PREFACE.


The main purpose of this book is to exhibit a fair delineation of the
credulity of the human mind. Such an exhibition cannot fail to be
productive of the most salutary lessons.

One view of the subject will teach us a useful pride in the abundance
of our faculties. Without pride man is in reality of little value. It
is pride that stimulates us to all our great undertakings. Without
pride, and the secret persuasion of extraordinary talents, what man
would take up the pen with a view to produce an important work,
whether of imagination and poetry, or of profound science, or of acute
and subtle reasoning and intellectual anatomy? It is pride in this
sense that makes the great general and the consummate legislator, that
animates us to tasks the most laborious, and causes us to shrink from
no difficulty, and to be confounded and overwhelmed with no obstacle
that can be interposed in our path.

Nothing can be more striking than the contrast between man and the
inferior animals. The latter live only for the day, and see for the
most part only what is immediately before them. But man lives in the
past and the future. He reasons upon and improves by the past; he
records the acts of a long series of generations: and he looks into
future time, lays down plans which he shall be months and years in
bringing to maturity, and contrives machines and delineates systems
of education and government, which may gradually add to the
accommodations of all, and raise the species generally into a nobler
and more honourable character than our ancestors were capable of