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APPEALS to foreign judicatures first came in request
among the Grecians out of their distrust of one another's
justice, they deeming it as requisite to fetch justice from
abroad, as any other necessary commodity which was not
of their own growth. And is it not even so that philosophers, by reason of dissensions amongst themselves, have
in the decision of some questions appealed to the nature
of irrational beings, as to a strange city, and have submitted the final determination of such questions to the affections or to the dispositions of brutes, as being unbiassed and
not corrupted by bribes? Or else this is the general complaint of human frailty, that while we differ about the
most necessary and the greatest things, we consult horses,
dogs, and birds, how we should marry, beget children, and
bring them up; and, as if the evidence of Nature in ourselves were not to be trusted, we appeal to the dispositions
and affections of brute beasts, and testify against the manifold transgressions of our own lives, intimating how at
the very first and in the first things we are confounded and
disturbed. For Nature conserves the propriety in them
pure, unmixed, and simple; but in men, the mixture of
ascititious opinions and judgments (as oil is served by the
druggists) alters the properties, and does not preserve what
is their peculiar. Nor need we wonder if irrational animals
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follow Nature more than rational; for plants do it
more than animals, for they have neither imagination nor
passion for what is not according to Nature, but are bound
in chains, and ever go that one way that Nature leads
them. Brutes do little regard gentleness, wit, or liberty;
they have indeed the use of irrational incitements and appetites, which put them upon wandering and running
about,—but seldom far, for they seem to lie at the anchor
of Nature, who guides them in the right way (as it were)
by bit and bridle. But reason, the lord and master in man,
finds sometimes one turning, sometimes another; but in all
its wanderings leaves no mark or footstep of Nature.
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