establishing them upon chimerical ideas, which have no existence but in
his imagination; these morals, upon which the welfare of society so much
depends, are rendered uncertain, are made arbitrary, are abandoned to
the caprices of fancy, are not fixed upon any solid basis.

Beings essentially different by their natural organization, by the
modifications they experience, by the habits they contract, by the
opinions they acquire, must of necessity think differently. His
temperament, as we have seen, decides the mental qualities of man: this
temperament itself is diversely modified in him: from whence it
consecutively follows, his imagination cannot possibly be the same;
neither can it create to him the same images. Each individual is a
connected whole, of which all the parts have a necessary correspondence.
Different eyes must see differently, must give extremely varied ideas of
the objects they contemplate, even when these objects are real. What,
then, must be the diversity of these ideas, if the objects meditated
upon do not act upon the senses? Mankind have pretty nearly the same
ideas, in the gross, of those substances that act upon his organs with
vivacity; he is sufficiently in unison upon some qualities which he
contemplates very nearly in the same manner; I say, very nearly, because
the intelligence, the notion, the conviction of any one proposition,
however simple, however evident, however clear it may be supposed, is
not, nor cannot be, strictly the same, in any two men. Indeed, one man
not being another man, the first cannot, for example, have rigorously
and mathematically the same notion of unity as the second; seeing that
an identical effect cannot be the result of two different causes. Thus,
when men are in accord in their ideas, in their modes of thinking, in
their judgment, in their passions, in their desires, in, their tastes,
their consent does not arise from their seeing or feeling the same
objects precisely in the same manner, but pretty nearly; language is