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HISTORY

OF THE

INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT

OF

EUROPE.

By JOHN WILLIAM DRAPER, M.D., LL.D.,

Professor of Chemistry in the University of New York, Author of a
"Treatise on Human Physiology," "Civil Policy of America,"
"History of the American Civil War," &c.

REVISED EDITION, IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

NEW YORK:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,
FRANKLIN SQUARE.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

PREFACE.

At the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Oxford in 1860, I read an abstract of the physiological argument contained in this work respecting the mental progress of Europe, reserving the historical evidence for subsequent publication.

This work contains that evidence. It is intended as the completion of my treatise on Human Physiology, in which man was considered as an individual. In this he is considered in his social relation.

But the reader will also find, I think, that it is a history of the progress of ideas and opinions from a point of view heretofore almost entirely neglected. There are two methods of dealing with philosophical questions—the literary and the scientific. Many things which in a purely literary treatment of the subject remain in the background, spontaneously assume a more striking position when their scientific relations are considered. It is the latter method that I have used.

Social advancement is as completely under the control of natural law as is bodily growth. The life of an individual is a miniature of the life of a nation. These propositions it is the special object of this book to demonstrate.

No one, I believe, has hitherto undertaken the labour of arranging the evidence offered by the intellectual history of Europe in accordance with physiological principles, so as to illustrate the orderly progress of civilization, or collected the facts furnished by other branches of science with a view of enabling us to recognize clearly the conditions under which that progress takes place. This philosophical deficiency I have endeavoured in the following pages to supply.

Seen thus through the medium of physiology, history presents a new aspect to us. We gain a more just and thorough appreciation of the thoughts and motives of men in successive ages of the world.

In the Preface to the second edition of my Physiology, published in 1858, it was mentioned that this work was at that time written. The changes that have been since made in it have been chiefly with a view of condensing it. The discussion of several scientific questions, such as that of the origin of species, which have recently attracted public attention so strongly, has, however remained untouched, the principles offered being the same as presented in the former work in 1856.

New York, 1861.

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION.

Many reprints of this work having been issued, and translations published in various foreign languages, French, German, Russian, Polish, Servian, &c., I have been induced to revise it carefully, and to make additions wherever they seemed to be desirable. I therefore hope that it will commend itself to the continued approval of the public.

November, 1875.

THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF
EUROPE.

CHAPTER I.

ON THE GOVERNMENT OF NATURE BY LAW.

The subject of this Work proposed.—Its difficulty.

Gradual Acquisition of the Idea of Natural Government by Law.—Eventually sustained by Astronomical, Meteorological, and Physiological Discoveries.—Illustrations from Kepler's Laws, the Trade-winds, Migrations of Birds, Balancing of Vegetable and Animal Life, Variation of Species and their Permanence.

Individual Man is an Emblem of Communities, Nations, and Universal Humanity.—They exhibit Epochs of Life like his, and, like him are under the Control of Physical Conditions, and therefore of Law.

Plan of this Work.—The Intellectual History of Greece.—Its Five characteristic Ages.—European Intellectual History.

Grandeur of the Doctrine that the World is governed by Law.

The subject proposed.

I intend, in this work, to consider in what manner the advancement of Europe in civilization has taken place, to ascertain how far its progress has been fortuitous, and how far determined by primordial law.

Does the procession of nations in time, like the erratic phantasm of a dream, go forward without reason or order? or, is there a predetermined, a solemn march, in which all must join, ever moving, ever resistlessly advancing, encountering and enduring an inevitable succession of events?

In a philosophical examination of the intellectual and political history of nations, an answer to these questions is to be found. But how difficult it is to master the mass of facts necessary to be collected, to handle so great an accumulation, to place it in the clearest point of view; how difficult it is to select correctly the representative Its difficulty and grandeur. men, to produce them in the proper scenes, and to conduct successfully so grand and complicated a drama as that of European life! Though in one sense the subject offers itself as a scientific problem, and in that manner alone I have to deal with it; in another it swells into a noble epic—the life of humanity, its warfare and repose, its object and its end.

Man is the archetype of society. Individual development is the model of social progress.

Some have asserted that human affairs are altogether determined by the voluntary action of men, some that the Providence of God directs us in every step, some that all events are fixed by Destiny. It is for us to ascertain how far each of these affirmations is true.

Individual life of a mixed kind.

The life of individual man is of a mixed nature. In part he submits to the free-will impulses of himself and others, in part he is under the inexorable dominion of law. He insensibly changes his estimate of the relative power of each of these influences as he passes through successive stages. In the confidence of youth he imagines that very much is under his control, in the disappointment of old age very little. As time wears on, and the delusions of early imagination vanish away, he learns to correct his sanguine views, and prescribes a narrower boundary for the things he expects to obtain. The realities of life undeceive him at last, and there steals over the evening of his days an unwelcome conviction of the vanity of human hopes. The things he has secured are not the things he expected. He sees that a Supreme Power has been using him for unknown ends, that he was brought into the world without his own knowledge, and is departing from it against his own will.

It foreshadows social life.

Whoever has made the physical and intellectual history of individual man his study, will be prepared to admit in what a surprising manner it foreshadows social history. The equilibrium and movement of humanity are altogether physiological phenomena. Yet not without hesitation may such an opinion be frankly avowed, since it is offensive to the pride, and to many of the prejudices and interests of our age. An author who has been disposed to devote many years to the labour of illustrating this topic, has need of the earnest support of all who prize the truth; and, considering the extent and profundity of his subject, his work, at the best, must be very imperfect, requiring all the forbearance, and even the generosity of criticism.

First opinions of savage life. In the intellectual infancy of a savage state, Man transfers to Nature his conceptions of himself, and, considering that every thing he does is determined by his own pleasure, regards all passing events as depending on the arbitrary volition of a superior but invisible power. He gives to the world a constitution like his own. His tendency is necessarily to superstition. Whatever is strange, or powerful, or vast, impresses his imagination with dread. Such objects are only the outward manifestations of an indwelling spirit, and therefore worthy of his veneration.

After Reason, aided by Experience, has led him forth from these delusions as respects surrounding things, he still clings to his original ideas as respects objects far removed. In the distance and irresistible motions of the stars he finds arguments for the supernatural, and gives to each of those shining bodies an abiding and controlling genius. The mental phase through which he is passing permits him to believe in the exercise of planetary influences on himself.

