through what clouds, and as it were groping in the dark, our teachers
lead us to the knowledge of most of the things about us; assuredly we
shall find that it is rather custom than knowledge that takes away their
strangeness--

"Jam nemo, fessus saturusque videndi,
Suspicere in coeli dignatur lucida templa;"

["Weary of the sight, now no one deigns to look up to heaven's lucid
temples."--Lucretius, ii. 1037. The text has 'statiate videnai']

and that if those things were now newly presented to us, we should think
them as incredible, if not more, than any others.

"Si nunc primum mortalibus adsint
Ex improviso, si sint objecta repente,
Nil magis his rebus poterat mirabile dici,
Aute minus ante quod auderent fore credere gentes."

[Lucretius, ii. 1032. The sense of the passage is in the preceding
sentence.]

He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the
sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge, we
conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind.

"Scilicet et fluvius qui non est maximus, ei'st
Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit; et ingens
Arbor, homoque videtur, et omnia de genere omni
Maxima quae vidit quisque, haec ingentia fingit."