Augustine: Earlier Writings (continued)
not to know, no one would applaud. But any of the people who catches him out thinks himself worthy of greater praise than the juggler for no other reason than that he could not be deceived or taken in. If many see through the trick the juggler is not praised, but the rest who cannot see it are laughed at. So the palm is always awarded to knowledge, to the comprehension of truth. But no one can reach truth who looks for it outside the mind.
95. When we are asked which is better, truth or falsehood, we answer with one voice that truth is better. And yet we are so sunk in trifles and baseness that we are much more ready to cling to jests and games in which deception, not truth, delights us, than to the precepts of the truth itself. So by our own judgment and out of our own mouth we are sentenced because we approve one thing by reason and pursue another in our vanity. So long as a thing is a matter of fun and games, we know that it arouses laughter when it counterfeits truth. But when we love such things we fall away from truth, and cannot discover what they imitate, and so we pant for them as if they were the prime objects of beauty. Getting further away from these primal objects we embrace our phantasms. When we reiurn to seek truth phantasms meet us in the way and will not allow us to pass on, attacking us like brigands, not indeed with violence but with dangerous pitfalls, because we do not know how widely applicable is the saying: "Keep yourselves from images" (I John 5:21).
96. So some go vaguely wandering in thought through innumerable worlds. Others have thought that God cannot exist except as corporeal fire. Others have thought of God as the brightness of an immense light radiating through infinite space in all directions, except that on one side it is cloven as by a black wedge. They are of opinion that there are two realms, one over against the other, and they set up two opposing principles as fabulous as their phantasms. If I were to urge them to declare on oath whether they know that these things are true, probably they would not dare to go so far; but they might reply: Tou show us what truth is. If I were to reply simply that they should look for the light that enables them to be certain that believing is one thing and knowing another, they themselves would swear that that light cannot be seen with the eyes, nor thought of as filling any space however vast, and yet that it is everywhere present to those who seek; and that nothing can be found more certain or more serene.
97. All that I have said about the light of the mind is made