Obviously the extravagance of this proposition is calculated. The point is that no belief whatever concerning life and death and morality and the process of nature can be justified by 'reason'; and that accordingly no religious belief whatever can be discredited on the score of being opposed to reason or 'unreasonable.' If not more reasonable than the most carefully tested or the most widely accepted belief in science, or the belief that the sun will rise or fire burn to-morrow, or that we shall all die, it is not less reasonable than they. Therefore, believe as your bias leads. It is only fair to Mr. Balfour to say that there is nothing new in his position, though probably it has never before been quite so violently formulated. The Greek Pyrrho (fl. 300-350 B.C.) argued that almost all propositions were doubtful; and some of his followers are said to have been consistent enough to doubt whether they doubted. In the dialogues of Cicero we find the skeptical method employed, with supreme inconsistency, by the official exponents of unbelieved doctrines, to discredit competing doctrines. Among the pagans it was also turned, with no special religious purpose, against all forms of dogmatic doctrine by Sextus the Empiric (fl. 200-250 A.C.); and in the early Christian dialogue of Minucius Felix a pagan is presented as turning it against Christianity. In the later Middle Ages it is resorted to by Cornelius Agrippa, previously a great propounder of fantastic propositions in science, against the current science of his time, and in favour of a return to the simplicity of the early Christian creed. Still later, it was much resorted to, after the Reformation, by Catholics for the purpose of discrediting Protestantism; and Pascal and Huet, the latter in particular, sought to employ it against 'unbelief.' Huet left behind him, as his legacy to his church and generation, what Mark Pattison has termed 'a work of the most outrageous skepticism'; and Pascal's use of the method has left a standing debate as to whether he himself was a 'skeptic.' In England, on the Protestant side, Bishop Berkeley put forth an argument to the effect that the Newtonian doctrine of fluxions involved the acceptance of unproved 'mysteries,' and that those who applied it had accordingly no excuse for rejecting the mysteries of Christianity. Finally, it is fair to note that Mr. Balfour's nihilistic treatment of reason has a surprising sanction in Hume, to say nothing of the other writers who have practically limited reasoning to mathematical deduction. That great thinker, with his frequent great carelessness, wrote that 'Our conclusions from experience [of cause and effect] are not founded on reasoning, or any process of the understanding' (_Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding_, Sect. iv. Part ii., par. 2). 'All inferences from experience are effects of custom, not of reasoning' (Sect. v., par. 3).