Will, the cause of willing.
For cause of the will, to do any particular action, which is called volitio, they assign the faculty, that is to say, the capacity in general, that men have, to will sometimes one thing, sometimes another, which is called voluntas; making the power the cause of the act. As if one should assign for cause of the good or evil acts of men, their ability to do them.
Ignorance an occult cause.
And in many occasions they put for cause of natural events, their own ignorance; but disguised in other words: as when they say, fortune is the cause of things contingent; that is, of things whereof they know no cause: and as when they attribute many effects to occult qualities; that is, qualities not known to them; and therefore also, as they think, to no man else. And to sympathy, antipathy, antiperistasis, specifical qualities, and other like terms, which signify neither the agent that produceth them, nor the operation by which they are produced.
If such metaphysics, and physics as this, be not vain philosophy, there was never any; nor needed St. Paul to give us warning to avoid it.
One makes the things incongruent, another the incongruity.
And for their moral, and civil philosophy, it hath the same, or greater absurdities. If a man do an action of injustice, that is to say, an action contrary to the law, God they say is the prime cause of the law, and also the prime cause of that, and all other actions; but no cause at all of the injustice; which is the inconformity of the action to the law. This is vain philosophy. A man might as well say, that one man maketh both a straight line, and a crooked, and another maketh their incongruity. And such is the philosophy of all men that resolve of their conclusions, before they know their premises; pretending to comprehend, that which is incomprehensible; and of attributes of honour to make attributes of nature; as this dictinction was made to maintain the doctrine of free-will, that is, of a will of man, not subject to the will of God.
Private appetite the rule of public good.
Aristotle, and other heathen philosophers, define good and evil, by the appetite of men; and well enough, as long as we consider them governed every one by his own law; for in the condition of men that have no other law but their own appetites, there can be no general rule of good, and evil actions. But in a commonwealth this measure is false: not the appetite of private men, but the law, which is the will and appetite of the state, is the measure. And yet is this doctrine still practised; and men judge the goodness or wickedness of their own, and of other men’s actions, and of the actions of the commonwealth itself, by their own passions; and no man calleth good or evil, but that which is so in his own eyes, without any regard at all to the public laws; except only monks, and friars, that are bound by vow to that simple obedience to their superior, to which every subject ought to think himself bound by the law of nature to the civil sovereign. And this private measure of good, is a doctrine, not only vain, but also pernicious to the public state.
And that lawful marriage is unchastity.