Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

alike the power and the weakness of human reason, by the subtlety of its speculations on a subject of such overpowering interest. This conviction cannot be ascribed to the policy of the legislator, which was itself the foundation on which his religious enactments were erected, nor yet to the wisdom of the philosopher, which prevailed for ages before philosophy took its rise among mankind. mankind. It was probably a remnant of that early revelation given to our first parents, and which, amid all the changes and distractions of civil society, and all the emigrations of tribes and nations, had never been utterly obscured. But in process of time, when civilization had advanced, men's ideas respecting both the nature of the Deity and the doctrine of a future state had been corrupted; gods were multiplied without number, the li

b The notion of a future existence must be either a deduction of reason, or be derived from revelation, or an impression of instinctive consciousness.

c The treatise, Пepì xóoμou, ascribed to Aristotle, speaks of the Deity as one, and derives the different names of God from the different parts of nature which he regulates. Aristot. IIepì xóoμou, cap. 7.

centious passions of the most licentious men were ascribed to them, and the belief of a future existence was intermingled with the wildest creations of the fancy. fancy. All these notions were at length combined into order by the poet, and sanctioned by the legislator; vices of the most atrocious kind were countenanced by the example of the divinities, and the authority of the laws, and the obligations of mistaken piety and public duty, lent in some cases additional stimulus to the depraved appetites of our nature. Yet notwithstanding this perni

Hesiod and Homer reduced to system the mythology of the Grecian gods. Vid. Herod. lib. ii. c. 53. Brucker, Hist. Crit. Phil. pars ii. lib. i. cap. 1. sect. 26. 31. pp. 407. 423.

In process of time, not only all the operations of external nature were explored for deities, but the most trifling acts of man himself were each under the superintendance of a particular god. Vide a singular chapter, Augustin. Civ. Dei, lib. iv. c. 11.

d It is because the weakness and licentiousness of Jove and the other deities, as described by Homer, furnished a bad example to mankind, that Plato wished to banish poets from his republic. Plato de Repub. lib. iii. Bekker, pars iii. vol. i. p. 107-117.

* The worship of Mylitta, the Babylonian goddess, is frequently cited as a preeminent instance of pagan im

cious influence, derived from the corruptions of the doctrine, society must have been on the whole improved by it; for unless the belief had acted powerfully as a check upon the unruly desires, we cannot conceive why legislators should have taken so much pains to preserve it. When philosophy, at a comparatively late period, arose, it made no claim to the invention of the notion, or to have derived it from the deductions of natural reason. Not only

Plato makes continual and direct allusions

purity; yet the ordinary homage paid to the divinities in Greece and Rome at the sacred festivals, was far more pernicious in its effect upon public morals than the singu-. lar institution above alluded to. Vid. Augustin. Civ. Dei, lib. ii. cap. 4, 5. Herodot. lib. i. cap. 200.

f Thales, the founder of the Ionic school, flourished about six hundred years before Christ, and no regular course of reasoning was brought forward for the soul's immortality, till the time of Plato, two centuries after: Thales taught that water was the first principle, which Aristotle seems to consider as the most ancient philosophical notion, Metaph. lib. i, c. 3, and that God, or Mind, made all things out of water. As he was a native of Phoenicia, Cudworth supposes that he received his two principles from thence, "water, and the Divine Spirit moving on the face of it." Cudworth, Intellect. Syst. book i. cap. i. sect. 22.

66

to tradition as the origin of his knowledge, but earlier writers were avowedly indebted to the same source; all that philosophy did pretend to was, to demonstrate that belief by arguments which was before grounded, we know not how, in the common fears and hopes of mankind. And let those who form an exalted estimate of the intellectual powers, in deciding upon such mysterious subjects, judge with what success the attempt was made, by the jarring and contradictory opinions of the different schools of antiquity. Let those who imagine that the immortality of the soul (I speak not of the resurrection of the body) is discoverable by human sagacity", examine the strong reasons of that unrivalled genius, who has the merit of having taught succeeding disputers to set their arguments in order on the subject. Almost all the disquisitions of Plato are grounded upon the hypothesis of the soul's preexistence. Be

8 Vide Appendix, note A.

h Phædo passim.

i The two principal arguments in the Phædo, the one derived from the notions of the ancients respecting yéveais,

side's confusing himself and his readers with the mazes of verbal sophistry, in which, notwithstanding all its excellencies, Greek philosophy so much abounds, he derives his fancied demonstrations from abstruse theories on the properties of generation and corruption, and the essential and eternal archetypes of things; and even the most plausible and specious are so obscured by

the other from his own philosophical belief concerning the archetypes of things, rest entirely upon such a supposition. As the term generation was relative, and implied its contrary corruption, he infers that the act of being born involves the destruction of a previous existence, from which this present coming to life is a transition. 'Quoroγεῖται ἄρα ἡμῖν καὶ ταύτῃ τοὺς ζῶντας ἐκ τῶν τεθνεώτων γεγοvévaι. Phædo, Bekker, p. 30-34. 2dly. His theory of eternal essences, or ideas, suggests the argument that the notions which the soul has of perfect equality, perfect good, &c. which are never found in sensible objects, prove that it must have existed in a previous state, its present knowledge being nothing more than reminiscence. The discussion derives an incidental value, from shewing that Plato had a considerable acquaintance with the law of association. Plato, Bekker, pars ii. vol. iii. pp. 35-44.

Not one of the ancient philosophers before Christianity held the soul's immortality, without holding the preexistence of souls. They believed also the immortality and preexistence of brutes. Cudworth, Intellect. Syst. book i. cap. 1. sect. 31, 32.

« AnteriorContinuar »