Essay on the Nature and Obligations of Virtue (1744)

In these inquiries the author endeavors to avoid as much as possible of all abstracted reasonings, and, if ever he is betrayed into them, he hopes the reader will see that it is by the necessity of examination what others have wrote and not by his own inclination. He would rather instruct the reader, than to amuse and perplex him. Matters of fact, which he meets with every day in common life, will be more intelligible than refined disputation; and an appeal to the general sense and judgment of mankind will be more convincing that the subtly of metaphysics. Due to the age and scarcity of the original we reproduced, some pages may be spotty, faded or difficult to read. Old English text.