Fetichism displaced by star-worship.

But as reason led him forth from fetichism, so in due time it again leads him forth from star-worship. Perhaps not without regret does he abandon the mythological forms he has created; for, long after he has ascertained that the planets are nothing more than shining points, without any perceptible influence on him, he still venerates the genii once supposed to vivify them, perhaps even he exalts them into immortal gods.

Philosophically speaking, he is exchanging by ascending degrees his primitive doctrine of arbitrary volition for the doctrine of law. As the fall of a stone, the flowing of a river, the movement of a shadow, the rustling of a leaf, have been traced to physical causes, to like causes at last are traced the revolutions of the stars. In events and scenes continually increasing in greatness and grandeur, The idea of government by law. he is detecting the dominion of law. The goblins, and genii, and gods who successively extorted his fear and veneration, who determined events by their fitful passions or whims, are at last displaced by the noble conception of one Almighty Being, who rules the universe according to reason, and therefore according to law.

Its application to the solar system.

In this manner the doctrine of government by law is extended, until at last it embraces all natural events. It was thus that, hardly two centuries ago, that doctrine gathered immense force from the discovery of Newton that Kepler's laws, under which the movements of the planetary bodies are executed, issue as a mathematical necessity from a very simple material condition, and that the complicated motions of the solar system cannot be other than they are. Few of those who read in the beautiful geometry of the 'Principia' the demonstration of this fact, saw the imposing philosophical consequences which must inevitably follow this scientific discovery. And now the investigation of the aspect of the skies in past ages, and all predictions of its future, rest essentially upon the principle that no arbitrary volition ever intervenes, the gigantic mechanism moving impassively in accordance with a mathematical law.

And to terrestrial events.

And so upon the earth, the more perfectly we understand the causes of present events, the more plainly are they seen to be the consequences of physical conditions, and therefore the results of law. To allude to one example out of many that might be considered, the winds, how proverbially inconstant, who can tell whence they come or whither they go! If any thing bears the fitful character of arbitrary volition, surely it is these. But we deceive ourselves in imagining that atmospheric events are fortuitous. Where shall a line be drawn between that eternal trade-wind, which, originating in well-understood physical causes, sweeps, like the breath of Destiny, slowly, and solemnly, and everlastingly over the Pacific Ocean, and the variable gusts into which it degenerates in more northerly and southerly regions—gusts which seem to come without any cause, and to pass away without leaving any trace? In what latitude is it that the domain of the physical ends, and that of the supernatural begins?

All mundane events are the results of the operation of law. Every movement in the skies or upon the earth proclaims to us that the universe is under government.

But if we admit that this is the case, from the mote that floats in the sunbeam to multiple stars revolving round each other, are we willing to carry our principles to their consequences, and recognise a like operation of law among living as among lifeless things, in the organic as well as the inorganic world? What testimony does physiology offer on this point?

And to the organic world.

Physiology, in its progress, has passed through the same phases as physics. Living beings have been considered as beyond the power of external influences, and, conspicuously among them, Man has been affirmed to be independent of the forces that rule the world in which he lives. Besides that immaterial principle, the soul, which distinguishes him from all his animated companions, and makes him a moral and responsible being, he has been feigned, like them, to possess another immaterial principle, the vital agent, which, in a way of its own, carries forward all the various operations in his economy.

Especially to man.

But when it was discovered that the heart of man is constructed upon the recognised rules of hydraulics, and with its great tubes is furnished with common mechanical contrivances, valves; when it was discovered that the eye has been arranged on the most refined principles of optics, its cornea, and humours, and lens properly converging the rays to form an image—its iris, like the diaphragm of a telescope or microscope, shutting out stray light, and also regulating the quantity admitted; when it was discovered that the ear is furnished with the means of dealing with the three characteristics of sound—its tympanum for intensity, its cochlea for pitch, its semicircular canals for quality; when it was seen that the air brought into the great air-passages by the descent of the diaphragm, calling into play atmospheric pressure, is conveyed upon physical principles into the ultimate cells of the lungs, and thence into the blood, producing chemical changes throughout the system, disengaging heat, and permitting all the functions of organic life to go on; when these facts and very many others of a like kind were brought into prominence by modern physiology, it obviously became necessary to admit that animated beings do not constitute the exception once supposed, and that organic operations are the result of physical agencies.

If thus, in the recesses of the individual economy, these natural agents bear sway, must they not operate in the social economy too?

In social as well as individual life.

Has the great shadeless desert nothing to do with the habits of the nomade tribes who pitch their tents upon it—the fertile plain no connection with flocks and pastoral life—the mountain fastnesses with the courage that has so often defended them—the sea with habits of adventure? Indeed, do not all our expectations of the stability of social institutions rest upon our belief in the stability of surrounding physical conditions? From the time of Bodin, who nearly three hundred years ago published his work 'De Republica,' these principles have been well recognized: that the laws of Nature cannot be subordinated to the will of Man, and that government must be adapted to climate. It was these things which led him to the conclusion that force is best resorted to for northern nations, reason for the middle, and superstition for the southern.

Effects of the seasons on animals and plants.

In the month of March the sun crosses the equator, dispensing his rays more abundantly over our northern hemisphere. Following in his train, a wave of verdure expands towards the pole. The luxuriance is in proportion to the local brilliancy. The animal world is also affected. Pressed forward, or solicited onward by the warmth, the birds of passage commence their annual migration, keeping pace with the developing vegetation beneath. As summer declines, this orderly advance of light and life is followed by an orderly retreat, and in its turn the southern hemisphere presents the same glorious phenomenon. Once every year the life of the earth pulsates; now there is an abounding vitality, now a desolation. But what is the cause of all this? It is only mechanical. The earth's axis of rotation is inclined to the plane of her orbit of revolution round the sun.

Let that wonderful phenomenon and its explanation be a lesson to us; let it profoundly impress us with the importance of physical agents and physical laws. They intervene in the life and death of man personally and socially. External events become interwoven in our constitution; their periodicities create periodicities in us. Day and night are incorporated in our waking and sleeping; summer and winter compel us to exhibit cycles in our life.

Individual existence depends on physical conditions.

