A26883:2092
Richard Baxter's Catholic theology plain, pure, peaceable, for pacification of the dogmatical word-warriors who,…Richard Baxter's Catholick theologie plain, pure, peaceable, for pacification of the dogmatical word-warriours who,…
Richard Baxter's Catholic theology plain, pure, peaceable, for pacification of the dogmatical word-warriors who, 1. by contending about things unrevealed or not understood, 2. and by taking verbal differences for real,Richard Baxter's Catholick theologie plain, pure, peaceable, for pacification of the dogmatical word-warriours who, 1. by contending about things unrevealed or not understood, 2. and by taking verbal differences for real,
London: printed by Robert White for Nevill Simmons, 1675
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
6. After these come Hobbs, Cartesius and Gassendus, with a swarm of Epicureans, (a Sect commonly despised even in Cicero's time, and yet called Wits in ours by men that have no more wit than themselves); and some of these say, that Motion needeth no continued cause at all, any more than non-movere: But when a thing is in motion, it will so continue, because it is its state, without any other continued cause than the motion it self. And so they may as well say (and some do) that when a thing is in Being, it will so continue till it be positively annihilated, without any continued causation of its being. As if esse & existere were nothing more than non esse; and agere were no more noble a mode of Entity than non agere, and so needed no more (that is, no) Cause. (For non esse & non agere need no Cause:) When this distraction is worn out and shamed, the next Age will reproach us for attempting the confutation of it; And yet the Wits of this delirant Age have not the wit to understand a Confutation.
Some of them say, that Spirits cannot move bodies for want of Contact (as Gassendus). Some say, that Matter and Motion are eternal, and that of themselves; As if there were no God but Matter and Motion. Some say, that there is a God who gave matter one push at first, and so set it in that motion by which one body by a knock will move another to the end. And some say, There is no other Intellect; but the wonders of wisdom and order in the World are done by such fortuitous motion.
But Hobbes meeteth the Predeterminants and saith, that the Will is free in that its Act is Volition; but that this Volition is necessitated by superior or natural Causes as much as any motion in a Clock or Watch, and that it is unconceivable that any Act or Mode of Act can be without a necessitating efficient cause. But he differs from them in his consequents, and in the Notion of a Spirit, acknowledging no being but Corporeal.