objected better than where I now write,[12] as there is nowhere
more pomp of bigotry) that whole nations have been firm believers
in such most absurd suppositions, I reply, the fact is not true.
They have known nothing of the matter, and have believed they
knew not what. It is, indeed, with me no matter of doubt but
that the pope and his clergy might teach any of those Christian
heterodoxies, the tenets of which are the most diametrically
opposite to their own; nay, all the doctrines of Zoroaster,
Confucius, and Mahomet, not only with certain and immediate
success, but without one Catholic in a thousand knowing he had
changed his religion.

[12] At Lisbon.


What motive a man can have to sit down, and to draw forth a list
of stupid, senseless, incredible lies upon paper, would be
difficult to determine, did not Vanity present herself so
immediately as the adequate cause. The vanity of knowing more
than other men is, perhaps, besides hunger, the only inducement
to writing, at least to publishing, at all. Why then should not
the voyage-writer be inflamed with the glory of having seen what
no man ever did or will see but himself? This is the true source
of the wonderful in the discourse and writings, and sometimes, I
believe, in the actions of men. There is another fault, of a
kind directly opposite to this, to which these writers are
sometimes liable, when, instead of filling their pages with
monsters which nobody hath ever seen, and with adventures which
never have, nor could possibly have, happened to them, waste
their time and paper with recording things and facts of so common