is not at all concerned.  All the discourses of the mathematicians about the squaring of a circle, conic sections, or any other part of mathematics, concern not the existence of any of those figures:  but their demonstrations, which depend on their ideas, are the same, whether there be any square or circle existing in the world or no.  In the same manner, the truth and certainty of moral discourses abstracts from the lives of men, and the existence of those virtues in the world whereof they treat:  nor are Tully’s Offices less true, because there is nobody in the world that exactly practises his rules, and lives up to that pattern of a virtuous man which he has given us, and which existed nowhere when he writ but in idea.  If it be true in speculation, i.e. in idea, that murder deserves death, it will also be true in reality of any action that exists conformable to book iv. that idea of murder.  As for other actions, the truth of that proposition concerns them not.  And thus it is of all other species of things, which have no other essences but those ideas which are in the minds of men.

9.  Nor will it be less true or certain, because Moral Ideas are of our own making and naming.

But it will here be said, that if moral knowledge be placed in the contemplation of our own moral ideas, and those, as other modes, be of our own making, What strange notions will there be of justice and temperance?  What confusion of virtues and vices, if every one may make what ideas of them he pleases?  No confusion or disorder in the things themselves, nor the reasonings about them; no more than (in mathematics) there would be a disturbance in the demonstration, or a change in the properties of figures, and their relations one to another, if a man should make a triangle with four corners, or a trapezium with four right angles:  that is, in plain English, change the names of the figures, and call that by one name, which mathematicians call ordinarily by another.  For, let a man make to himself the idea of a figure with three angles, whereof one is a right one, and call it, if he please, EQUILATERUM or trapezium, or anything else; the properties of, and demonstrations about that idea will be the same as if he called it a rectangular triangle.  I confess the change of the name, by the impropriety of speech, will at first disturb him who knows not what idea it stands for:  but as soon as the figure is drawn, the consequences and demonstrations are plain and clear.  Just the same is it in moral knowledge:  let a man have the idea of taking from others, without their consent, what their honest industry has possessed them of, and call this justice if he please.  He that takes the name here without the idea put to it will be mistaken, by joining another idea of his own to that name:  but strip the idea of that name, or take it such as it is in the speaker’s mind, and the same things will agree to it, as if you called