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.
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.
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 distinction was made to maintain the doctrine of freewill, that is, of a will of man not subject to the will of God.
Aristotle, and other heathen philosophers, define good and evil by the appetite of men; and well enough, as long as we consider them governed