The Source of Human Misfortune
Religious enthusiasm, bigotry, and superstition, conjoined with the strong arm of political despotism, have rendered man in the past ages of the world the degraded instrument of their own pernicious and destructive purposes; it is here we must seek for the source of any human misfortunes, and the perpetuation of those prejudices by which the body and mind are both enslaved; it is true that the natural imbecility and imperfection of our faculties, and the extensive nature and variety of those moral and physical combinations, from which science is to be deduced, evince the strong probability that man may frequently be erroneous in the conclusions which he draws from certain premises, because the force of his faculties is not adequate to a full and complete investigation of the compounded and diversified relations of existence; but these natural obstacles to the clear deductions of science, are neither of a discouraging or an insurmountable nature. --Elihu Palmer (1764-1806), Principles