Newton had very false judgment when
he commentated the Apocalypse.
All that certain tyrants of the souls desire is that the men they teach
shall have false judgment. A fakir rears a child who gives much promise;
he spends five or six years in driving into his head that the god Fo
appeared to men as a white elephant, and he persuades the child that he
will be whipped after his death for five hundred thousand years if he
does not believe these metamorphoses. He adds that at the end of the
world the enemy of the god Fo will come to fight against this divinity.
The child studies and becomes a prodigy; he argues on his master's
lessons; he finds that Fo has only been able to change himself into a
white elephant, because that is the most beautiful of animals. "The
kings of Siam and Pegu," he says, "have made war for a white elephant;
certainly if Fo had not been hidden in that elephant, these kings would
not have been so senseless as to fight simply for the possession of an
animal.
"The enemy of Fo will come to defy him at the end of the world;
certainly this enemy will be a rhinoceros, for the rhinoceros fights the
elephant." It is thus that in mature age the fakir's learned pupil
reasons, and he becomes one of the lights of India; the more subtle his
mind, the more false is it, and he forms later minds as false as his.
One shows all these fanatics a little geometry, and they learn it easily
enough; but strange to relate, their minds are not straightened for
that; they perceive the truths of geometry; but they do not learn to
weigh probabilities; they have got into a habit; they will reason
crookedly all their lives, and I am sorry for them.
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