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foolish enough to declare that men are not acting in good faith, but he
punishes this bad faith with force.

389. Ecclesiastes shows that man without God is in total ignorance and
inevitable misery. For it is wretched to have the wish, but not the power.
Now he would be happy and assured of some truth, and yet he can neither
know, nor desire not to know. He cannot even doubt.

390. My God! How foolish this talk is! "Would God have made the world to
damn it? Would He ask so much from persons so weak"? etc. Scepticism is the
cure for this evil, and will take down this vanity.

391. Conversation.--Great words: Religion, I deny it.

Conversation.--Scepticism helps religion.

392. Against Scepticism.--... It is, then, a strange fact that we cannot
define these things without obscuring them, while we speak of them with all
assurance. We assume that all conceive of them in the same way; but we
assume it quite gratuitously, for we have no proof of it. I see, in truth,
that the same words are applied on the same occasions, and that every time
two men see a body change its place, they both express their view of this
same fact by the same word, both saying that it has moved; and from this
conformity of application we derive a strong conviction of a conformity of
ideas. But this is not absolutely or finally convincing though there is
enough to support a bet on the affirmative, since we know that we often draw
the same conclusions from different premises.

This is enough, at least, to obscure the matter; not that it completely
extinguishes the natural light which assures us of these things. The
academicians would have won. But this dulls it and troubles the dogmatists
to the glory of the sceptical crowd, which consists in this doubtful
ambiguity and in a certain