Chapter 4
216 comics.
361: Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?
362: He replied, All poets that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains;
363: but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.
364: Then Ezekiel said, The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human perception:
365: some nations held one principle for the origin & some another;
366: we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle and all other others merely derivative,
367: which was the cause of our despising the priests & Philosophers of other countries,
368: and prophecying that all Gods would at last be proved to originate in ours & to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius;
369: it was this that our great poet King David desired so fervently & invokes so patheticly,
370: saying by this he conquers enemies & governs kingdoms;
371: and we so loved our God, that we cursed in his name all deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had rebelled;
372: from these opinions the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the jews.
