An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. | Page 6

in all voluntary
actions. This I cannot forbear to acknowledge to the world with as
much freedom and readiness; as I at first published what then seemed

to me to be right; thinking myself more concerned to quit and renounce
any opinion of my own, than oppose that of another, when truth
appears against it. For it is truth alone I seek, and that will always be
welcome to me, when or from whencesoever it comes. But what
forwardness soever I have to resign any opinion I have, or to recede
from anything I have writ, upon the first evidence of any error in it; yet
this I must own, that I have not had the good luck to receive any light
from those exceptions I have met with in print against any part of my
book, nor have, from anything that has been urged against it, found
reason to alter my sense in any of the points that have been questioned.
Whether the subject I have in hand requires often more thought and
attention than cursory readers, at least such as are prepossessed, are
willing to allow; or whether any obscurity in my expressions casts a
cloud over it, and these notions are made difficult to others'
apprehensions in my way of treating them; so it is, that my meaning, I
find, is often mistaken, and I have not the good luck to be everywhere
rightly understood.
Of this the ingenious author of the Discourse Concerning the Nature of
Man has given me a late instance, to mention no other. For the civility
of his expressions, and the candour that belongs to his order, forbid me
to think that he would have closed his Preface with an insinuation, as if
in what I had said, Book II. ch. xxvii, concerning the third rule which
men refer their actions to, I went about to make virtue vice and vice
virtue, unless he had mistaken my meaning; which he could not have
done if he had given himself the trouble to consider what the argument
was I was then upon, and what was the chief design of that chapter,
plainly enough set down in the fourth section and those following. For I
was there not laying down moral rules, but showing the original and
nature of moral ideas, and enumerating the rules men make use of in
moral relations, whether these rules were true or false: and pursuant
thereto I tell what is everywhere called virtue and vice; which "alters
not the nature of things," though men generally do judge of and
denominate their actions according to the esteem and fashion of the
place and sect they are of.
If he had been at the pains to reflect on what I had said, Bk. I. ch. ii.

sect. 18, and Bk. II. ch. xxviii. sect. 13, 14, 15 and 20, he would have
known what I think of the eternal and unalterable nature of right and
wrong, and what I call virtue and vice. And if he had observed that in
the place he quotes I only report as a matter of fact what OTHERS call
virtue and vice, he would not have found it liable to any great exception.
For I think I am not much out in saying that one of the rules made use
of in the world for a ground or measure of a moral relation is--that
esteem and reputation which several sorts of actions find variously in
the several societies of men, according to which they are there called
virtues or vices. And whatever authority the learned Mr. Lowde places
in his Old English Dictionary, I daresay it nowhere tells him (if I
should appeal to it) that the same action is not in credit, called and
counted a virtue, in one place, which, being in disrepute, passes for and
under the name of vice in another. The taking notice that men bestow
the names of 'virtue' and 'vice' according to this rule of Reputation is all
I have done, or can be laid to my charge to have done, towards the
making vice virtue or virtue vice. But the good man does well, and as
becomes his calling, to be watchful in such points, and to take the
alarm even at expressions, which, standing alone by themselves, might
sound ill and be suspected.
'Tis to this zeal, allowable in his function, that I forgive his citing as he
does these words of mine (ch. xxviii. sect. II): "Even the exhortations
of inspired teachers have not feared to appeal to common repute, Philip,
iv. 8;" without taking notice of those immediately preceding, which
introduce them, and run thus: "Whereby even in the corruption of
manners, the true boundaries of the law of nature, which ought to be the