atrabilarians

Updated: May 21, 2025

Idle dreamers nourished with bile, intoxicated with theologic fury atrabilarians, whose melancholic humour frequently disposes them to wickedness visionaries, whose devious imaginations, heated with intemperate zeal, generally leads them to the extremes of fanaticism, working upon ignorance, whose usual bias is credulity, have incessantly disturbed the harmony of mankind, kindled the inextinguishable flame of discord, and in an almost uninterrupted succession, strewed the earth with the mangled carcasses of the multitudinous victims to mad-brained error, whose only crime has been their incapacity to dream according to the rules prescribed by these infuriate maniacs; although these have never been uniform never assimilated in any two countries never borne the same features in any two ages, nor even had the united concurrence of the persecuting contemporaries.

baron d' Paul Henri Thiry Holbach - The System of Nature, Volume 2