🚀 go-pugleaf

all
this that man has gone astray, that he has fallen from his place, that he
anxiously seeks it, that he cannot find it again? And who shall then direct
him to it? The greatest men have failed.

432. Scepticism is true; for, after all, men before Jesus Christ did not
know where they were, nor whether they were great or small. And those who
have said the one or the other knew nothing about it and guessed without
reason and by chance. They also erred always in excluding the one or the
other.

Quod ergo ignorantes, quaeritis, religio annuntiat vobis.64

433. After having understood the whole nature of man.--That a religion may
be true, it must have knowledge of our nature. It ought to know its
greatness and littleness, and the reason of both. What religion but the
Christian has known this?

434. The chief arguments of the sceptics--I pass over the lesser ones--are
that we have no certainty of the truth of these principles apart from faith
and revelation, except in so far as we naturally perceive them in ourselves.
Now this natural intuition is not a convincing proof of their truth; since,
having no certainty, apart from faith, whether man was created by a good
God, or by a wicked demon, or by chance, it is doubtful whether these
principles given to us are true, or false, or uncertain, according to our
origin. Again, no person is certain, apart from faith, whether he is awake
or sleeps, seeing that during sleep we believe that we are awake as firmly
as we do when we are awake; we believe that we see space, figure, and
motion; we are aware of the passage of time, we measure it; and in fact we
act as if we were awake. So that half of our life being passed in sleep, we
have on our own admission no idea of truth, whatever we may imagine. As all
our intuitions are, then, illusions, who knows whether the other half of our
life, in which we think we are awake, is not another sleep a little
different from