The Epilogue argues that a collary of the book's thesis is that earnestness and credulity are not the same thing: the satires of Swift and Defoe reveal that credulous investment in even apparently authentic beliefs need not be earnest. This remains true regardless of whether there is a rigorous factual basis for such beliefs: the same bad faith can power both the most rigorous research as well as the most baseless conspiracy theorizing. A second corollary is therefore that such credulity need not be naïve or unreflective but can instead demonstrate both self-awareness and a deep cynicism, in the same way that Hutcheson’s moral sense is simultaneously an automatic and instantaneous process yet also one that reflects, upon further investigation, a kind of reasoning.