In just two quotes:
Bishop Colenso, in his endeavor to convert the Zulus, translated the Bible into their language. They read it with an open mind, but when they came to the statement that the hare chews the cud they informed him that this was not the case. He was a bookish man, unfamiliar with the habits of hares, but at the instigation of the Zulus he observed a hare and found they were right. This caused him to have “doubts,” which led the authorities to deprive him of his salary.
— Bertrand Russell, “The Art of Drawing Inferences,” in The Art of Philosophizing and Other Essays.
In addition to this there is another form of temptation, more complex in its peril. […] Hence do we proceed to search out the secret powers of nature (which is beside our end), which to know profits not, and wherein men desire nothing but to know.
— Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X, ch. 35, §§54–55, translated by J. G. Pilkington.
Augustine’s subject here is “the lust of the eyes,” which he describes as “a certain vain and curious longing.”
