But it should be remembered that
men are mentally no less than corporeally gregarious, and that public
opinion, the fetish even of the nineteenth century, makes men, whether
for good or ill, into a mob, which either hurries the individual judgment
along with it, or runs over and tramples it into insensibility. Those who
are so fortunate as to occupy the philosophical position of spectators
_ab extra_ are very few in any generation.
There were exceptions, it is true, but the old cruelties went on. In 1610
a case came before the tribunal of the _Tourelle_, and when the counsel
for the accused argued at some length that sorcery was ineffectual, and
that the Devil could not destroy life, President Seguier told him that he
might spare his breath, since the court had long been convinced on those
points. And yet two years later the grand-vicars of the Bishop of
Beauvais solemnly summoned Beelzebuth, Satan, Motelu, and Briffaut, with
the four legions under their charge, to appear and sign an agreement
never again to enter the bodies of reasonable or other creatures, under
pain of excommunication! If they refused, they were to be given over to
"the power of hell to be tormented and tortured more than was customary,
three thousand years after the judgment.
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