Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
glowing figure climbing the stairs. She entered his room, paused, and
then said - anticlimactically, it seems to me - 'That is the linoleum.'
Some nights the figure was an old woman; in others, an elephant.
Sometimes the young man was convinced the entire business was a
dream; other times he was certain he was awake. He was pressed
down into his bed, paralysed, unable to move or cry out. His heart
was pounding. He was short of breath. Similar events transpired on
many consecutive nights. What is happening here? These events
took place before alien abductions were widely described. If the
young man had known about alien abductions, would his old woman
have had a large head and bigger eyes?
In several famous passages in The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon described the balance between
credulity and scepticism in late classical antiquity:
Credulity performed the office of faith; fanaticism was permitted
to assume the language of inspiration, and the effects
of accident or contrivance were ascribed to supernatural
causes . . .
In modern times [Gibbon is writing in the middle eighteenth
century], a latent and even involuntary scepticism
adheres to the most pious dispositions. Their admission of
supernatural truths is much less an active consent than a cold
and passive acquiescence. Accustomed long since to observe
and to respect the invariable order of Nature, our reason, or
at least our imagination, is not sufficiently prepared to sustain
the visible action of the Deity. But in the first ages of
Christianity the situation of mankind was extremely different.
The most curious, or the most credulous, among the pagans
were often persuaded to enter into a society which asserted
an actual claim of miraculous powers. The primitive Christians
perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were
exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary
events. They felt, or they fancied, that on every side they
were incessantly assaulted by daemons, comforted by visions,
instructed by prophecy, and surprisingly delivered from danger,
sickness, and from death itself, by the supplications of
the church . . .
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