us.

JUPITER IS ALL THINGS.

55

What has been said of the gods of the Greeks may be also said of the deities of Rome. The Romans, too, made God and nature one-finite on the human side, infinite on the divine side. Their mythology, like their literature, was but a feeble echo of the Greek. Their poets and philosophers only repeat what was said before. Their Jupiter is the Greek Zeus; he is primarily the heavens, or that portion of the visible universe which appears to This truth is petrified into the Roman language. Bad weather is "bad Jupiter;" to be in the open air is to be "under Jupiter;" and to be out in the cold is to be under "frigid Jupiter." "Behold," says Ennius, "the clear sky, which all men invoke as Jupiter." And Cato says, "His seat is heaven, earth, and ocean. Wheresoever we move, wheresoever we go, whatever we see, that is Jupiter." Virgil, in imitation of the Greek poet, says, "Let us begin with Jupiter; all things are full of Jupiter." In another place he describes "the prone descending showers," as the omnipotent Father coming down into the bosom of His glad spouse. The powers of nature personified; that is Greek Polytheism. Nature in its infinitude, embracing the whole conceivable assemblage of being in which mind is pre-eminently manifest; that is Greek Monotheism.

Epirus, or transplanted from the shrines of Asia. Poetry and philosophy served only to give different forms of expression to the same immemorial sentiment, which, through the treatment of art receding from it, universally lost in intellectual compass what it gained in distinctness. The comprehensiveness of the original feeling was preserved only in the most ancient symbols, such as the Scarabaeus pointing to the great Dodonaan parent and artificer, as the all-generating ungenerated cause, and the triform or triophthalmic statues of Argolis and Corinth exhibiting his triple dominion over time and space. And if Zeus was Triopian or Triophthalmic, so also was his son or correlative, Apollo. Apollo, again, was akin to Nomian Pan the companion of Rhea and foster brother of Zeus. In the praise of Zeus every element and every deity are united. His mythical brethren the autocrats of the sun and shade were felt to be repetitions of himself. It is not without reason that Arcadia and many other places disputed with Crete the honor of his birth for the seemingly new deity was only a reproduction of the Pelasgic or Lycaean Pantheism in a new form.-Mackay's Progress.

The chief authorities for this chapter are Creuzer and Bunsen. On the Persian religion; the Latin work of Hyde; Spiegels' translation of the Zend Avesta, and Framjee's volume, "The Parsees, &c." On the Egyptian religion some things are taken from Dr. Prichard, and several passages on mythology in general, and its interpretation are from Cudworth.

CHAPTER III.

GREEK PHILOSOPHY.

ALL philosophy is a seeking after God-a reiteration of the

66

cry of the patriarch, "Ŏ that I knew where I might find Him." And the all but universal answer has been, "He is not far from any one of us." This is pre-eminently true of the philosophy of the Greeks in all its stages, and in nearly all its schools.

As to the early Greek philosophers, there are two great difficulties. First, their own writings are not extant, so that the materials are both scanty and uncertain. Secondly, these materials have been used for the most opposite interpretations. Cicero, the Neo-Platonists, and the Christian Fathers hold the early Greek philosophers to have been pure Theists. They assumed rightly, unconscious indeed that it was an assumption; that the fact of these old enquirers after truth, being philosophers, was no argument, for their being irreligious, some of them believed in the gods of the Mythology, and some of them did not; but they were seeking after the One who was yet greater than all the gods. Aristotle, to whom we are chiefly indebted for the materials respecting them, refers their speculations to the old "Theologies," intimating that these are to guide us in the interpretation of their cosmogonies. And this is in the order of things: religion comes before philosophy, men bow in reverence before the unseen, long before it becomes the subject of reason. The view which makes the early Greek philosophers advocates of positive science, without reference to religion, is an anachronism in the history of philosophy. It places them in another age of the world than that in which they lived, and ignores the natural religiousness of man.*

THE IONICS In the fifth century, before the Christian era, lived Thales of Miletus, a lover of knowledge, and a seeker after

*This is the view taken by Mr. Lewes in his Biographical History of Philosophy, but it is contradicted by all we know of the history of mind. Man has religious feelings about nature long before he studies it scientifically.

wisdom. Ile visited Egypt, at that time the sacred dwelling of science-sacred indeed, for out of religion Egyptian wisdom had arisen. The priests' lips kept knowledge-knowledge of all kinds. Thales probably learned there of the "unknown Darkness" which produced the "water and sand" from which all things were made. He may have compared this with what we read in Homer and Hesiod about the origin of all things from Oceanus and Tethys and hence the thought arose 66 water is the first principle of creation."* Perhaps he made experiments on matter. A rude chemist he must indeed have been, yet it was within his reach to know that material forms are fleeting and unsubstantial. He felt that at the foundation of nature there was a unity in which all things were one, a substance of which all partook-a material capable of being formed into suns and stars, and worlds, trees, animals, and men, an original element in which all the elements had their beginning; and what more likely than water to be this original element? It is the blood of nature, by it all things live, without it all die. He took a

material element for the original unity, what he meant more we cannot tell. Did he find that he could go no farther? Did he make no distinction between the material and the spiritual?— We cannot answer. Aristotle says that Thales believed "all things were full of gods." Laertius, that he called God "the oldest of all things, because He was uncreated," and Cicero, that he held" water to be the beginning of things, but that God was the mind which created things out of the water."

