I presently pitied the poor people that were abused by these follies. Whereas I now find, that I myself was to be pitied as much, at least, as they; not that experience has taught me anything to alter my former opinions, though my curiosity has endeavoured that way; but reason has instructed me, that thus resolutely to condemn anything for false and impossible, is arrogantly and impiously to circumscribe and limit the will of God, and the power of our mother nature, within the bounds of my own capacity, than which no folly can be greater. If we give the names of monster and miracle to everything our reason cannot comprehend, how many are continually presented before our eyes? Let us but consider through what clouds, and as it were groping in the dark, our teachers lead us to the knowledge of most of the things about us; assuredly we shall find that it is rather custom than knowledge that takes away their strangeness-- "Jam nemo, fessus saturusque videndi, Suspicere in coeli dignatur lucida templa;" ["Weary of the sight, now no one deigns to look up to heaven's lucid temples."--Lucretius, ii. 1037. The text has 'statiate videnai'] and that if those things were now newly presented to us, we should think them as incredible, if not more, than any others. "Si nunc primum mortalibus adsint Ex improviso, si sint objecta repente, Nil magis his rebus poterat mirabile dici, Aute minus ante quod auderent fore credere gentes." [Lucretius, ii. 1032. The sense of the passage is in the preceding sentence.] He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge, we conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind. "Scilicet et fluvius qui non est maximus, ei'st Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit; et ingens Arbor, homoque videtur, et omnia de genere omni Maxima quae vidit quisque, haec ingentia fingit." ["A little river seems to him, who has never seen a larger river, a mighty stream; and so with other things--a tree, a man--anything appears greatest to him that never knew a greater."--Idem, vi. 674.] "Consuetudine oculorum assuescunt animi, neque admirantur, neque requirunt rationes earum rerum, quas semper vident." ["Things grow familiar to men's minds by being often seen; so that they neither admire nor are they inquisitive about things they daily see."--Cicero, De Natura Deor., lib. ii. 38.]