🚀 go-pugleaf

forget. This is as instructive to me
as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness.

373. Scepticism.--I shall here write my thoughts without order, and not
perhaps in unintentional confusion; that is true order, which will always
indicate my object by its very disorder. I should do too much honour to my
subject, if I treated it with order, since I want to show that it is
incapable of it.

374. What astonishes me most is to see that all the world is not astonished
at its own weakness. Men act seriously, and each follows his own mode of
life, not because it is in fact good to follow since it is the custom, but
as if each man knew certainly where reason and justice are. They find
themselves continually deceived, and, by a comical humility, think it is
their own fault and not that of the art which they claim always to possess.
But it is well there are so many such people in the world, who are not
sceptics for the glory of scepticism, in order to show that man is quite
capable of the most extravagant opinions, since he is capable of believing
that he is not in a state of natural and inevitable weakness, but, on the
contrary, of natural wisdom.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than that there are some who are not
sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

375. I have passed a great part of my life believing that there was justice,
and in this I was not mistaken; for there is justice according as God has
willed to reveal it to us. But I did not take it so, and this is where I
made a mistake; for I believed that our justice was essentially just, and
that I had that whereby to know and judge of it. But I have so often found
my right judgement at fault, that at last I have come to distrust myself and
then others. I have seen changes in all nations and men, and thus, after
many changes of judgement regarding true justice, I have recognised that our
nature was but in continual change, and I have not chan