For they being combinations of
several ideas that the mind of man has arbitrarily put together,
without reference to any archetypes, men may, if they please,
exactly know the ideas that go to each composition, and so both use
these words in a certain and undoubted signification, and perfectly
declare, when there is occasion, what they stand for. This, if well
considered, would lay great blame on those who make not their
discourses about moral things very clear and distinct. For since the
precise signification of the names of mixed modes, or, which is all
one, the real essence of each species is to be known, they being not
of nature's, but man's making, it is a great negligence and
perverseness to discourse of moral things with uncertainty and
obscurity; which is more pardonable in treating of natural substances,
where doubtful terms are hardly to be avoided, for a quite contrary
reason, as we shall see by and by.
16. Morality capable of demonstration. Upon this ground it is that I
am bold to think that morality is capable of demonstration, as well as
mathematics: since the precise real essence of the things moral
words stand for may be perfectly known, and so the congruity and
incongruity of the things themselves be certainly discovered; in which
consists perfect knowledge. Nor let any one object, that the names
of substances are often to be made use of in morality, as well as
those of modes, from which will arise obscurity.
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