Religion

Men are concerned what happens after death.

The lack of resemblance in this case so entirely destroys belief.

Very few people truly believe in the soul’s immortality in the same way as travelers and historians believe their own testimonies.

Exceptions are people who have repeatedly meditated to imprint in their minds the arguments for a future state, upon cool reflection on the importance of the soul’s immortality.

This appears very conspicuously wherever men compare the pleasures and pains, the rewards and punishments of this life with those of a future, even though:

• the case does not concern themselves, and
• there is no violent passion to disturb their judgment.

The Roman Catholics are the most zealous Christian sect.

• Yet most of them approve the massacre of St. Bartholomew.

This inconsistency is from them not really believing their belief of an afterlife.

In religion, men take a pleasure in being terrified.

In common life, fear and terror gives pleasure only in dramatic performances and religious discourses.

In religious discourses, the imagination rests indolently on the idea of death.

My hypothesis will be confirmed further if we examine the effects of other kinds of habit and relations.

I attribute all belief and reasoning to habit.

This habit may invigorate an idea in 2 ways.

If we have found 2 objects always conjoined together, the appearance of one makes us easily transition to the idea of its connected object.

• The idea of that connected object is stronger and more lively than any loose floating image of the imagination.

Assume that a mere idea alone, without any artificial preparation, frequently appears in the mind.

This idea must:

• acquire a facility by degrees,
• force by its firm hold and easy introduction, and
• distinguish itself from any new and unusual idea.

This is the only part in which these 2 kinds of habit [custom] agree.

If it appears that their effects on the judgment are similar and proportional, we may conclude that the foregoing explanation of judgement is satisfactory.

But can we doubt of this agreement in their influence on the judgment, when we consider the nature and effects of education?

All those opinions and notions of things we have been use to since infancy take such deep root.

It is impossible for us to eradicate them by all the powers of reason and experience.

This habit approaches in its influence and even on many occasions prevails over that which arises from the constant and inseparable union of causes and effects.

Here we must not be content with saying that the idea’s vividness produces the belief.

We must maintain that they are individually the same.

The frequent repetition of any idea fixes it in the imagination.

But repetition could never possibly produce belief by itself, if it was annexed only to a reasoning and comparison of ideas, by the original constitution of our natures.

Custom may lead us into some false comparison of ideas.

This is the utmost effect we can conceive of it.

But it is certain it could never:

• supply the place of that comparison, nor
• produce any act of the mind which naturally belonged to that principle.

A person that has lost a leg or an arm by amputation, tries for a long time to serve himself with them.

After the death of any one, the whole family, especially the servants, commonly remark that they cannot believe him to be dead.

They still imagine him to be in his room or any place where they used to find him.

A man might say about a famous person whom he has never met: ‘I have never seen that famous person, but I feel as though I have met him because I have heard much talk about him.’

All these are parallel instances.

If we consider this argument from education in a proper light, it will appear very convincing, especially since it is founded on the most common phenomena.

We shall find that more than half of mankind’s opinions are owing to education.

The principles implicitly embraced, overbalance those which are owing to abstract reasoning or experience.

This is the same way that liars come to believe in their lies through frequent repetition of their lies

Likewise, the imagination might have ideas so strongly imprinted on it that they operate on the mind in the same way as those with those, which the senses, memory, or reason present to us.

Education is never recognized by philosophers:

• because education is an artificial cause, not a natural one, and
• because its maxims are frequently contrary to even to themselves in different times and places.

Though in reality, education is built almost on the same foundation of habit and repetition as our reasonings from causes and effects.