Wherein for the nature of good positive or
simple, they have set it down excellently in describing the forms of
virtue and duty, with their situations and postures; in distributing
them into their kinds, parts, provinces, actions, and
administrations, and the like: nay further, they have commended
them to man's nature and spirit with great quickness of argument and
beauty of persuasions; yea, and fortified and entrenched them (as
much as discourse can do) against corrupt and popular opinions.
Again, for the degrees and comparative nature of good, they have
also excellently handled it in their triplicity of good, in the
comparisons between a contemplative and an active life, in the
distinction between virtue with reluctation and virtue secured, in
their encounters between honesty and profit, in their balancing of
virtue with virtue, and the like; so as this part deserveth to be
reported for excellently laboured.
(6) Notwithstanding, if before they had come to the popular and
received notions of virtue and vice, pleasure and pain, and the
rest, they had stayed a little longer upon the inquiry concerning
the roots of good and evil, and the strings of those roots, they had
given, in my opinion, a great light to that which followed; and
specially if they had consulted with nature, they had made their
doctrines less prolix and more profound: which being by them in
part omitted and in part handled with much confusion, we will
endeavour to resume and open in a more clear manner.
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