If these rules are so liable to vary, through adventitious notions, we should find them clearest in children and in persons wholly illiterate.
He grants that there are many opinions, received by men of different countries, educations, and tempers, and held as unquestionable first principles; but then the absurdity of some, and the mutual contradiction of others, make it impossible that they should be all true.

Yet it will often happen that these men will sooner part with their lives, than suffer the truth of their opinions to be questioned.
We can see from our experience how the belief in principles grows up.
Doctrines, with no better original than the superstition of a nurse, or the authority of an old woman, may in course of time, and by the concurrence of neighbours, grow up to the dignity of first truths in Religion and in Morality.

Persons matured under those influences, and, looking into their own minds, find nothing anterior to the opinions taught them before they kept a record of themselves; they, therefore, without scruple, conclude that those propositions whose origin they cannot trace are the impress of God and nature upon their minds.

Such a result is unavoidable in the circumstances of the bulk of mankind, who require some foundation of principles to rest upon, and have no means of obtaining them but on trust from others.

_Custom is it greater power than Nature_, and, while we are yet young, seldom fails to make us worship as divine what she has inured us to; nor is it to be wondered at, that, when we come to mature life, and are engrossed with quite different matters, we are indisposed to sit down and examine all our received tenets, to find ourselves in the wrong, to run counter to the opinions of our country or party, and to be branded with such epithets as whimsical, sceptical, Atheist.