"Your logic is too subtle," said the youth, "for my inexperience." "Say, rather, my reasoning too close. Did I bear you down with sounding words and weighty authorities, and confound your understanding with hair-drawn distinctions, you would be right to retreat from the battery." "I have nothing to object to the fairness of your deductions," said Theon. "But would not the doctrine be dangerous that should establish our inability to help our belief; and might we not stretch the principle, until we asserted our inability to help our actions?" "We might, and with reason. But we will not now traverse the ethical _pons asinorum_ of necessity--the most simple and evident of mortal truths, and the most darkened, tortured, and belabored by moral teachers. You inquire if the doctrine we have essayed to establish, be not dangerous. I reply--not, if it be true.--Nothing is so dangerous as error--nothing so safe as truth. A dangerous truth would be a contradiction in terms, and an anomaly in things." "But what is a truth?" said Theon. "It is pertinently asked. A truth I consider to be an ascertained fact; which truth would be changed to an error, the moment the fact, on which it rested, was disproved." "I see, then, no fixed basis for truth." "It surely has the most fixed of all--the nature of things. And it is only an imperfect insight into that nature which occasions all our erroneous conclusions, whether in physics or morals." "But where, if we discard the Gods and their will, as engraven on our hearts, are our guides in the search after truth?"