270 ADVANCEMENT OP LEARNING. [BOOK VII. 



may, with less offence to truth and sobriety, receive much 

 of what they deliver about the image of good. As for the 

 nature of positive and simple good, they have certainly drawn 

 it beautifully and according to the life, in several pieces 

 exactly representing the form of virtue and duty, their 

 order, kinds, relations, parts, subjects, provinces, actions, and 

 dispensations. And all this they have recommended and 

 insinuated to the mind with great vivacity and subtilty of 

 argument, as well as sweetness of persuasion, at the same 

 time faithfully guarding, as much as was possible by words, 

 against depraved and popular errors and insults. And in 

 deducing the nature of comparative good they have not been 

 wanting, but appointed three orders thereof, they have 

 compared contemplative and active life together; 1 distin 

 guished between virtue with reluctance, and virtue secured 

 and confirmed ; represented the conflict betwixt honour and 

 advantage ; balanced the virtues, to show which overweighed, 

 and the like, so that this part of the image of good is 

 already nobly executed ; and herein the ancients have shown 

 wonderful abilities. Yet the pious and strenuous diligence 

 of the divines, exercised in weighing and determining studies, 

 moral virtues, cases of conscience, and fixing the bounds of 

 sin, have greatly exceeded them. But if the philosophers, 

 before they descended to the popular and received notions of 

 virtue and vice, pain and pleasure, &c., had dwelt longer 

 upon discovering the roots and fibres of good and evil, they 

 would, doubtless, have thus gained great light to their sub 

 sequent inquiries, especially if they had consulted the nature 

 of things, as well as moral axioms, they would have shortened 

 their doctrines and laid them deeper. But as they have 

 entirely omitted this or confusedly touched it, we will here 

 briefly touch it over again, and endeavour to open and 

 cleanse the springs of morality, before we come to the geor- 

 gics of the mind, which we set down as deficient. 



All things are endued with an appetite to two kinds of 

 good, the one as the thing is a whole in itself, the other as 

 it is a part of some greater whole; and this latter is more 

 worthy and more powerful than the other, as it tends to the 

 conservation of a more ample form. The first may be called 



1 See Arirt. Eth. Nic. i. S, sq. 



