inquired into.

  I have been told that a short Epitome of this Treatise, which was
printed in 1688, was by some condemned without reading, because innate
ideas were denied in it; they too hastily concluding, that if innate
ideas were not supposed, there would be little left either of the
notion or proof of spirits. If any one take the like offence at the
entrance of this Treatise, I shall desire him to read it through;
and then I hope he will be convinced, that the taking away false
foundations is not to the prejudice but advantage of truth, which is
never injured or endangered so much as when mixed with, or built on,
falsehood.

  In the Second Edition I added as followeth:-

  The bookseller will not forgive me if I say nothing of this New
Edition, which he has promised, by the correctness of it, shall make
amends for the many faults committed in the former. He desires too,
that it should be known that it has one whole new chapter concerning
Identity, and many additions and amendments in other places. These I
must inform my reader are not all new matter, but most of them
either further confirmation of what I had said, or explications, to
prevent others being mistaken in the sense of what was formerly
printed, and not any variation in me from it.

  I must only except the alterations I have made in Book II. chap.
xxi.

  What I had there written concerning Liberty and the Will, I
thought deserved as accurate a view as I am capable of; those subjects
having in all ages exercised the learned part of the world with
questions and difficulties, that have not a little perplexed
morality and divinity, those parts of knowledge that men are most
concerned to be clear in. Upon a closer inspection into the working of
men's minds, and a stricter examination of those motives and views
they are turned by, I have found reason somewhat to alter the thoughts
I formerly had concerning that which gives the last determination to
the Will 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. sects. 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.