Photo by Gage Walker on Unsplash

Personalities are a dime a dozen, but when it comes to beliefs, much clearer distinctions can be made between people. You can’t convince an atheist that there is a God in the same way that you can’t convince your cat to take a bath. The same goes for spiritualists who ignore scientific proof in favor of superstition. Even agnostics are tough nuts to crack sometimes.

We choose to believe in something to give our existence meaning. It is one of the greatest drivers of the human mind, next to curiosity. It’s deeply rooted into everyone, and it’s not something you can change very easily. Of this, essayist Jonathan Swift said these words with a typically vexing tone:

Reasoning will never make a man correct an opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.

– Jonathan Swift

The name may or may not ring a bell. Swift wrote under several pseudonyms, some of which he used to name name his characters, including the famous Gulliver (Gulliver’s Travels). An Anglo-Irish satirist, Swift is also known for works such as: A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, Drapier’s Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity and A Tale of a Tub. Encyclopædia Britannica regards him as the foremost prose satirist in the English language.

The writer had a tumultuous life, spotted with fear, disappointment, disapproval, physical illness, and ultimately mental illness (which he had reportedly feared the most). In his final years, Swift had to be committed because he had become increasingly quarrelsome and violent, including towards himself. He died at 80 years old, in 1745. His $12,000 fortune was used to found a hospital for the mentally ill which exists to this day. Pictured above is an illustration depicting the events in the first chapter of Gulliver’s Travels, “A voyage to Lilliput,” courtesy of 4umi.com.