A third cause of common Errors is the Credulity of men, that is, an easie assent to what is obtruded, or a believing at first ear, what is delivered by others. This is a weakness in the understanding, without examination assenting unto things, which from their Natures and Causes do carry no perswasion; whereby men often swallow falsities for truths, dubiosities for certainties, feasibilities for possibilities, and things impossible as possibilities themselves. Which, though the weakness of the Intellect, and most discoverable in vulgar heads; yet hath it sometime fallen upon wiser brains, and greater advancers of Truth. Thus many wise _Athenians_ so far forgot their Philosophy, and the nature of humane production, that they descended unto belief, that the original of their Nation was from the Earth, and had no other beginning than the seminality and womb of their great Mother. Thus is it not without wonder, how those learned _Arabicks_ so tamely delivered up their belief unto the absurdities of the _Alcoran_. How the noble _Geber_, _Avicenna_, and _Almanzor_, should rest satisfied in the nature and causes of Earthquakes, delivered from the doctrine of their _Prophet_; that is, from the motion of a great Bull, upon whose horns all the earth is poised. How their faiths could decline so low, as to concede their generations in Heaven, to be made by the smell of a Citron, or that the felicity of their Paradise should consist in a Jubile of copulation, that is, a coition of one act prolonged unto fifty years. Thus is it almost beyond wonder, how the belief of reasonable creatures, should ever submit unto Idolatry: and the credulity of those men scarce credible (without presumption of a second Fall) who could believe a Deity in the work of their own hands. For although in that ancient and diffused adoration of Idols, unto the _Priests_ and subtiler heads, the worship perhaps might be symbolical, and as those Images some way related unto their Deities; yet was the Idolatry direct and down-right in the People; whose credulity is illimitable, who may be made believe that any thing is God; and may be made believe there is no God at all. [Sidenote: _Obstinate and irrational Scepticism, justly censured._]