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The Fourth Treatise - CHAPTER XVIII
In the preceding chapter has been determined how each Moral Virtue
comes from one root, or first principle, that is, a good habit of
choice; and the present text bears upon that, until the part which
begins: "Nobility by right." In this part, then, it proceeds, by a way
that is allowable, to teach that each Virtue mentioned above, taken
singly, or otherwise generally, proceeds from Nobility as an effect
from its cause, and it is founded upon a philosophical proposition,
which says that, when two things are found to meet in one, both these
things must be reduced to a third, or one to the other, as an effect
to a cause: because one thing having stood first and of itself, it
cannot exist except it be from one; and if those two could not be both
the effect of a third, or else one the effect of the other, each would
have had a separate first cause, which is impossible. It says, then,
that
Such virtue shows its good
To others' intellect,
For when two things agree in one,
Producing one effect,
One must from other come,
Or each one from a third,
If each be as each, and more, then one
From the other is inferred.
Where it is to be known that here one does not proceed by an evident
demonstration; as it would be to say that the cold is the generative
principle of water, when we see the clouds; but certainly by a
beautiful and suitable induction. For if there are many laudable
things in us, and one is the principle or first cause of them all,
reason requires each to be reduced to that first cause, which
comprehends more things; and this ought more reasonably to be called
the principle of those things than that which comprehends in itself
less of their principle. For as the trunk of a tree, which contains or
encloses all the other branches, ought to be called the first
beginning and cause of those branches, and not those branches the
cause of the trunk, so Nobility, which comprehends each and every
Virtue (as the cause contains the effect) and many other actions or
operations of ours which are praiseworthy, it ought to be held for
such; that the Virtue may be reduced to it, rather than to the other
third which is in us. Finally it says that the position taken (namely,
that each Moral Virtue comes from one root, and that such Virtue and
Nobility unite in one thing, as is stated above, and that therefore it
is requisite to reduce the one to the other, or both to a third; and
that if the one contains the value of the other and more, from that it
proceeds rather than from the other third) may be considered as a rule
established and set forth, as was before intended.
And thus ends this passage and this present part. _
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