They who have paid attention to the subject have long ago ascertained that the possibility of human existence on the earth depends on conditions altogether of a material kind. Since it is only within a narrow range of temperature that life can be maintained, it is needful that our planet should be at a definite mean distance from the source of light and heat, the sun; and that the form of her orbit should be so little eccentric as to approach closely to a circle. If her mass were larger or less than it is, the weight of all living and lifeless things on her surface would no longer be the same; but absolute weight is one of the primary elements of organic construction. A change in the time of her diurnal rotation, as affecting the length of the day and night, must at once be followed by a corresponding modification of the periodicities of the nervous system of animals; a change in her orbitual translation round the sun, as determining the duration of the year, would, in like manner, give rise to a marked effect. If the year were shorter, we should live faster and die sooner.

Animal and vegetable life interbalanced by material conditions.

In the present economy of our globe, natural agents are relied upon as the means of regulation and of government. Through heat, the distribution and arrangement of the vegetable tribes are accomplished; through their mutual relations with the atmospheric air, plants and animals are interbalanced, and neither permitted to obtain a superiority. Considering the magnitude of this condition, and its necessity to general life, it might seem worthy of incessant Divine intervention, yet it is in fact accomplished automatically.

Of past organic history the same remark may be made. The condensation of carbon from the air, and its inclusion in the strata, constitute the chief epoch in the organic And also appearances and extinctions determined. life of the earth, giving a possibility for the appearance of the hot-blooded and more intellectual animal tribes. That great event was occasioned by the influence of the rays of the sun. And as such influences have thus been connected with the appearance of organisms, so likewise have they been concerned in the removal. Of the myriads of species which have become extinct, doubtless every one has passed away through the advent of material conditions incompatible with its continuance. Even now, a fall of half-a-dozen degrees in the mean temperature of any latitude would occasion the vanishing of the forms of warmer climates, and the advent of those of the colder. An obscuration of the rays of the sun for a few years would compel a redistribution of plants and animals all over the earth; many would totally disappear, and everywhere new comers would be seen.

Permanence of organisms due to immobility of external conditions.

The permanence of organic forms is altogether dependent on the invariability of the material conditions under which they live. Any variation therein, no matter how insignificant it might be, would be forthwith followed by a corresponding variation in the form. The present invariability of the world of organization is the direct consequence of the physical equilibrium, and so it will continue as long as the mean temperature, the annual supply of light, the composition of the air, the distribution of water, oceanic and atmospheric currents, and other such agencies remain unaltered; but if any one of these, or of a hundred other incidents that might be mentioned, should suffer modification, in an instant the fanciful doctrine of the immutability of species would be brought to its true value. The organic world appears to be in repose, because natural influences have reached an equilibrium. A marble may remain for ever motionless upon a level table; but let the surface be a little inclined, and the marble will quickly run off. What should we say of him, who, contemplating it in its state of rest, asserted that it was impossible for it ever to move?

They who can see no difference between the race-horse and the Shetland pony, the bantam and the Shanghai fowl, the greyhound and the poodle dog, who altogether deny that impressions can be made on species, and see in the long succession of extinct forms, the ancient existence of which they must acknowledge, the evidences of a continuous and Orderly sequence of conditions is followed by orderly organic changes. creative intervention, forget that mundane effects observe definite sequences, event following event in the necessity of the case, and thus constituting a chain, each link of which hangs on a preceding, and holds a succeeding one. Physical influences thus following one another, and bearing to each other the inter-relation of cause and effect, stand in their totality to the whole organic world as causes, it representing the effect, and the order of succession existing among them is perpetuated or embodied in it. Thus, in those ancient times to which we have referred, the sunlight acting on the leaves of plants disturbed the chemical constitution of the atmosphere, gave rise to the accumulation of a more energetic element therein, diminished the mechanical pressure, and changed the rate of evaporation from the sea, a series of events following one another so necessarily that we foresee their order, and, in their turn, making an impression on the vegetable and animal economy. The natural influences, thus varying in an orderly way, controlled botanical events, and made them change correspondingly. The orderly procedure of the one must be imitated in the orderly procedure of the other. And the same holds good in the animal kingdom; the recognized variation in the material conditions is copied in the organic effects, in vigour of motion, energy of life, intellectual power.

When, therefore, we notice such orderly successions, we must not at once assign them to a direct intervention, the issue of wise predeterminations of a voluntary agent; we must first satisfy ourselves how far they are dependent on mundane or material conditions, occurring in a definite and necessary series, ever bearing in mind the important principle that an orderly sequence of inorganic events necessarily involves an orderly and corresponding progression of organic life.

Universal control of physical agents over organisms.

To this doctrine of the control of physical agencies over organic forms I acknowledge no exception, not even in the case of man. The varied aspects he presents in different countries are the necessary consequences of those influences.

He who advocates the doctrine of the unity of the human race is plainly forced to the admission of the absolute control of such agents over the organization of man, since the originally-created type has been brought to exhibit very different aspects in different parts of the world, apparently in accordance with the climate and other purely material circumstances. To those circumstances it is scarcely necessary to add manner of life, for that itself The case of man. arises from them. The doctrine of unity demands as its essential postulate an admission of the paramount control of physical agents over the human aspect and organization, else how could it be that, proceeding from the same stock, all shades of complexion in the skin, and variety in the form of the skull, should have arisen? Experience assures us that these are changes assumed only by slow degrees, and not with abruptness; they come as a cumulative effect. They plainly enforce the doctrine that national type is not to be regarded as a definite or final thing, a seeming immobility in this particular being due to the attainment of a correspondence with the conditions to which the type is exposed. Let those conditions be changed, and it begins forthwith to change too. I repeat it, therefore, that he who receives the doctrine of the unity of the human race, must also accept, in view of the present state of humanity on various parts of the surface of our planet, its necessary postulate, the complete control of physical agents, whether natural, or arising artificially from the arts of civilization and the secular progress of nations toward a correspondence with the conditions to which they are exposed.

To the same conclusion also must he be brought who advocates the origin of different races from different centres. It comes to the same thing, whichever of those doctrines we adopt. Each brings us to the admission of the transitory nature of typical forms, to their transmutations and extinctions.

Human variations.

