WERE DELIGHTED

BOOK I.


It being our determination to discourse of Natural Philosophy, we
judge it necessary, in the first place and chiefly, to divide the
body of philosophy into its proper members, so that we may know
what is that which is called philosophy, and what part of it is
physical, or the explanation of natural things. The Stoics affirm
that wisdom is the knowledge of things human and divine;
that philosophy is the pursuit of that art which is convenient to
this knowledge; that virtue is the sole and sovereign art which is
thus convenient; and this distributes itself into three general
parts--natural, moral, and logical. By which just reason (they say)
philosophy is tripartite; of which one natural, the other moral,
the third logical. The natural when our inquiries are concerning
the world and all things contained in it; the ethical is the
employment of our minds in those things which concern the manners
of man's life; the logical (which they also call dialectical)
regulates our conversation with others in speaking.
Aristotle, Theophrastus, and after them almost all the Peripatetics
give the same division of philosophy. It is absolutely requisite
that the complete person he contemplator of things which have a
being, and the practiser of those thing which are decent; and this
easily appears by the following instances. If the question be
proposed, whether the sun, which is so conspicuous to us, be
informed of a soul or inanimate, he that makes this disquisition is
the thinking man; for he proceeds no farther than to consider the
nature of that thing which is proposed. Likewise, if the question