Nor that which is gotten by reasoning from the authority of books; because it is not by reasoning from the cause to the effect, nor from the effect to the cause; and is not knowledge but faith.
The faculty of reasoning being consequent to the use of speech, it was not possible but that there should have been some general truths found out by reasoning, as ancient almost as language itself. The savages of America are not without some good moral sentences; also they have a little arithmetic, to add, and divide in numbers not too great: but they are not, therefore, philosophers. For as there were plants of corn and wine in small quantity dispersed in the fields and woods, before men knew their virtue, or made use of them for their nourishment, or planted them apart in fields and vineyards; in which time they fed on acorns and drank water; so also there have been divers true, general, and profitable speculations from the beginning; as being the natural plants of human reason. But they were at first but few in number; men lived upon gross experience, there was no method; that is to say, no sowing, nor planting of knowledge by itself, apart from the weeds, and common plants of error and conjecture. And the cause of it being the want of leisure from procuring the necessities of life, and defending themselves against their neighbours, it was impossible, till the erecting of great commonwealths, it should be otherwise. “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