Variations in the aspect of men are best seen when an examination is made of nations arranged in a northerly and southerly direction; the result is such as would ensue to an emigrant passing slowly along a meridional track; but the case would be quite different if the movement were along a parallel of latitude. In this latter direction the variations of climate are far less marked, and depend much more on geographical than on astronomical causes. In emigrations of this kind there is never that rapid change of aspect, complexion, and intellectual power which must occur in the other. Thus, though the mean temperature of Europe increases from Poland to France, chiefly through the influence of the great Atlantic current transferring heat from the Gulf of Mexico and tropical ocean, that rise is far less than would be encountered on passing through the same distance to the south. By the arts of civilization man can much more easily avoid the difficulties arising from variations along a parallel of latitude than those upon a meridian, for the simple reason that in that case those variations are less.

Their political result.

But it is not only complexion, development of the brain, and, therefore, intellectual power, which are thus affected. With difference of climate there must be differences of manners and customs, that is, differences in the modes of civilization. These are facts which deserve our most serious attention, since such differences are inevitably connected with political results. If homogeneousness be an element of strength, an empire that lies east and west must be more powerful than one that lies north and south. I cannot but think that this was no inconsiderable cause of the greatness and permanence of Rome and that it lightened the task of the emperors, often hard enough, in government. There is a natural tendency to homogeneousness in the east and west direction, a tendency to diversity and antagonism in the north and south, and hence it is that government under the latter circumstances will always demand the highest grade of statesmanship.

Nature of transitional forms.

The transitional forms which an animal type is capable of producing on a passage north and south are much more numerous than those it can produce on a passage east and west. These, though they are truly transitional as respects the type from which they have proceeded, are permanent as regards the locality in which they occur, being, in fact, the incarnation of its physical influences. As long, therefore, as those influences remain without change the form that has been produced will last without any alteration. For such a permanent form in the case of man we may adopt the designation of an ethnical element.

Conditions of change in an ethnical element.

An ethnical element is therefore necessarily of a dependent nature; its durability arises from its perfect correspondence with its environment. Whatever can affect that correspondence will touch its life.

Such considerations carry us from individual man to groups of men or nations. There is a progress for races of men as well marked as the progress of one man. There Progress of nations like that of individuals. are thoughts and actions appertaining to specific periods in the one case as in the other. Without difficulty we affirm of a given act that it appertains to a given period. We recognize the noisy sports of boyhood, the business application of maturity, the feeble garrulity of old age. We express our surprise when we witness actions unsuitable to the epoch of life. As it is in this respect in the individual, so it is in the nation. The march of individual existence shadows forth the march of race-existence, being, indeed, its representative on a little scale.

Communities, like families, exhibit members in different stages of advance.

Groups of men, or nations, are disturbed by the same accidents, or complete the same cycle as the individual. Some scarcely pass beyond infancy, some are destroyed on a sudden, some die of mere old age. In this confusion of events, it might seem altogether hopeless to disentangle the law which is guiding them all, and demonstrate it clearly. Of such groups, each may exhibit, at the same moment, an advance to a different stage, just as we see in the same family the young, the middle-aged, the old. It is thus that Europe shows in its different parts societies in very different states—here the restless civilization of France and England, there the contentment and inferiority of Lapland. This commingling might seem to render it difficult to ascertain the true movement of the whole continent, and still more so for distant and successive periods of time. In each nation, moreover, the contemporaneously different classes, the educated and illiterate, the idle and industrious, the rich and poor, the intelligent and superstitious, represent different contemporaneous stages of advancement. One may have made a great progress, another scarcely have advanced at all. How shall we ascertain the real state of the case? Which of these classes shall we regard as the truest and most perfect type?

Though difficult, this ascertainment is not impossible. The problem is to be dealt with in the same manner that we should estimate a family in which there are persons of every condition from infancy to old age. Each member of it tends to pursue a definite course, though some, cut off in an untimely manner, may not complete it. One may be enfeebled by accident, another by disease; but each, if his past and present circumstances be fully considered, will illustrate the nature of the general movement that all are making. To demonstrate that movement most satisfactorily, certain members of such a family suit our purpose better than others, because they more closely represent its type, or have advanced farthest in their career.

The intellectual class the true representative of a community.

So in a family of many nations, some are more mature, some less advanced, some die in early life, some are worn out by extreme old age; all show special peculiarities. There are distinctions among kinsmen, whether we consider them intellectually or corporeally. Every one, nevertheless, illustrates in his own degree the march that all are making, but some do it more, some less completely. The leading, the intellectual class, is hence always the true representative of a state. It has passed step by step through the lower stages, and has made the greatest advance.

Interstitial change and death the condition of individual life.

In an individual, life is maintained only by the production and destruction of organic particles, no portion of the system being in a state of immobility, but each displaying incessant change. Death is, therefore, necessarily the condition of life, and the more energetic the function of a part—or, if we compare different animals with one another—the more active the mode of existence, correspondingly, the greater the waste and the more numerous the deaths of the interstitial constituents.

Particles in the individual answer to persons in the state.

To the death of particles in the individual answers the death of persons in the nation, of which they are the integral constituents. In both cases, in a period of time quite inconsiderable, a total change is accomplished without the entire system, which is the sum of these separate parts, losing its identity. Each particle or each person comes into existence, discharges an appropriate duty, and then passes away, perhaps unnoticed. The production, continuance, and death of an organic molecule in the person answers to the production, continuance, and death of a person in the nation. Nutrition and decay in one case are equivalent to well-being and transformation in the other.

Epochs in national the same as in individual life.

In the same manner that the individual is liable to changes through the action of external agencies, and offers no resistance thereto, nor any indication of the possession of a physiological inertia, but submits at once to any impression, so likewise it is with aggregates of men constituting nations. A national type pursues its way physically and intellectually through changes and developments answering to those of the individual, and being represented by Infancy, Childhood, Youth, Manhood, Old Age, and Death respectively.

Disturbance through emigration.

But this orderly process may be disturbed exteriorly or interiorly. If from its original seats a whole nation were transposed to some new abode, in which the climate, the seasons, the aspect of nature were altogether different, it would appear spontaneously in all its parts to commence a movement to come into harmony with the new conditions—a movement of a secular nature, and implying the consumption of many generations for its accomplishment. During such a period of transmutation there would, of course, be an increased waste of life, a risk, indeed, of total disappearance or national death; but the change once completed, the requisite correspondence once attained, things would go forward again in an orderly manner on the basis of the new modification that had been assumed. When the change to be accomplished is very profound, involving extensive anatomical alterations not merely in the appearance of the skin, but even in the structure of the skull, long periods of time are undoubtedly required, and many generations of individuals are consumed.

