To Be A Good Patriot, A Man

There Being In The Make Of An English Mind A Certain Gloom And Eagerness, Which Carries To The Sad Extreme; Religion To Fanaticism; Free-thinking To Atheism; Liberty To Rebellion.

Man Is An Animal, Formidable Both From His Passions And His Reason; His Passions Often Urging Him To Great Evils, And His Reason Furnishing Means To Achieve Them. To Train This Animal, And Make Him Amenable To Order; To Inure Him To A Sense Of Justice And Virtue, To Withhold Him From Ill Courses By Fear, And Encourage Him In His Duty By Hopes; In Short, To Fashion And Model Him For Society, Hath Been The Aim Of Civil And Religious Institutions; And, In All Times, The Endeavour Of Good And Wise Men. The Aptest Method For Attaining This End, Hath Been Always Judged A Proper Education.

I Am Apt To Think, If We Knew What It Was To Be An Angel For One Hour, We Should Return To This World, Though It Were To Sit On The Brightest Throne In It, With Vastly More Loathing And Reluctance Than We Would Now Descend Into A Loathsome Dungeon Or Sepulchre.

All That Stock Of Arguments [the Skeptics] Produce To Depreciate Our Faculties, And Make Mankind Appear Ignorant And Low, Are Drawn Principally From This Head, To Wit, That We Are Under An Invincible Blindness As To The True And Real Nature Of Things.

To Be Is To Be Perceived (esse Est Percipi)." Or, "if A Tree Falls In The Forest And No One Is There To Hear It, Does It Make A Sound?