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The remaining circumstances of the reign of Varahran V. come to us wholly through the Oriental writers, amid whose exaggerations and fables it is very difficult to discern the truth.
A hypothesis, being a discursive device, gains its utmost possible validity when its discursive value is established. It is not, it merely applies; and every situation in which it is found to apply is a proof of its truth. The case would not be different with fables, were their basis and meaning remembered.
The first conversions were free and spontaneous: a holy life and an eloquent tongue were the only arms of the missionaries; but the domestic fables of the Pagans were silenced by the miracles and visions of the strangers; and the favorable temper of the chiefs was accelerated by the dictates of vanity and interest.
XII. The building of the temples, by which Athens was adorned, the people delighted, and the rest of the world astonished, and which now alone prove that the tales of the ancient power and glory of Greece are no fables, was what particularly excited the spleen of the opposite faction, who inveighed against him in the public assembly, declaring that the Athenians had disgraced themselves by transferring the common treasury of the Greeks from the island of Delos to their own custody.
Then he said, "I do not believe in those old women's fables." I said, "I am going to get you to believe in God." He replied, "You can't do it." I answered, "By God's help I can, for where you are, I have been, and where I am, you can come. If I can only gain one point with you I can get you to believe in God." I had to come back in the afternoon at three o'clock and the next morning at about nine.
Bernardino del Lupino, of whom some mention was made not very far back, painted in Milan, near S. Sepolcro, the house of Signor Gian Francesco Rabbia that is, the façade, loggie, halls, and apartments depicting there many of the Metamorphoses of Ovid and other fables, with good and beautiful figures, executed with much delicacy.
Particularly, his ignorance of conditions on the Western front was supreme. He was full to the brim with the most extraordinary fables about the British. He solemnly assured me, for example on the faith of a friend of his who had seen them that Japanese were fighting with the English in France, dressed as Highlanders his friend had heard these Asiatic Scotsmen talking Japanese, he declared.
Generally your intellectual worries very little about squaring his conduct with his principles, and does not bother about the practical part. No; what was much worse in his eyes is that the Manichean physical science, a congeries of fables more or less symbolical, suddenly struck him as ruinous.
He also executed, round a chamber in the house of Francesco del Pugliese, various scenes with little figures; nor is it possible to describe the different fantastic things that he delighted to paint in all those scenes, what with the buildings, the animals, the costumes, the various instruments, and any other fanciful things that came into his head, since the stories were drawn from fables.
"We know nothing to-day of the nature of phenomena we knew nothing yesterday, and we shall know nothing to-morrow. The great advance in thought has only brought us to the point of no more self-deception, and exactly knowing what we do know, whereas yesterday men deceived themselves, and imagined that the fables of religion and metaphysics were positive knowledge.