And through blood admixture.

Or, by interior disturbance, particularly by blood admixture, with more rapidity may a national type be affected, the result plainly depending on the extent to which admixture has taken place. This is a disturbance capable of mathematical computation. If the blood admixture be only of limited amount, and transient in its application, its effect will sensibly disappear in no very great period of time, though never, perhaps, in absolute reality. This accords with the observation of philosophical historians, who agree in the conclusion that a small tribe intermingling with a larger one will only disturb it in a temporary manner, and, after the course of a few years, the effect will cease to be perceptible. Nevertheless, the influence must really continue much longer than is outwardly apparent; and the result is the same as when, in a liquid, a drop of some other kind is placed, and additional quantities of the first liquid then successively added. Though it might have been possible at first to detect the adulteration without trouble, it becomes every moment less and less possible to do so, and before long it cannot be done at all. But the drop is as much present at last as it was at first: it is merely masked; its properties overpowered.

Considering in this manner the contamination of a numerous nation, a trifling amount of foreign blood admixture would appear to be indelible, and the disturbance, at any moment, capable of computation by the ascertained degree of dilution that has taken place. But it must not be forgotten that there is another agency at work, energetically tending to bring about homogeneity: it is the influence of external physical conditions. The intrusive adulterating element possesses in itself no physiological inertia, but as quickly as may be is brought into correspondence with the new circumstances to which it is exposed, herein running in the same course as the element with which it had mingled had itself antecedently gone over.

National homogeneity is thus obviously secured by the operation of two distinct agencies: the first, gradual but inevitable dilution; the second, motion to come into harmony with the external natural state. The two conspire in their effects.

Secular variations of nations.

We must therefore no longer regard nations or groups of men as offering a permanent picture. Human affairs must be looked upon as in continuous movement, not wandering in an arbitrary manner here and there, but proceeding in a perfectly definite course. Whatever may be the present state, it is altogether transient. All systems of civil life are therefore necessarily ephemeral. Time brings new external conditions; the manner of thought is modified; with thought, action. Institutions of all kinds must hence Their institutions must correspondingly change. participate in this fleeting nature, and, though they may have allied themselves to political power, and gathered therefrom the means of coercion, their permanency is but little improved thereby; for, sooner or later, the population on whom they have been imposed, following the external variations, spontaneously outgrows them, and their ruin, though it may have been delayed, is none the less certain. For the permanency of any such system it is essentially necessary that it should include within its own organization a law of change, and not of change only, but change in the right direction—the direction in which the society interested is about to pass. It is in an oversight of this last essential condition that we find an explanation of the failure of so many such institutions. Too commonly do we believe that the affairs of men are determined by a spontaneous action or free will; we keep that overpowering influence which really controls them in the background. In individual life we also accept a like deception, living in the belief that every thing we do is determined by the volition of ourselves or of those around us; nor is it until the close of our days that we discern how great is the illusion, and that we have been swimming—playing and struggling—in a stream which, in spite of all our voluntary motions, has silently and resistlessly borne us to a predetermined shore.

In the foregoing pages I have been tracing analogies between the life of individuals and that of nations. There is yet one point more.

The death of nations.

Nations, like individuals, die. Their birth presents an ethnical element; their death, which is the most solemn event that we can contemplate, may arise from interior or from external causes. Empires are only sand-hills in the hour-glass of Time; they crumble spontaneously away by the process of their own growth.

A nation, like a man, hides from itself the contemplation of its final day. It occupies itself with expedients for prolonging its present state. It frames laws and constitutions under the delusion that they will last, forgetting that the condition of life is change. Very able modern statesmen consider it to be the grand object of their art to keep things as they are, or rather as they were. But the human race is not at rest; and bands with which, for a moment, it may be restrained, break all the more violently the longer they hold. No man can stop the march of destiny.

There is nothing absolute in time.

Time, to the nation as to the individual, is nothing absolute; its duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling. For the same reason that to the child the year is actually longer than to the adult, the life of a nation may be said to be no longer than the life of a person, considering the manner in which its affairs are moving. There is a variable velocity of existence, though the lapses of time may be equable.

Nations are only transitional forms.

The origin, existence, and death of nations depend thus on physical influences, which are themselves the result of immutable laws. Nations are only transitional forms of humanity. They must undergo obliteration as do the transitional forms offered by the animal series. There is no more an immortality for them than there is an immobility for an embryo in any one of the manifold forms passed through in its progress of development.

Their course is ever advancing, never retrograde.

The life of a nation thus flows in a regular sequence, determined by invariable law, and hence, in estimating different nations, we must not be deceived by the casual aspect they present. The philosophical comparison is made by considering their entire manner of career or cycle of progress, and not their momentary or transitory state. Though they may encounter disaster, their absolute course can never be retrograde; it is always onward, even if tending to dissolution. It is as with the individual, who is equally advancing in infancy, in maturity, in old age. Pascal was more than justified in his assertion that "the entire succession of men, through the whole course of ages, must be regarded as one man, always living and incessantly learning." In both cases, the manner of advance, though it may sometimes be unexpected, can never be abrupt. At each stage events and ideas emerge which not only necessarily owe their origin to preceding events Variable rapidity of national life. and ideas, but extend far into the future and influence it. As these are crowded together, or occur more widely apart, national life, like individual, shows a variable rapidity, depending upon the intensity of thought and action. But, no matter how great that energy may be, or with what rapidity modifications may take place—since events are emerging as consequences of preceding events, and ideas from preceding ideas—in the midst of the most violent intellectual oscillations, a discerning observer will never fail to detect that there exists a law of continuous variation of human opinions.

Plan of this work.

In the examination of the progress of Europe on which we now enter, it is, of course, to intellectual phenomena that we must, for the most part, refer; material aggrandisement and political power offering us less important though still valuable indications, and serving our purpose rather in a corroborative way. There are five intellectual manifestations to which we may resort—philosophy, science, literature, religion, government. Selection among European communities. Our obvious course is, first, to study the progress of that member of the European family, the eldest in point of advancement, and to endeavour to ascertain the characteristics of its mental unfolding. We may reasonably expect that the younger members of the family, more or less distinctly, will offer us illustrations of the same mode of advancement that we shall thus find for Greece; and that the whole continent, which is the sum of these different parts, will, in its secular progress, comport itself in like manner.

