king of men's minds, and a stricter
examination of those motives and views they are turned by, I have found
reason somewhat to alter the thoughts I formerly had concerning that
which gives the last determination to the Will in all voluntary actions.
This I cannot forbear to acknowledge to the world with as much freedom
and readiness; as I at first published what then seemed to me to be
right; thinking myself more concerned to quit and renounce any opinion
of my own, than oppose that of another, when truth appears against it.
For it is truth alone I seek, and that will always be welcome to me,
when or from whencesoever it comes. But what forwardness soever I have
to resign any opinion I have, or to recede from anything I have writ,
upon the first evidence of any error in it; yet this I must own, that I
have not had the good luck to receive any light from those exceptions
I have met with in print against any part of my book, nor have, from
anything that has been urged against it, found reason to alter my sense
in any of the points that have been questioned. Whether the subject I
have in hand requires often more thought and attention than cursory
readers, at least such as are prepossessed, are willing to allow; or
whether any obscurity in my expressions casts a cloud over it, and
these notions are made difficult to others' apprehensions in my way of
treating them; so it is, that my meaning, I find, is often mistaken, and
I have not the good luck to be everywhere rightly understood.

Of this the ingenious author of the Discourse Concerning the Nature of
Man has given me a late instance, to mention no other. For the civility
of his expressions, and the candour that belongs to his order, forbid me
to think that he would have closed his Preface with an insinuation, as
if in what I had said, Book II. ch. xxvii, concerning the third rule
which men refer their actions to, I went about to make virtue vice and
vice virtue, unless he had mistaken my meaning; which he could not have
done if he had given himself the trouble to consider what the argument
was I was then upon, and what was the chief design of that chapter,
plainly enough set down in the fourth section and those following. For
I was there not laying down moral rules, but showing the original and
nature of moral ideas, and enumerating the rules men make use of in
moral relations, whether these rules were true or false: and pursuant
thereto I tell what is everywhere called v