*Water is a Protean quality, and therefore was thought the original Hyle; mythically Thetis, Nereus, Proteus. Tradition emanates from the centre of the alluvial plains of Babylon and Egypt. The opinion of the Ionian sage is from the Egyptians who recognized a deity in moisture and identified the great and good Osiris with the Nile.-Mackay's Progress of the Intellect.

The inherent life with which the Ionics endowed the universal element was but the ensouled world of Pantheism-a re-union of the elements which poetry had parted and personified.-Ibid.

The reason why Thales concluded that water was the first of all things is thus given by Plutarch:-First, because natural seed, the principle of all things, is moist; whence it is highly probable that moisture is also the principle of all other things. Secondly, because all kinds of plants are nourished by moisture, without which they wither and decay. And thirdly, because fire, even the sun itself aud the stars, are nourished and supported by vapours proceeding from water, and, consequently, the whole world consists of the same.

According to Diogenes Laertius, Museus was the first who taught that all things were created of one matter, and would be dissolved into the same matter again.

"Our ancestors 99

says Aristotle," and men of great antiquity have left us a tradition, involved in fable, that these first essences are gods, and that the Divinity comprehends the whole of nature."

58

ANAXIMANDER AND ANAXIMENES.

"But why, "asked Thales' disciple Anaximander, "should the preference be given to water over the other elements? That which you assume to be the ground of all things is finite. By thus placing it above the others, by making it the one thing of the universe, you make it infinite. It then ceases to be Why not at once call the one substance the infinite,' that which is unlimited, eternal, unconditioned." A universe of opinion has arisen about the meaning of Anaximander's "infinite." Was it material? was it incorporeal?-we only know that He believed in an "infinite" in which all beings have their being.*

Anaximander's successor, Anaximenes, thought it might be determined what that is which is infinite. It was not water, that was too gross, too material. Was there no existence

conceivable in thought, nor perceptible by sense, that appeared infinite-no essence that is in all things-and yet is not any one of them? There is that which we call breath, life, soul. It pervades all. It permeates all. It penetrates all. Is not that "the infinite ?" We breathe it. We live in it. It is the universal soul. This may have been what Anaximenes meant; we do not know for certainty. But this is the interpretation of the "air" by Anaximenes' disciple, Diogenes of Apollonia. He thought the Deity a divine breath, air, or spirit, endowed with the attributes of wisdom and intelligence, and pervading the universe of being. These philosophers begin with enquiries that belong apparently to natural philosophy, but they do not stop there; they cannot-they go beyond the bounds of the finite and the phenomenal.

THE ITALICS.-The Ionics began their search for the truth. of the universe from external nature. The Italics began with mathematics. The former declared that all was one-one something, one infinite; they could not explain it further. Pythagoras said it is simply one. What he meant is not easy to determine. In Persiat he may have learned of the nameless One, who created Ormuzd and Ahriman. Was not this a Monad creating a Dyad?

* Aristotle and Plutarch suppose Anaximander's “infinite ; to have been material-the original or first matter out of which all things were made. Ritter on the other hand says, that Anaximander's "infinite" was not a mere multiplicity of primary material elements but an immortal and imperishable unity-an ever producing energy.

It is only conjecture that Pythagoras ever was in Persia. There is no contemporary evidence that the early Greek philosophers learned anything from the East.

Did not One thus become the father of the world, and two its mother? What can be the essence of all things but numbers? Do not all come from the original Unity? As the number one is the foundation of the manifold operations of arithmetic. and geometry, so the divine One-the universal Soul-is the foundation of the world's manifoldness. The universe is a reflection of the Divine. It is a "living arithmetic, a realized geometry." Because of its beauty, and harmony, and everlasting order, it is called the Kosmos.

But the Monad of Pythagoras; was it a mind or simply an original something, out of which the all was evolved? If the Monad was not the active principle, it is identical with Chaos, and the Dyad contained in it becomes the active power which causes the harmonious world-development to arise from the Chaos. On this supposition the Pythagorean doctrine of the Deity could have risen no higher than that of an evolution or emanation out of Chaos-an original substance from which has proceeded the divine world-soul. But if, as Tenneman thinks, the Pythagorean Monad was the active principle, the divine Being, then God is above and before Chaos. He is mind, and the producer, not the product of the material; while matter is only God posited on one side, and subject to Him. That the latter was the true Pythagorean doctrine is probable from its agreement with the fragments of Philolaus, an old philosopher of the school of Pythagoras. The essence of things is regarded as arising out of two grand elements-the limiting or limit, and the unlimited. Philolaus shows how this takes place through the the opposition of the one and the many. The one was unity to many, and the many, as such was the indefinite Dyad, through the limitation given by the unity, and through the participation in the unity. But now that the essences of things consist of these two original elements, consequently the principles, or original elements of numbers, must be also the principles of things themselves. The Pythagoreans found the reason of the necessity in this, that only under this condition could things be an object of human knowledge; for neither the one nor the many, in the abstract, can be known by man. The produced alone is cognizable to the human understanding. The union of the limited and the unlimited form a Kosmos. This Kosmos implies a principle of harmony, and this harmony a first cause or author, who is truly and simply God. "Were there not," says Professor Böckh, "above the original one and many, the limit and the unlimited, a