as it viewed
it. I never heard the termination of the case.

2. _Stultitia voluntaria._ Voluntary folly. The absence of voluntary power
and consequent incapacity to compare the ideas of present and future good.
Brute animals may be said to be in this situation, as they are in general
excited into action only by their present painful or pleasurable
sensations. Hence though they are liable to surprise, when their passing
trains of ideas are dissevered by violent stimuli; yet are they not
affected with wonder or astonishment at the novelty of objects; as they
possess but in a very inferior degree, that voluntary power of comparing
the present ideas with those previously acquired, which distinguishes
mankind; and is termed analogical reasoning, when deliberatively exerted;
and intuitive analogy, when used without our attention to it, and which
always preserves our hourly trains of ideas consistent with truth and
nature. See Sect. XVII. 3. 7.

3. _Credulitas._ Credulity. Life is short, opportunities of knowledge rare;
our senses are fallacious, our reasonings uncertain, mankind therefore
struggles with perpetual error from the cradle to the coffin. He is
necessitated to correct experiment by analogy, and analogy by experiment;
and not always to rest satisfied in the belief of facts even with this
two-fold testimony, till future opportunities, or the observations of
others, concur in their support.

Ignorance and credulity have ever been companions, and have misled and
enslaved mankind; philosophy has in all ages endeavoured to oppose their
progress, and to loosen the shackles they had imposed; philosophers have on
this account been called unbelievers: unbelievers of what? of the fictions
of fancy, of witchcraft, hobgobblins, apparitions, vampires, fairies; of
the influence of stars on human actions, miracles wrought by the bones of
saints, the flights of ominous birds, the predictions from the bowels of
dying animals, expounders of dreams, fortune-tellers, conjurors, modern
prophets, necromancy, cheiromancy, animal magnetism, with endless variety
of folly? These they have disbelieved and despised, but have ever bowed
their hoary heads to Truth and Nature.

Mankind may be divided in respect to the facility of their belief or
conviction into two classes; those, who are ready to assent to single facts
from the evidence of their senses, or from the serious assertions of
others; and those, who require analogy to corroborate or