The sciences can barely be without charlatanry. People wish to have
their opinions accepted; the quibbling doctor wishes to eclipse the
angelic doctor; the recondite doctor wishes to reign alone. Each builds
his system of physics, metaphysics, scholastic theology; it is a
competition in turning one's merchandise to account. You have agents who
extol it, fools who believe you, protectors who support you.

Is there a greater charlatanry than that of substituting words for
things, and of wanting others to believe what you do not believe
yourself?

One establishes whirlwinds of subtle matter, ramous, globulous,
striated, channelled; the other elements of matter which are not matter
at all, and a pre-established harmony which makes the clock of the body
sound the hour, when the clock of the soul shows it with its hand. These
chimeras find partisans for a few years. When this rubbish has passed
out of fashion, new fanatics appear on the itinerant theatre; they
banish germs from the world, they say that the sea produced the
mountains, and that men were once fish.

How much charlatanry has been put into history, either by astonishing
the reader with prodigies, by titillating human malignity with satire,
or by flattering the families of tyrants with infamous eulogy?

The wretched species that writes for a living is charlatan in another
way. A poor man who has no trade, who has had the misfortune to go to
college, and who thinks he knows how to write, goes to pay his court to
a bookseller, and asks him for work. The bookseller knows that the
majority of most people who live in houses want to have little
libraries, that they need abridgments and new titles; he orders from the