We have blind, one-eyed, cross-eyed, and squinting people--visions long, short, clear, confused, weak, or indefatigable. All this is a faithful image of our understanding; but we know scarcely any _false_ vision: there are not many men who always take a cock for a horse, or a coffeepot for a church. How is it that we often meet with minds, otherwise judicious, which are absolutely wrong in some things of importance? How is it that the Siamese, who will take care never to be overreached when he has to receive three rupees, firmly believes in the metamorphoses of Sammonocodom? By what strange whim do men of sense resemble Don Quixote, who beheld giants where other men saw nothing but windmills? Yet was Don Quixote more excusable than the Siamese, who believes that Sammonocodom came several times upon earth--and the Turk, who is persuaded that Mahomet put one-half of the moon into his sleeve? Don Quixote, impressed with the idea that he is to fight with a giant, may imagine that a giant must have a body as big as a mill, and arms as long as the sails; but from what supposition can a man of sense set out to arrive at a conclusion, that half the moon went into a sleeve, and that a Sammonocodom came down from heaven to fly kites at Siam, to cut down a forest, and to exhibit sleight-of-hand? The greatest geniuses may have their minds warped, on a principle which they have received without examination. Newton was very wrong-headed when he was commenting on the Apocalypse. All that certain tyrants of souls desire, is that the men whom they teach may have their intellects distorted. A fakir brings up a child of great promise; he employs five or six years in driving it into his head, that the god Fo appeared to men in the form of a white elephant; and persuades the child, that if he does not believe in these metamorphoses, he will be flogged after death for five hundred thousand years. He adds, that at the end of the world, the enemy of the god Fo will come and fight against that divinity. The child studies, and becomes a prodigy; he finds that Fo could not change himself into anything but a white elephant, because that is the most beautiful of animals. The kings of Siam and Pegu, say he, went to war with one another for a white elephant: certainly, had not Fo been concealed in that elephant, these two kings would not have been so mad as to fight for the possession of a mere animal. Fo's enemy will come and challenge him at the end of the world: this enemy will certainly be a rhinoceros; for the rhinoceros fights the elephant. Thus does the fakir's learned pupil reason in mature age, and he becomes one of the lights of the Indies: the more subtle his intellect, the more crooked; and he, in his turn, forms other intellects as distorted as his own.