362 LOGIC: OR THE ICLGHT cgs OF REASON. Never rest satisfied therefore with mere words which have no ideas belonging to them, or at least no settled and determinate ideas. Deal not in such empty ware, whether you are a learn- er or a teacher; for hereby some persons have made them- selves rich in words, and learned in their own esteem ; whereas in reality, their understandings have been poor, and they have nothing. Let me give for instance, some of those writers or talkers who deal much in the words nature, fate, luck, chance, perfec- tion, power, life, fortune, instinct, 8lc. and that even in the most calm and instructive parts of their discourse ; though neither they themselves nor their hearers have any settled meaning un- der those words and thus they build up their reasonings, and infer what they please, with an ambition of the name of learning, or of sublime elevations in religion ; whereas in truth, they do but amuse themselves and their admirers with swelling words of vanity, understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm. But this sort of talk was reproved of old by the two chief apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul ; 1 Tim. i. 7. and 2 Pet. ii. 18. When pretenders to philosophy or good sense grow fond of this sort of learning, they dazzle and confound their weaker hearers, but fall under the neglect of the wise. The Epicureans are guilty of this fault, when they ascribe the formation of the world to chance ; the Aristotelians, when they say nature abhors a vacuum ; the Stoics, when they talk of fate, which is superior to the gods ; and the gamesters, when they curse their ill -luck, or hope for the favours of fortune. Whereas, if they would tell us, that by the word nature they mean the properties of any being, or the order of things established at the creation ;, that by the word fate, they intend the decrees of God, or the necessary con- nection and influence of second causes and effects ; if by the word luck or chance, they signify the absolute negation of any deter- minate cause, or only their ignorance of any such cause, we should know how to converse with them, and to assent to, or dis- sent from their opinions. But while they flutter in the dark, and snake a noise with words which have no fixed ideas, they talk to the wind, and never can profit. I would make this matter a little plainer still by instances borrowed from the Peripatetic philosophy, which was once taught in all the schools. The professor fancies he has assigned the true reason, why all heavy bodies tend downward, why am- her will draw feathers or straws, and the load-stone draws iron, when lie tells you, that this is done by certain gravitating and attractive qualities, which proceed from the substantial forms of those various bodies. He imagines that he has explained why
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