figures. Their moral philosophy is but a description of their own passions. For the rule of manners, without civil government, is the law of Nature; and in it the law civil, that determineth what is “honest” and “dishonest,” what is “just” and “unjust,” and generally what is “good” and “evil.” Whereas they make the rules of “good” and “bad” by their own “liking” and “disliking”: by which means, in so great diversity of taste, there is nothing generally agreed on; but everyone doth, as far as he dares, whatsoever seemeth good in his own eyes, to the subversion of commonwealth. Their “logic,” which should be the method of reasoning, is nothing else but captions of words, and inventions how to puzzle such as should go about to pose them. To conclude, there is nothing so absurd that the old philosophers, as Cicero saith (who was one of them), have not some of them maintained. And I believe that scarce anything can be more absurdly said in natural philosophy than that which now is called “Aristotle’s Metaphysics”; nor more repugnant to government than much of that he hath said in his Politics ; nor more ignorantly than a great part of his Ethics .
The school of the Jews was originally a