CVI. Whoever is upon his guard not to fall into one of the two beforementioned errors, and has capacity to distinguish true virtue from false, and a clear and good understanding, from a cloudy, crooked, or crafty one, will be convinced as I myself have been convinced, that there never fails to be much virtue lodged in the person, in whom you find a real good and clear understanding. I would not however be understood to insinuate, that all men of great genius and capacity should be saints; for meritorious virtue, or such as entitles a man to inherit eternal life, is the child of grace, and not of nature. Neither would I be understood to say, that all kinds of moral virtues should be resplendent in such a man as I have been describing, but only those, whose opposite vices, at first sight, and without the assistance of any reasoning or reflection, are manifest and apparent; and whose deformity, at a glance, strikes the eye of every beholder; nor would I even be understood to assert so much as this, without some limitation and exception; for every vehement passion during the time it lasts, will make the most prudent man act like a mad one, and the most acute one, like a fool; but abstracted from the intervention of such accidents, it is my firm opinion, that every man of a clear and good understanding, is an honest and a good-intentioned one. THE GREAT AND MASTERLY AUTHORITY of EXPERIENCE. SECT. I. I. There arrived in the kingdom of Cosmosia, two famous women, who were very opposite to each other; but both with the same design, which was that of obtaining the absolute dominion over that empire. The first was called Solidina, the other Idearia; the first was learned, but simple; the second ignorant, and ostentatious. The people of the country, were ignorant like the last, and simple as the first. Hence, Solidina thought to win them to her by kindness, and by instructing them; and Idearia, to subdue them by craft and imposition. Idearia opened a public school, and promised in pompous language, that in a very short time, and with little or no trouble, she would make all those extremely learned and wise, who chose to attend her lectures. The greatness of the promise, joined to the imposing appearance of the new doctress, mounted in the professional chair, together with her great volubility, and flow of mountebank rhetoric, soon filled the school with pupils. She began her lectures, which all consisted, in laying before her auditors in new and unusual language, the chimeras, contained in the extensive field of the imagination. And, oh wonderful to relate! either Idearia had somewhat of enchantment about her, or else there was something very singular in her method of applying her artifice and cunning; for in a few years after opening her school, she persuaded those miserable people, they perfectly understood all that could be learned.