In the same manner, the truth
and certainty of moral discourses abstracts from the lives of men, and
the existence of those virtues in the world whereof they treat: nor
are Tully's Offices less true, because there is nobody in the world
that exactly practises his rules, and lives up to that pattern of a
virtuous man which he has given us, and which existed nowhere when
he writ but in idea. If it be true in speculation, i.e. in idea,
that murder deserves death, it will also be true in reality of any
action that exists conformable to that idea of murder. As for other
actions, the truth of that proposition concerns them not. And thus
it is of all other species of things, which have no other essences but
those ideas which are in the minds of men.
9. Nor will it be less true or certain, because moral ideas are of
our own making and naming. But it will here be said, that if moral
knowledge be placed in the contemplation of our own moral ideas, and
those, as other modes, be of our own making, What strange notions will
there be of justice and temperance? What confusion of virtues and
vice, if every one may make what ideas of them he pleases? No
confusion or disorder in the things themselves, nor the reasonings
about them; no more than (in mathematics) there would be a disturbance
in the demonstration, or a change in the properties of figures, and
their relations one to another, if a man should make a triangle with
four corners, or a trapezium with four right angles: that is, in plain
English, change the names of the figures, and call that by one name,
which mathematicians call ordinarily by another.
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