"
[7] Both Bayle and Locke would have treated the subject of Toleration in a
manner much more worthy of themselves and of the cause if they had written
in an age less distracted by religious prejudices.
THE SCEPTIC,
A PHILOSOPHICAL SATIRE.
PREFACE.
The Sceptical Philosophy of the Ancients has been no less misrepresented
than the Epicurean. Pyrrho may perhaps have carried it to rather an
irrational excess;--but we must not believe with Beattie all the
absurdities imputed to this philosopher; and it appears to me that the
doctrines of the school, as explained by Sextus Empiricus, are far more
suited to the wants and infirmities of human reason as well as more
conducive to the mild virtues of humility and patience, than any of those
systems of philosophy which preceded the introduction of Christianity. The
Sceptics may be said to have held a middle path between the Dogmatists and
Academicians; the former of whom boasted that they had attained the truth
while the latter denied that any attainable truth existed. The Sceptics
however, without either asserting or denying its existence, professed to
be modestly and anxiously in search of it; or, as St. Augustine expresses
it, in his liberal tract against the Manichaeans, "_nemo nostrum dicat jam
se invenisse veritatem; sic eam quoeramus quasi ab utrisque nesciatur_.
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