Thus it is observable that the buildings which a
single architect has planned and executed, are generally more elegant
and commodious than those which several have attempted to improve, by
making old walls serve for purposes for which they were not originally
built. Thus also, those ancient cities which, from being at first only
villages, have become, in course of time, large towns, are usually but
ill laid out compared with the regularity constructed towns which a
professional architect has freely planned on an open plain; so that
although the several buildings of the former may often equal or surpass
in beauty those of the latter, yet when one observes their
indiscriminate juxtaposition, there a large one and here a small, and
the consequent crookedness and irregularity of the streets, one is
disposed to allege that chance rather than any human will guided by
reason must have led to such an arrangement. And if we consider that
nevertheless there have been at all times certain officers whose duty it
was to see that private buildings contributed to public ornament, the
difficulty of reaching high perfection with but the materials of others
to operate on, will be readily acknowledged. In the same way I fancied
that those nations which, starting from a semi-barbarous state and
advancing to civilization by slow degrees, have had their laws
successively determined, and, as it were, forced upon them simply by
experience of the hurtfulness of particular crimes and disputes, would
by this process come to be possessed of less perfect institutions than
those which, from the commencement of their association as communities,
have followed the appointments of some wise legislator. It is thus
quite certain that the constitution of the true religion, the ordinances
of which are derived from God, must be incomparably superior to that of
every other. And, to speak of human affairs, I believe that the
pre-eminence of Sparta was due not to the goodness of each of its laws
in particular, for many of these were very strange, and even opposed to
good morals, but to the circumstance that, originated by a single
individual, they all tended to a single end. In the same way I thought
that the sciences contained in books (such of them at least as are made
up of probable reasonings, without demonstrations), composed as they are
of the opinions of many different individuals massed together, are
farther removed from truth than the simple inferences which a man of
good sense using his natural and unprejudiced judgment draws respecting
the matters of his experience. And because we have all to pass through
a state of infancy to manhood, and have been of necessity, for a length
of time, governed by our desires and preceptors (whose dictates were
frequently conflicting, while neither perhaps always counseled us for
the best), I farther concluded that it is almost impossible that our
judgments can be so correct or solid as they would have been, had our
reason been mature from the moment of our birth, and had we always been
guided by it alone.
