made an immediate supplication for assistance, or rather for forbearance
of further affliction: this disposition in man has been finely
pourtrayed by Aesop in his fable of "the Waggoner and Hercules." The
motion which in despight of himself was excited in his machine, his
diseases, his troubles, his passions, his inquietude, the painful
alterations his frame underwent, without his being able to fathom the
true causes; at length death, of which the aspect in so formidable to a
being strongly attached to existence, were effects he looked upon either
as supernatural, or else he conceived they were repugnant to his actual
nature; he attributed them to some mighty cause, which maugre all his
efforts, disposed of him at each, moment. Thus palsied with alarm,
benumbed with terror, he pensively meditated upon his sorrows; agitated
with fear, he sought for means to avert the calamities that threatened
him with destruction; his imagination, thus rendered desperate by his
endurance of evils which he found inevitable, formed to him those
phantoms which he called gods; before whom he trembled from a
consciousness of his own weakness; thus disposed, he endeavoured by
prostration, by sacrifices, by prayers, to disarm the anger of these
imaginary beings to which his trepidation had given birth; whom he
ignorantly imagined to be the cause of his misery, whom his fancy
painted to him as endowed with the power of alleviating his sufferings:
it was thus in the extremity of his grief, in the exacerbation of his
mind, weighed down with misfortune, that unhappy man fashioned those
chimeras which filled him with the most gloomy ideas, which he
transmitted to his posterity, as the surest means of avoiding the evils
to which he had been himself subjected.

Man never judges of those objects of which he is ignorant, but through
the medium of those which come within his knowledge: thus man, taking
himself for the model, ascribed will, intelligence, design, projects,