Our investigation limited to the intellectual, and commencing with Greece.
From thence we pass to the examination of all Europe.

Of the early condition of Europe, since we have to consider it in its prehistoric times, our information must necessarily be imperfect. Perhaps, however, we may be disposed to accept that imperfection as a sufficient token of its true nature. Since history can offer us no aid, our guiding lights must be comparative theology and comparative philology. Proceeding from those times, we shall, in detail, examine the intellectual or philosophical movement first exhibited in Greece, endeavouring to ascertain its character at successive epochs, and thereby to judge of its complete nature. Fortunately for our purpose, the information is here sufficient, both in amount and distinctness. It then remains to show that the mental movement of the whole continent is essentially of the same kind, though, as must necessarily be the case, it is spread over far longer periods of time. Our conclusions will constantly be found to gather incidental support and distinctness from illustrations presented by the aged populations of Asia, and the aborigines of Africa and America.

The five ages of European life.

The intellectual progress of Europe being of a nature answering to that observed in the case of Greece, and this, in its turn, being like that of an individual, we may conveniently separate it into arbitrary periods, sufficiently distinct from one another, though imperceptibly merging into each other. To these successive periods I shall give the titles of—1, the Age of Credulity; 2, the Age of Inquiry; 3, the Age of Faith; 4, the Age of Reason; 5, the Age of Decrepitude; and shall use these designations in the division of my subject in its several chapters.

The world is ruled by law. From the possibility of thus regarding the progress of a continent in definite and successive stages, answering respectively to the periods of individual life—infancy, childhood, youth, maturity, old age—we may gather an instructive lesson. It is the same that we have learned from inquiries respecting the origin, maintenance, distribution, and extinction of animals and plants, their balancing against each other; from the variations of aspect and form of an individual man as determined by climate; from his social state, whether in repose or motion; from the secular variations of his opinions, and the gradual dominion of reason over society: this lesson is, that the government of the world is accomplished by immutable law.

Such a conception commends itself to the intellect of man by its majestic grandeur. It makes him discern the eternal in the vanishing of present events and through the shadows of time. From the life, the pleasures, the sufferings of humanity, it points to the impassive; from our wishes, wants, and woes, to the inexorable. Leaving the individual beneath the eye of Providence, it shows society under the finger of law. And the laws of Nature never vary; in their application they never hesitate nor are wanting.

And yet there is free-will for man.

But in thus ascending to primordial laws, and asserting their immutability, universality, and paramount control in the government of this world, there is nothing inconsistent with the free action of man. The appearance of things depends altogether on the point of view we occupy. He who is immersed in the turmoil of a crowded city sees nothing but the acts of men, and, if he formed his opinion from his experience alone, must conclude that the course of events altogether depends on the uncertainties of human volition. But he who ascends to a sufficient elevation loses sight of the passing conflicts, and no longer hears the contentions. He discovers that the importance of individual action is diminishing, as the panorama beneath him is extending. And if he could attain to the truly philosophical, the general point of view, disengaging himself front all terrestrial influences and entanglements, rising high enough to see the whole globe at a glance, his acutest vision would fail to discover the slightest indication of man, his free-will, or his works. In her resistless, onward sweep, in the clock-like precision of her daily and nightly revolution, in the well-known pictured forms of her continents and seas, now no longer dark and doubtful, but shedding forth a planetary light, well might he ask what had become of all the aspirations and anxieties, the pleasures and agony of life. As the voluntary vanished from his sight, and the irresistible remained, and each moment became more and more distinct, well might he incline to disbelieve his own experience, and to question whether the seat of so much undying glory could be the place of so much human uncertainty, whether beneath the vastness, energy, and immutable course of a moving world, there lay concealed the feebleness and imbecility of man. Yet it is none the less true that these contradictory conditions co-exist—Free-will and Fate, Uncertainty and Destiny, It is only the point of view that has changed, but on that how much has depended! A little nearer we gather the successive ascertainments of human inquiry, a little further off we realize the panoramic vision of the Deity. A Hindu philosopher has truly remarked, that he who stands by the banks of a flowing stream sees, in their order, the various parts as they successively glide by, but he who is placed on an exalted station views, at a glance, the whole as a motionless silvery thread among the fields. To the one there is the accumulating experience and knowledge of man in time, to the other there is the instantaneous the unsuccessive knowledge of God.

Changeability of forms and unchangeability of law.

Is there an object presented to us which does not bear the mark of ephemeral duration? As respects the tribes of life, they are scarcely worth a moment's thought, for the term of the great majority of them is so brief that we may say they are born and die before our eyes. If we examine them, not as individuals, but as races, the same conclusion holds good, only the scale is enlarged from a few days to a few centuries. If from living we turn to lifeless nature, we encounter again the evidence of brief continuance. The sea is unceasingly remoulding its shores; hard as they are, the mountains are constantly yielding to frost and to rain; here an extensive tract of country is elevated, there depressed. We fail to find any thing that is not undergoing change.

Then forms are in their nature transitory, law is everlasting. If from visible forms we turn to directing law how vast is the difference. We pass from the finite, the momentary, the incidental, the conditioned—to the illimitable, the eternal, the necessary, the unshackled.

The object of this book is to assert the control of law in human affairs.

It is of law that I am to speak in this book. In a world composed of vanishing forms I am to vindicate the imperishability, the majesty of law, and to show how man proceeds, in his social march, in obedience to it. I am to lead my reader, perhaps in a reluctant path, from the outward phantasmagorial illusions which surround us, and so ostentatiously obtrude themselves on our attention, to something that lies in silence and strength behind. I am to draw his thoughts from the tangible to the invisible, from the limited to the universal, from the changeable to the invariable, from the transitory to the eternal; from the expedients and volitions so largely amusing the life of man, to the predestined and resistless issuing from the fiat of God.

Chapter II.

OF EUROPE: ITS TOPOGRAPHY AND ETHNOLOGY.

ITS PRIMITIVE MODES OF THOUGHT, AND THEIR PROGRESSIVE VARIATIONS, MANIFESTED IN THE GREEK AGE OF CREDULITY.

Description of Europe: its Topography, Meteorology, and secular Geological Movements.—Their Effect on its Inhabitants.

Its Ethnology determined through its Vocabularies.

