which is a means much more weak and cheap; but truth is so great a thing
that we ought not to disdain any mediation that will guide us to it.
Reason has so many forms that we know not to which to take; experience
has no fewer; the consequence we would draw from the comparison of events
is unsure, by reason they are always unlike. There is no quality so
universal in this image of things as diversity and variety. Both the
Greeks and the Latins and we, for the most express example of similitude,
employ that of eggs; and yet there have been men, particularly one at
Delphos, who could distinguish marks of difference amongst eggs so well
that he never mistook one for another, and having many hens, could tell
which had laid it.

Dissimilitude intrudes itself of itself in our works; no art can arrive
at perfect similitude: neither Perrozet nor any other can so carefully
polish and blanch the backs of his cards that some gamesters will not
distinguish them by seeing them only shuffled by another. Resemblance
does not so much make one as difference makes another. Nature has
obliged herself to make nothing other that was not unlike.

And yet I am not much pleased with his opinion, who thought by the
multitude of laws to curb the authority of judges in cutting out for them
their several parcels; he was not aware that there is as much liberty and
latitude in the interpretation of laws as in their form; and they but
fool themselves, who think to lessen and stop our disputes by recalling
us to the express words of the Bible: forasmuch as our mind does not find
the field less spacious wherein to controvert the sense of another than
to deliver his own; and as if there were less animosity and tartness in
commentary than in invention. We see how much he was mistaken, for we
have more laws in France than all the rest of the world put together, and