SECT.  LVI.  Reason is the Same in all Men, of all Ages and Countries.

Two men who never saw or heard of one another, and who never entertained any correspondence with any other man that could give them common notions, yet speak at two extremities of the earth, about a certain number of truths, as if they were in concert.  It is infallibly known beforehand in one hemisphere, what will be answered in the other upon these truths.  Men of all countries and of all ages, whatever their education may have been, find themselves invincibly subjected and obliged to think and speak in the same manner.  The Master who incessantly teaches us makes all of us think the same way.  Whenever we hastily judge, without hearkening to His voice, in diffidence of ourselves, we think and utter dreams full of extravagance.  Thus what appears most to be part of ourselves, and our very essence, I mean our reason, is least our own, and what, on the contrary, ought to be accounted most borrowed.  We continually receive a reason superior to us, as we incessantly breathe the air, which is a foreign body; or as we incessantly see all the objects near us by the light of the sun, whose rays are bodies foreign to our eyes.  That superior reason over-rules and governs, to a certain degree, with an absolute power all men, even the least rational, and makes them all ever agree, in spite of themselves, upon those points.  It is she that makes a savage in Canada think about a great many things, just as the Greek and Roman philosophers did.  It is she that made the Chinese geometricians find out much of the same truths with the Europeans, whilst those nations so very remote were unknown one to another.  It is she that makes people in Japan conclude, as in France, that two and two make four; nor is it apprehended that any nation shall ever change their opinion about it.  It is she that makes men think nowadays about certain points, just as men thought about the same four thousand years ago.  It is she that gives uniform thoughts to the most jealous and jarring men, and the most irreconcilable among themselves.  It is by her that men of all ages and countries are, as it were, chained about an immovable centre, and held in the bonds of amity by certain invariable rules, called first principles, notwithstanding the infinite variations of opinions that arise in them from their passion, avocations, and caprices, which over-rule all their other less-clear judgments.  It is through her that men, as depraved as they are, have not yet presumed openly to bestow on vice the name of virtue, and that they are reduced to dissemble being just, sincere, moderate, benevolent, in order to gain one another’s esteem.  The most wicked and abandoned of men cannot be brought to esteem what they wish they could esteem, or to despise what they wish they could despise.  It is not possible to force the eternal barrier of truth and justice.  The inward master, called reason, intimately checks the attempt with absolute power, and knows how to set bounds to the most impudent folly of men.  Though vice has for many ages reigned with unbridled licentiousness, virtue is still called virtue; and the most brutish and rash of her adversaries cannot yet deprive her of her name.  Hence it is that vice, though triumphant in the world, is still obliged to disguise itself under the mask of hypocrisy or sham honesty, to gain the esteem it has not the confidence to expect, if it should go bare-faced.  Thus, notwithstanding its impudence, it pays a forced homage to virtue, by endeavouring to adorn itself with her fairest outside in order to receive the honour and respect she commands from men.  It is true virtuous men are exposed to censure; and they are, indeed, ever reprehensible in this life, through their natural imperfections; but yet the most vicious cannot totally efface in themselves the idea of true virtue.  There never was yet any man upon earth that could prevail either with others, or himself, to allow, as a received maxim, that to be knavish, passionate, and mischievous, is more honourable than to be honest, moderate, good-natured, and benevolent.