11. Yet history is of great use.
I would not be thought here to lessen the credit and use of history: it is all the light
we have in many cases, and we have in many cases, and we receive from it a great part of the useful truths we
have, with a convincing evidence. I think nothing more valuable than the records of antiquity: I wish we had more
of them, and more uncorrupted. But this truth itself forces me to say, That no probability can rise higher than its
first original. What has no other evidence than the single testimony of one only witness must stand or fall by his
only testimony, whether good, bad, or indifferent; and though cited afterwards by hundreds of others, one after
another, is so far from receiving any strength thereby, that it is only the weaker. Passion, interest, inadvertency,
mistake of his meaning, and a thousand odd reasons, or capricios, men's minds are acted by, (impossible to be
discovered,) may make one man quote another man's words or meaning wrong. He that has but ever so little
examined the citations of writers, cannot doubt how little credit the quotations deserve, where the originals are
wanting; and consequently how much less quotations of quotations can be relied on. This is certain, that what in
one age was affirmed upon slight grounds, can never after come to be more valid in future ages by being often
repeated. But the further still it is from the original, the less valid it is, and has always less force in the mouth or
writing of him that last made use of it than in his from whom he received it.
