Désintéressement, impartialité, supériorité de la Raison

SECT.  LIX.  It is by the Light of Primitive Truth a Man Judges whether what one says to him be True or False.

Men may speak and discourse to us in order to instruct us: but we cannot believe them any farther, than we find a certain conformity or agreement between what they say, and what the inward master says.  After they have exhausted all their arguments, we must still return, and hearken to him, for a final decision.  If a man should tell us that a part equals the whole of which it is a part, we should not be able to forbear laughing, and instead of persuading us, he would make himself ridiculous to us.  It is in the very bottom of ourselves, by consulting the inward master, that we must find the truths that are taught us, that is, which are outwardly proposed to us.  Thus, properly speaking, there is but one true Master, who teaches all, and without whom one learns nothing.  Other masters always refer and bring us back to that inward school where he alone speaks.  It is there we receive what we have not; it is there we learn what we were ignorant of; and find what we had lost by oblivion.  It is in the intimate bottom of ourselves, he keeps in store for us certain truths, that lie, as it were, buried, but which revive upon occasion; and it is there, in short, that we reject the falsehood we had embraced.  Far from judging that master, it is by him alone we are judged peremptorily in all things.  He is a judge disinterested, impartial, and superior to us.  We may, indeed, refuse hearing him, and raise a din to stun our ears: but when we hear him it is not in our power to contradict him.  Nothing is more unlike man than that invisible master that instructs and judges him with so much severity, uprightness, and perfection.  Thus our limited, uncertain, defective, fallible reason, is but a feeble and momentaneous inspiration of a primitive, supreme, and immutable reason, which communicates itself with measure, to all intelligent beings.