‘Subject to names is whatsoever can enter into, or be considered in an account, and be added one thing to another to make a sum, or subtracted one from another and leave a remainder. The Latins called accounts of money _rationes_, and accounting, _ratiocinatio_, and that which we in bills or books of accounts call _items_, they call _nomina_, or names; and thence it seems to proceed that they extended the word _ratio_ to the faculty of reckoning in all other things. The Greeks have but one word, λογος for both speech and reason, not that they thought there was no speech without reason, but no reason without speech: and the act of reasoning they call syllogism, which signifieth summing up (or putting together) the consequences of one saying to another. For reason is nothing but reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting) of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts; I say marking them, when we reckon by ourselves, and signifying them, when we demonstrate or approve our reckonings to other men. ‘And as in arithmetic, unpractised men must, and professors themselves may, often err, and cast up false, so also in any other subject of reasoning, the ablest, most attentive, and most practised men may deceive themselves, and infer false conclusions: not but that reason itself is always right reason, as well as arithmetic is a certain and infallible art. But no one man’s reason, nor the reason of any number of men makes the certainty: no more than an account is therefore well cast up, because a great many men have unanimously approved it. And, therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord set up for right reason the reason of some arbitrator or judge, so it is in all debates of what kind soever: and when men that think themselves wiser than all others, clamour and demand right reason for judge, yet seek no more but that things should be determined by no other men’s reason but their own, it is as intolerable in the society of men as it is in play, after trump is turned, to use for trump on every occasion that suit whereof they have most in their hand. For they do nothing else that will have every of their passions, as it comes to bear sway in them, to be taken for right reason, and that in their own controversies, betraying their want of right reason by the claim they lay to it.