What then shall man do in this state?  Shall he doubt everything?  Shall he doubt whether he is awake, whether he is being pinched, or whether he is being burned?  Shall he doubt whether he doubts?  Shall he doubt whether he exists?  We cannot go so far as that; and I lay it down as a fact that there never has been a real complete sceptic.  Nature sustains our feeble reason, and prevents it raving to this extent.

Shall he then say, on the contrary, that he certainly possesses truth—­he who, when pressed ever so little, can show no title to it, and is forced to let go his hold?

What a chimera then is man!  What a novelty!  What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy!  Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe!

Who will unravel this tangle?  Nature confutes the sceptics, and reason confutes the dogmatists.  What then will you become, O men! who try to find out by your natural reason what is your true condition?  You cannot avoid one of these sects, nor adhere to one of them.

Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself.  Humble yourself, weak reason; be silent, foolish nature; learn that man infinitely transcends man, and learn from your Master your true condition, of which you are ignorant.  Hear God.

For in fact, if man had never been corrupt, he would enjoy in his innocence both truth and happiness with assurance; and if man had always been corrupt, he would have no idea of truth or bliss.  But, wretched as we are, and more so than if there were no greatness in our condition, we have an idea of happiness, and cannot reach it.  We perceive an image of truth, and possess only a lie.  Incapable of absolute ignorance and of certain knowledge, we have thus been manifestly in a degree of perfection from which we have unhappily fallen.

It is, however, an astonishing thing that the mystery furthest removed from our knowledge, namely, that of the transmission of sin, should be a fact without which we can have no knowledge of ourselves.  For it is beyond doubt that there is nothing which more shocks our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has rendered guilty those, who, being so removed from this source, seem incapable of participation in it.  This transmission does not only seem to us impossible, it seems also very unjust.  For what is more contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than to damn eternally an infant incapable of will, for a sin wherein he seems to have so little a share, that it was committed six thousand years before he was in existence?  Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves.  The knot of our condition takes its twists and turns in this abyss, so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man.