I suppose this prodigious diversity of opinion is caused, in the first place, by the weakness of the human intellect; and, in the second, by pride.  We have no means of measuring this vast machine, we are unable to calculate its workings; we know neither its guiding principles nor its final purpose; we do not know ourselves, we know neither our nature nor the spirit that moves us; we scarcely know whether man is one or many; we are surrounded by impenetrable mysteries.  These mysteries are beyond the region of sense, we think we can penetrate them by the light of reason, but we fall back on our imagination.  Through this imagined world each forces a way for himself which he holds to be right; none can tell whether his path will lead him to the goal.  Yet we long to know and understand it all.  The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable.  We prefer to trust to chance and to believe what is not true, rather than to own that not one of us can see what really is.  A fragment of some vast whole whose bounds are beyond our gaze, a fragment abandoned by its Creator to our foolish quarrels, we are vain enough to want to determine the nature of that whole and our own relations with regard to it.

If the philosophers were in a position to declare the truth, which of them would care to do so?  Every one of them knows that his own system rests on no surer foundations than the rest, but he maintains it because it is his own.  There is not one of them who, if he chanced to discover the difference between truth and falsehood, would not prefer his own lie to the truth which another had discovered.  Where is the philosopher who would not deceive the whole world for his own glory?  If he can rise above the crowd, if he can excel his rivals, what more does he want?  Among believers he is an atheist; among atheists he would be a believer.

The first thing I learned from these considerations was to restrict my inquiries to what directly concerned myself, to rest in profound ignorance of everything else, and not even to trouble myself to doubt anything beyond what I required to know.

I also realised that the philosophers, far from ridding me of my vain doubts, only multiplied the doubts that tormented me and failed to remove any one of them.  So I chose another guide and said, “Let me follow the Inner Light; it will not lead me so far astray as others have done, or if it does it will be my own fault, and I shall not go so far wrong if I follow my own illusions as if I trusted to their deceits.”

I then went over in my mind the various opinions which I had held in the course of my life, and I saw that although no one of them was plain enough to gain immediate belief, some were more probable than others, and my inward consent was given or withheld in proportion to this improbability.  Having discovered this, I made an unprejudiced comparison of all these different ideas, and I perceived that the first and most general