The vanity of dogmatizing: or confidence in opinions

The most refined beauties of the world below heaven are only faint reflections of these original perfections. All the powers and abilities of this copy of the Divine, this medal of God, were as perfect as the ideal of beauty and harmony. The soul was not weighed down by a sluggish body like ours, nor hindered by unhealthy or poorly functioning organs. Passions stayed in their place as servants to the higher mind and did not try to take over the throne as they do now. No conflicting orders came from the passions to cancel the decrees of the ruling mind. That Batrachomyomachia original: "Battle of the Frogs and Mice," a Greek mock-epic used here to mean a silly or chaotic conflict of one passion against another, and both against reason, did not yet exist. Man was never at odds with himself until he was at odds with the commands of his Creator. There was no discord in his mind until sin put it out of tune. When he told one faculty to go, it went; when he told another to act, it acted. Even the senses, which are the windows of the soul, were

completely clear. To compare them to the purest crystal would be an insult, for their sharpness and strength came from the perfect arrangement of the organs and the spirits the subtle fluids then believed to carry sensory information that bring outward motions to the soul's judgment seat. In a state of innocence, these must have been infinitely better than ours, just as the senses of a vibrant youth are better than those of a frail, elderly person. Adam did not need spectacles. The sharpness of his natural vision likely showed him much of the heavenly magnificence without needing a Galileo's tube a telescope. It is probable that his naked eyes could see as much of the upper world as we can with all our scientific tools. In his view, it might have seemed absurd that the Sun and stars should be smaller than the Earth, whereas to us it seems the opposite. It is not unlikely that he clearly perceived the Earth's motion, just as we think we perceive it standing still.