Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion, by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. This error however at length prevailed, the earth became a globe, and Descartes declared it was whirled round its axis by a vortex. The government in which he lived was wise enough to see that this was no question of civil jurisdiction, or we should all have been involved by authority in vortices. In fact, the vortices have been exploded, and the Newtonian principle of gravitation is now more firmly established, on the basis of reason, than it would be were the government to step in and make it an article of necessary faith. Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them.
Truth can stand by itself.
Confidence in the free competition of ideas is not blind faith about the ability of the market to solve any particular crisis. It is instead a certainty about the fundamental conditions needed to protect creative and productive minds from brutality and confiscation. Hobbes recommended a social system which would invest a king with complete authority over the lives of the people, not because the king would be wise, but because his actions would be definite and predictable. Mistrust of reason implied mistrust of the individual. Society was, for Hobbes, in the person of the king, more reliable than the mass of individual people.