men resemble Don Quixote who thought he saw giants where other men saw
only windmills? Still, Don Quixote was more excusable than the Siamese
who believes that Sammonocodom came several times on earth, and than the
Turk who is persuaded that Mahomet put half the moon in his sleeve; for
Don Quixote, struck with the idea that he must fight giants, can figure
to himself that a giant must have a body as big as a mill; but from what
supposition can a sensible man set off to persuade himself that the half
of the moon has gone into a sleeve, and that a Sammonocodom has come
down from heaven to play at shuttlecock, cut down a forest, and perform
feats of legerdemain?

The greatest geniuses can have false judgment about a principle they
have accepted without examination. Newton had very false judgment when
he commentated the Apocalypse.

All that certain tyrants of the souls desire is that the men they teach
shall have false judgment. A fakir rears a child who gives much promise;
he spends five or six years in driving into his head that the god Fo
appeared to men as a white elephant, and he persuades the child that he
will be whipped after his death for five hundred thousand years if he
does not believe these metamorphoses. He adds that at the end of the
world the enemy of the god Fo will come to fight against this divinity.

The child studies and becomes a prodigy; he argues on his master's
lessons; he finds that Fo has only been able to change himself into a
white elephant, because that is the most beautiful of animals. "The
kings of Siam and Pegu," he says, "have made war for a white elephant;
certainly if Fo had not been hidden in that elephant, these kings would
not have been so senseless as to fight simply for the possession of an
animal.