Comparative Theology of Greece; the Stage of Sorcery, the Anthropocentric Stage.—Becomes connected with false Geography and Astronomy.—Heaven, the Earth, the Under World.—Origin, continuous Variation and Progress of Greek Theology.—It introduces Ionic Philosophy.

Decline of Greek Theology, occasioned by the Advance of Geography and Philosophical Criticism.—Secession of Poets, Philosophers, Historians.—Abortive public Attempts to sustain it.—Duration of its Decline.—Its Fall.

Europe is geographically a peninsula, and historically a dependency of Asia.

Description of Europe.

It is constructed on the western third of a vast mountain axis, which reaches in a broken and irregular course from the Sea of Japan to the Bay of Biscay. On the flanks of this range, peninsular slopes are directed toward the south, and extensive plateaus to the north. The culminating point in Europe is Mont Blanc, 16,000 feet above the level of the sea. The axis of elevation is not the axis of figure; the incline to the south is much shorter and steeper than that to the north. The boundless plains of Asia are prolonged through Germany and Holland. An army may pass from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, a distance of more than six thousand miles, without encountering any elevation of more than a few hundred feet. The descent from Asia into Europe is indicated in a general manner by the mean The great path-zone. elevation of the two continents above the level of the sea; that for Asia being 1132 feet, that for Europe 671. Through the avenue thus open to them, the Oriental hordes have again and again precipitated themselves on the West. With an abundance of springs and head-waters, but without any stream capable of offering a serious obstacle, this tract has a temperature well suited to military movements. It coincides generally with the annual isothermal line of 50°, skirting the northern boundary beyond which the vine ceases to grow, and the limiting region beyond which the wild boar does not pass.

Exterior and interior accessibility.

Constructed thus, Europe is not only easily accessible from Asia, a fact of no little moment in its ancient history, but it is also singularly accessible interiorly, or from one of its parts to another. Still more, its sea-line is so broken, it has so many intrusive gulfs and bays, that, its surface considered, its maritime coast is greater than that of any other continent. In this respect it contrasts strikingly with Africa. Europe has one mile of coast-line for every 156 square miles of surface, Africa has only one for every 623. This extensive maritime contact adds, of course, greatly to its interior as well as exterior accessibility.

Distribution of heat in Europe.

The mean annual temperature of the European countries on the southern slope of the mountain axis is from 60° to 70° F., but of those to the north the heat gradually declines, until, at the extreme limit on the shores of Zembla, the ground is perpetually frozen. As on other parts of the globe, the climate does not correspond to the latitude, but is disturbed by several causes, among which may be distinguished the great Atlantic current—the Gulf Stream coming from America—and the Sahara Desert. The latter gives to the south of Europe an unduly high heat, and the former to Ireland, England, and the entire west a genial temperature. Together they press into higher latitudes the annual isothermal lines. If in Europe there are no deserts, there are none of those impenetrable forests seen in tropical countries. From the westerly shores of Portugal, France, and Ireland, the humidity diminishes as we pass to the east, and, indeed, if we advance into Asia, it disappears in the desert of Gobi. There are no vast homogeneous areas as in Asia, and therefore there is no widespread uniformity in the races of men.

And the quantity of rain.

But not only is the temperature of the European continent elevated by the Gulf Stream and the south-west wind, its luxuriance of vegetation depends on them; for luxuriance of vegetation is determined, among other things, by the supply of rain. A profusion of water gives to South America its amazing forests; a want inflicts on Australia its shadeless trees, with their shrunken and pointed leaves. With the diminished moisture the green gardens of France are replaced in Gobi by ligneous plants covered with a gray down. Physical circumstances control the vegetable as well as the animal world.

The westerly regions of Europe, through the influence of the south-west wind, the Gulf Stream, and their mountain ranges, are supplied with abundant rains, and have a favourable mean annual temperature; but as we pass to the eastern confines the number of rainy days diminishes, the absolute annual quantity of rain and snow is less, and the mean annual temperature is lower. On the Atlantic face of the mountains of Norway it is perpetually raining: the annual depth of water is there 82 inches; but on the opposite side of those mountains is only 21 inches. For similar reasons, Ireland is moist and green, and in Cornwall the laurel and camellia will bear a winter exposure.

There are six maximum points of rain—Norway, Scotland, South-western Ireland and England, Portugal, North-eastern Spain, Lombardy. They respectively correspond to mountains. In general, the amount of rain diminishes from the equator toward the poles; but it is greatly controlled by the disturbing influence of elevated ridges, which in many instances far more than compensate for the effects of latitude. The Alps exercise an influence over the meteorology of all Europe.

The number of rainy days;

Not only do mountains thus determine the absolute quantity of rain, they also affect the number of rainy days in a year. The occurrence of a rainy season depends on the amount of moisture existing in the air; and hence its frequency is greater at the Atlantic sea-board than in the interior, where the wind arrives in a drier state, much of its moisture having been precipitated by the mountains forcing it to a great elevation. Thus, on the eastern coast of Ireland it rains 208 days in a year; in England, about 150; at Kazan, 90; and in Siberia only 60 days.

and of snowy days.

When the atmospheric temperature is sufficiently low, the condensed water descends under the form of snow. In general, the annual depth of snow and the number of snowy days increase toward the north. In Rome the snowy days are 1½; in Venice, 5½; in Paris, 12; in St. Petersburgh, 171. Whatever causes interfere with the distribution of heat must influence the precipitation of snow; among such are the Gulf Stream and local altitude. Hence, on the coast of Portugal, snow is of infrequent occurrence; in Lisbon it never snowed from 1806 to 1811.

Such facts teach us how many meteorological contrasts Europe presents, how many climates it contains. Necessarily it is full of modified men.

Vibrations of the isothermal lines.

If we examine the maps of monthly isothermals, we observe how strikingly those lines change, becoming convex to the north as summer approaches, and concave as winter. They by no means observe a parallelism to the mean, but change their flexures, assuming new sinuosities. In their absolute transfer they move with a variable velocity, and through spaces far from insignificant. The line of 50° F., which in January passes through Lisbon and the south of the Morea, in July has travelled to the north shore of Lapland, and incloses the White Sea. As in some grand musical instrument, the strings of which vibrate, the isothermal lines of Europe and Asia beat to and fro, but it takes a year for them to accomplish one pulsation.

Europe is full of meteorological contrasts, and therefore of modified men.

