(_a_) “If I did not know what deliberation was, I should be little
relieved in my knowledge by this description. Sometimes he makes it to
be a consideration, or an act of the understanding, sometimes an
imagination, or an act of the fancy, &c. So he makes it I know not
what.” If the Bishop had observed what he does himself, when he
deliberates, reasons, understands, or imagines, he would have known what
to make of all that I have said in this Number. He would have known that
consideration, understanding, reason, and all the passions of the mind,
are imaginations. That to consider a thing, is to imagine it; that to
understand a thing, is to imagine it; that to hope and fear, are to
imagine the things hoped for and feared. The difference between them is,
that when we imagine the consequence of anything, we are said to
consider that thing; and when we have imagined anything from a sign, and
especially from those signs we call names, we are said to understand his
meaning that maketh the sign; and when we reason, we imagine the
consequence of affirmations and negations joined together; and when we
hope or fear, we imagine things good or hurtful to ourselves: insomuch
as all these are but imaginations diversely named from different
circumstances: as any man may perceive as easily as he can look into his
own thoughts. But to him that thinketh not himself upon the things
whereof, but upon the words wherewith he speaketh, and taketh those
words on trust from puzzled Schoolmen, it is not only hard, but
impossible to be known. And this is the reason that maketh him say, I
make deliberation he knows not what. But how is deliberation defined by
him? “It is”, saith he, “an inquiry made by reason, whether this or that
definitely considered, be a good and fit means; or indefinitely, what
are good and fit means to be chosen for attaining some wished end.” If
it were not his custom to say, the understanding understandeth, the will
willeth, and so of the rest of the faculties, I should have believed
that when he says deliberation is an inquiry made by reason, he meaneth
an inquiry made by the man that reasoneth; for so it will be sense. But
the reason which a man useth in deliberation, being the same thing that
is called deliberation, his definition that deliberation is an inquiry
made by reason, is no more than if he had said, deliberation is an
inquiry made by deliberation; a definition good enough to be made by a
Schoolman. Nor is the rest of the definition altogether as it should be;
for there is no such thing as an “indefinite consideration of what are
good and fit means”; but a man imagining first one thing, then another,
considereth them successively and singly each one, whether it conduceth
to his ends or not.