I was just now ruminating, as I often do, what a free and roving thing human reason is.  I ordinarily see that men, in things propounded to them, more willingly study to find out reasons than to ascertain truth:  they slip over presuppositions, but are curious in examination of consequences; they leave the things, and fly to the causes.  Pleasant talkers!  The knowledge of causes only concerns him who has the conduct of things; not us, who are merely to undergo them, and who have perfectly full and accomplished use of them, according to our need, without penetrating into the original and essence; wine is none the more pleasant to him who knows its first faculties.  On the contrary, both the body and the soul interrupt and weaken the right they have of the use of the world and of themselves, by mixing with it the opinion of learning; effects concern us, but the means not at all.  To determine and to distribute appertain to superiority and command; as it does to subjection to accept.  Let me reprehend our custom.  They commonly begin thus:  “How is such a thing done?” Whereas they should say, “Is such a thing done?” Our reason is able to create a hundred other worlds, and to find out the beginnings and contexture; it needs neither matter nor foundation:  let it but run on, it builds as well in the air as on the earth, and with inanity as well as with matter: 

“Dare pondus idonea fumo.”

          ["Able to give weight to smoke.”—­Persius, v. 20.]

I find that almost throughout we should say, “there is no such thing,” and should myself often make use of this answer, but I dare not:  for they cry that it is an evasion produced from ignorance and weakness of understanding; and I am fain, for the most part, to juggle for company, and prate of frivolous subjects and tales that I believe not a word of; besides that, in truth, ’tis a little rude and quarrelsome flatly to deny a stated fact; and few people but will affirm, especially in things hard to be believed, that they have seen them, or at least will name witnesses whose authority will stop our mouths from contradiction.  In this way, we know the foundations and means of things that never were; and the world scuffles about a thousand questions, of which both the Pro and the Con are false.

          “Ita finitima sunt falsa veris, ut in praecipitem
          locum non debeat se sapiens committere.”

     ["False things are so near the true, that a wise man should not
     trust himself in a precipitous place”—­Cicero, Acad., ii. 21.]

Truth and lies are faced alike; their port, taste, and proceedings are the same, and we look upon them with the same eye.  I find that we are not only remiss in defending ourselves from deceit, but that we seek and offer ourselves to be gulled; we love to entangle ourselves in vanity, as a thing conformable to our being.