Advancement of Learning 155 



And as Aristotle saith, That young men may be happy, but 

 not otherwise but by hope ; l so we must all acknowledge our 

 minority, and embrace the felicity which is by hope of the 

 future world. 



Freed therefore and delivered from this doctrine of the 

 philosopher s heaven, whereby they feigned a higher eleva 

 tion of man s nature than was, (for we see in what a height 

 of style Seneca writeth, Vere magnum, habere fragilitatem 

 hominis, securitatem Dei?) we may with more sobriety and 

 truth receive the rest of their inquiries and labours. Where 

 in 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 farther, 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 

 comparison between a contemplative and an active life, 3 

 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. 



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. 



There is formed in every thing a double nature of good : 

 the one, as every thing is a total or substantive in itself; 

 the other, as it is a part or member of a greater body; 



1 Rhet. ii. 12, 8. * Sen. ad Lucilium, Ep. 53. 



3 Arist. Eth. Nic. x. 6-8. 



