Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary
The Philosophical Dictionary
Voltaire
Selected and Translated by H.I. Woolf
New York: Knopf, 1924
Scanned by the Hanover College Department of History in 1995.
Proofread and pages added by Jonathan Perry, March 2001.
Declaration of the Admirers, Questioners
We declare to the scholars that, being like them prodigiously ignorant
about the first principles of all things, and about the natural, typical,
mystic, allegorical sense of many things, we refer these things to the
infallible judgment of the Holy Inquisition of Rome, Florence, Madrid,
Lisbon, and to the decrees of the Sorbonne of Paris, perpetual council
of the Gauls.
Our errors springing in no wise from malice, but being the natural consequence
of human frailty, we hope that they will be pardoned to us in this world
and the other.
We beseech the small number of heavenly spirits who are still shut up
in France in mortal bodies, and who, from there, enlighten the universe
at thirty sous the sheet, to communicate their luminousness to us
for the tenth volume which we reckon on publishing at the end of Lent 1772,
or in Advent 1773; and for their luminousness we will pay forty sous.
This tenth volume will contain some very curious articles, which, if
God favours us, will give new point to the salt which we shall endeavour
to bestow in the thanks we shall give to these gentlemen.
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