It Is Harder To Avoid Censure Than

A Wise Man Proportions His Belief To The Evidence.

I Do Not Have Enough Faith To Believe There Is No God.

I Have Written On All Sorts Of Subjects... Yet I Have No Enemies; Except Indeed All The Whigs, All The Tories, And All The Christians.

... If You Insist That The Inference Is Made By A Chain Of Reasoning, I Desire You To Produce That Reasoning. The Connection Between The Two Is Not Intuitive. There Is Required A Medium, Which May Enable The Mind To Draw Such An Inference, If Indeed It Be Drawn By Reasoning And Argument. What That Medium Is, I Must Confess, Passes My Comprehension; And It Is Incumbent On Those To Produce It, Who Assert That It Really Exists, And Is The Origin Of All Our Conclusions Concerning Matter Of Fact.

And Indeed Nothing But The Most Determined Scepticism, Along With A Great Degree Of Indolence, Can Justify This Aversion To Metaphysics. For If Truth Be At All Within The Reach Of Human Capacity, It Is Certain It Must Lie Very Deep And Abstruse: And To Hope We Shall Arrive At It Without Pains, While The Greatest Geniuses Have Failed With The Utmost Pains, Must Certainly Be Esteemed Sufficiently Vain And Presumptuous. I Pretend To No Such Advantage In The Philosophy I Am Going To Unfold, And Would Esteem It A Strong Presumption Against It, Were It So Very Easy And Obvious.