322 OF THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 



considereth it either Simple or Compared ; either the kinds 

 of good, or the degrees of good : in the later whereof 

 those infinite disputations which were touching the supreme 

 degree thereof, which they term felicity, beatitude, or the 

 highest good, the doctrines concerning which were as the 

 heathen divinity, are by the Christian faith discharged. 

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

 but not otherwise but by hope'; so we must all acknow- 

 ledge our minority, and embrace the felicity which is by 

 hope of the future world. 



Freed therefore and delivered from this doctrine of the 

 philosophers' heaven, whereby they feigned an higher eleva- 

 tion of man's nature than was, (for we see in what an 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. 

 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 farther, they have 

 commended them to man's nature and spirit with great 

 quickness of argument and beauty of persuasions ; yea, and 

 fortified and intrenched 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. 



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 in- 

 quiry 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 



