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However, a few of their most important precepts deducible from it are by no means to be omitted; among which, the following maxim was of much weight: That since wind had the master share as well as operation in every compound, by consequence those beings must be of chief excellence wherein that primordium appears most prominently to abound, and therefore man is in highest perfection of all created things, as having, by the great bounty of philosophers, been endued with three distinct animas or winds, to which the sage AEolists, with much liberality, have added a fourth, of equal necessity as well as ornament with the other three, by this quartum principium taking in the four corners of the world.
The soul, quoth I. 'Nay then, said he, 'you answer not like a scholar. Hereupon I endeavoured to prove that it was scholarlike, nay, in such disputes as this, usual and necessary to run in circulum, partly because definitio rei was primum et immediatum principium, and seeing primo non est Prius, a man must of necessity come backward, and partly because definitio and definitum be naturae reciprocae, the one convertible, answering unto the question made upon the other.
Those make a difference, who augment and diminish, as the Arians do; who distinguish the Trinity into different natures, as well as Persons, of different worth and excellency, and thus divide and multiply the Trinity into a plurality of Gods. 'Principium enim pluralitatis alteritas est. Præter alteritatem enim nec pluralitas quid sit intelligi potest'. Then if so, what becomes of the Persons?
"A Jove principium," he said, "I will begin with that which is both beginning and end. It is the truth of God's word and its maintenance that is the bond of our common cause. Reasons of state invite us as friends and neighbours by the preservation of our lives and property, but the interest of religion binds us as Christians and brethren to the mutual defence of the liberty of our consciences."
'I surpass you', he said, 'in the explanation of phenomena, which is the principal mark of a good system. But, in my opinion, it is not a very good explanation of a phenomenon to assign to it an ad hoc principle: to evil, a principium maleficum, to cold, a primum frigidum; there is nothing so easy and nothing so dull.
On the other hand, remember, that what Horace says of good writing is justly applicable to those who would make a good figure in courts, and distinguish themselves in the shining parts of life; 'Sapere est principium et fons'. A man who, without a good fund of knowledge and parts, adopts a court life, makes the most ridiculous figure imaginable.
Have the Persons attributes distinct from their nature; or does not their common nature constitute their common attributes? 'Principium enim, &c. Ib. p. 124.
All the arts I have cited above are superfluous if the writer really possesses any intellect, for it allows a man to show himself as he is and verifies for all time what Horace said: Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons.
"According to the ancient view," says Professor Lewis, "the present world was a growth; it was born, it came from something antecedent, not merely as a cause but as its seed, embryo or principium. Plato's world was a 'zoon, a living thing, a natural production."
The explanation of the cause of evil by a particular principle, per principium maleficum, is of the same nature. Evil needs no such explanation, any more than do cold and darkness: there is neither primum frigidum nor principle of darkness. Evil itself comes only from privation; the positive enters therein only by concomitance, as the active enters by concomitance into cold.
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