or balance, which is the triumph of scepticism.

But I observe, says CLEANTHES, with regard to you, PHILO, and all
speculative sceptics, that your doctrine and practice are as much at
variance in the most abstruse points of theory as in the conduct of
common life. Wherever evidence discovers itself, you adhere to it,
notwithstanding your pretended scepticism; and I can observe, too, some
of your sect to be as decisive as those who make greater professions of
certainty and assurance. In reality, would not a man be ridiculous, who
pretended to reject NEWTON's explication of the wonderful phenomenon of
the rainbow, because that explication gives a minute anatomy of the rays
of light; a subject, forsooth, too refined for human comprehension? And
what would you say to one, who, having nothing particular to object to
the arguments of COPERNICUS and GALILEO for the motion of the earth,
should withhold his assent, on that general principle, that these
subjects were too magnificent and remote to be explained by the narrow
and fallacious reason of mankind?

There is indeed a kind of brutish and ignorant scepticism, as you well
observed, which gives the vulgar a general prejudice against what they do
not easily understand, and makes them reject every principle which
requires elaborate reasoning to prove and establish it. This species of
scepticism is fatal to knowledge, not to religion; since we find, that
those who make greatest profession of it, give often their assent, not
only to the great truths of Theism and natural theology, but even to the
most absurd tenets which a traditional superstition has recommended to
them. They firmly believe in witches, though they will not believe nor
attend to the most simple proposition of Euclid. But the refined and
philosophical sceptics fall into an inconsistence of an opposite nature.
They push their researches into the most abstruse corners of science; and