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Theologico-Political Treatise — Part 1 by Benedictus de Spinoza
page 6 of 95 (06%)
or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for
the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over - confident, and vain.

(3) This as a general fact I suppose everyone knows, though few, I believe,
know their own nature; no one can have lived in the world without observing
that most people, when in prosperity, are so over-brimming with wisdom
(however inexperienced they may be), that they take every offer of advice as
a personal insult, whereas in adversity they know not where to turn, but beg
and pray for counsel from every passer-by. (4) No plan is then too futile,
too absurd, or too fatuous for their adoption; the most frivolous causes
will raise them to hope, or plunge them into despair - if anything happens
during their fright which reminds them of some past good or ill, they think
it portends a happy or unhappy issue, and therefore (though it may have
proved abortive a hundred times before) style it a lucky or unlucky omen.
(5) Anything which excites their astonishment they believe to be a portent
signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and, mistaking
superstition for religion, account it impious not to avert the evil with
prayer and sacrifice. (6) Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up
perpetually, till one might think Nature as mad as themselves, they
interpret her so fantastically.

(7) Thus it is brought prominently before us, that superstition's chief
victims are those persons who greedily covet temporal advantages; they it
is, who (especially when they are in danger, and cannot help themselves) are
wont with Prayers and womanish tears to implore help from God: upbraiding
Reason as blind, because she cannot show a sure path to the shadows they
pursue, and rejecting human wisdom as vain; but believing the phantoms of
imagination, dreams, and other childish absurdities, to be the very oracles
of Heaven. (8) As though God had turned away from the wise, and written His
decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them
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