“Leisure” is the mother of “philosophy,” and “Commonwealth” the mother of “peace” and “leisure.” Where first were great and flourishing cities, there was first the study of “philosophy.” The Gymnosophists of India, the Magi of Persia, and the Priests of Chaldea and Egypt, are counted the most ancient philosophers; and those countries were the most ancient of kingdoms. “Philosophy” was not risen to the Grecians, and other people of the west, whose “commonwealths,” no greater perhaps than Lucca or Geneva, had never “peace,” but when their fears of one another were equal; nor the “leisure” to observe anything but one another. At length, when war had united many of these Grecian lesser cities into fewer and greater, then began “seven men,” of several parts of Greece, to get the reputation of being “wise”; some of them for “moral” and “politic” sentences, and others for the learning of the Chaldeans and Egyptians, which was “astronomy” and “geometry.” But we hear not yet of any “schools” of “philosophy.”