II.] ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING. 203 



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, fcr the degrees and compara 

 tive nature of good, they have also excellently handled it in their 

 triplicity of good, in the comparison 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 

 deservcth 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 everything a double nature of good, the one as 

 everything is a total or substantive in itself, the other as it is a part 

 or member of a greater body; whereof the latter is in degree the 

 greater and the worthier, because it tcndeth to the conservation of a 

 more general form : therefore we see the iron in particular sympathy 

 movcth to the loadstone, but yet if it exceed a certain quantity, it 

 forsakcth the affection to the loadstone, and like a good patriot 

 movcth to the earth, which is the region and country of massy bodies; 

 so may we go forward and see that water and massy bodies move to 

 the centre of the earth, but rather than to suffer a divulsion in the 

 continuance of nature they will move upwards from the centre of the 

 earth, forsaking their duty to the earth in regard of their duty to the 

 world. This double nature of good and the comparative thereof is 

 much more engraven upon man, if he degenerate not, unto whom the 

 conservation of duty to the public ought to be much more precious 

 than the conservation of life and being ; according to that memorable 

 speech of Pompeius Magnus, when being in commission of pur 

 veyance for a famine at Rome, and being dissuaded with great 

 vchemency and instance by his friends about him, that he should 

 not hazard himself to sea in an extremity of weather, he said only 

 to them * Ncccsse est ut earn, non ut vivam:&quot; but it may be truly 

 affirmed that there was never any philosophy, religion, or other disci 

 pline, which did so plainly and highly exalt the good which is com 

 municative, and depress the good which is private and particular, as 

 the holy faith : well declaring, that it was the same God that gave the 

 Christian law to men, who gave those laws of nature to inanimate 

 creatures that we spake of before ; for we read that the elected saints 

 of God have wished themselves anathematized and razed out of the 

 book of life, in an ecstacy of charity, and infinite feeling of com 

 munion. 