All over the world physical circumstances control the human race. They make the Australian a savage; incapacitate the negro, who can never invent an alphabet or an arithmetic, and whose theology never passes beyond the stage of sorcery. They cause the Tartars to delight in a diet of milk, and the American Indian to abominate it. They make the dwarfish races of Europe instinctive miners and metallurgists. An artificial control over temperature by dwellings, warm for the winter and cool for the summer; variations of clothing to suit the season of the year, and especially the management of fire, have enabled man to maintain himself in all climates. The invention of artificial light has extended the available term of his life; by giving the night to his use, it has, by the social intercourse it encourages, polished his manners and refined his tastes, perhaps as much as any thing else has aided in his intellectual progress. Indeed, these are among the primary conditions that have occasioned his civilization. Variety of natural conditions gives rise to different national types, artificial inventions occasion renewed modifications. Where there are many climates there will be many forms of men. Herein, as we shall in due season discover, lies the explanation of the energy of European life, and the development of its civilization.

Would any one deny the influence of rainy days on our industrial habits and on our mental condition even in a civilized state? With how much more force, then, must such meteorological incidents have acted on the ill-protected, ill-clad, and ill-housed barbarian! Would any one deny the increasing difficulty with which life is maintained as we pass from the southern peninsulas to the more rigorous climates of the north? There is a relationship between the mean annual heat of a locality and the instincts of its inhabitants for food. The Sicilian is satisfied with a light farinaceous repast and a few fruits; the Norwegian requires a strong diet of flesh; to the Laplander it is none the less acceptable if grease of the bear, or train oil, or the blubber of whales be added. Meteorology to no little extent influences the morals; the instinctive propensity to drunkenness is a function of the latitude. Food, houses, clothing, bear a certain relation to the isothermal lines.

But, through artificial inventions, it tends to homogeneousness in modern times.

For similar reasons, the inhabitants of Europe each year tend to more complete homogeneity. Climate and meteorological differences are more and more perfectly equalized by artificial inventions; nor is it alone a similarity of habits, a similarity of physiological constitution also ensues. The effect of such inventions is to equalize the influences to which men are exposed; they are brought more closely to the mean typical standard, and—especially is it to be remembered—with this closer approach to each other in conformation, comes a closer approach in feelings and habits, and even in the manner of thinking.

The Mediterranean peninsulas.

On the southern slope of the mountain axis project the historic peninsulas, Greece, Italy, Spain. To the former we trace unmistakably the commencement of European civilization. The first Greeks patriotically affirmed that their own climate was the best suited for man; beyond the mountains to the north there reigned a Cimmerian darkness, an everlasting winter. It was the realm of Boreas, the shivering tyrant. In the early ages man recognized cold as his mortal enemy. Physical inventions have enabled him to overcome it, and now he maintains a more difficult and doubtful struggle with heat.

The Mediterranean Sea.

Beyond these peninsulas, and bounding the continent on the south, is the Mediterranean, nearly two thousand miles in length, isolating Europe from Africa socially, but uniting them commercially. The Black Sea and that of Azof are dependencies of it. It has, conjointly with them, a shore-line of 13,000 miles, and exposes a surface of nearly a million and a quarter of square miles. It is subdivided into two basins, the eastern and western, the former being of high interest historically, since it is the scene of the dawn of European intelligence; the western is bounded by the Italian peninsula, Sicily, and the African promontory of Cape Bon on one side, and at the other has as its portal the Straits of Gibraltar. The temperature is ten or twelve degrees higher than the Atlantic, and, since much of the water is removed by evaporation, it is necessarily more saline than that ocean. Its colour is green where shallow, blue where deep.

Secular geological movement of Europe and Asia, and its social consequences.

For countless centuries Asia has experienced a slow upward movement, not only affecting her own topography, but likewise that of her European dependency. There was a time when the great sandy desert of Gobi was the bed of a sea which communicated through the Caspian with the Baltic, as may be proved not only by existing geographical facts, but also from geological considerations. It is only necessary, for this purpose, to inspect the imperfect maps that have been published of the Silurian and even tertiary periods. The vertical displacement of Europe, during and since the latter period, has indisputably been more than 2000 feet in many places. The effects of such movements on the flora and fauna of a region must, in the course of time, be very important, for an elevation of 350 feet is equal to one degree of cold in the mean annual temperature, or to sixty miles on the surface northward. Nor has this slow disturbance ended. Again and again, in historic times, have its results operated fearfully on Europe, by forcibly precipitating the Asiatic nomades along the great path-zone; again and again, through such changes of level, have they been rendered waterless, and thus driven into a forced emigration. Some of their rivers, as the Oxus and Jaxartes, have, within the records of history, been dry for several years. To these topographical changes, rather than to political influences, we must impute many of the most celebrated tribal invasions. It has been the custom to refer these events to an excessive overpopulation periodically occurring in Central Asia, or to the ambition of warlike chieftains. Doubtless those regions are well adapted to human life, and hence liable to overpopulation, considering the pursuits man there follows, and doubtless there have been occasions on which those nations have been put in motion by their princes; but the modern historian cannot too carefully bear in mind the laws which regulate the production of men, and also the body of evidence which proves that the crust of the earth is not motionless, but rising in one place and sinking in another. The grand invasions of Europe by Asiatic hordes have been much more violent and abrupt than would answer to a steady pressure resulting from overpopulation, and too extensive for mere warlike incitement; they answer more completely to the experience of some irresistible necessity arising from an insuperable physical cause, which could drive in hopeless despair from their homes the young and the old, the vigorous and feeble, with their cattle, and waggons, and flocks. Such a cause is the shifting of the soil and disturbance of the courses of water. The tribes compelled to migrate were forced along the path-zone, their track being, therefore, on a parallel of latitude, and not on a meridian; and hence, for the reasons set forth in the preceding chapter, their movements and journey of easier accomplishment.

Rate and extent of these movements.

These geological changes then enter as an element in human history, not only for Asia, of which the great inland sea has dwindled away to the Caspian, and lost its connection with the Baltic, but for Europe also. The traditions of ancient deluges, which are the primitive facts of Greek history, refer to such movements, perhaps the opening of the Thracian Bosphorus was one of them. In much later times we are perpetually meeting with incidents depending on geological disturbances; the caravan trade of Asia Minor was destroyed by changes of level and the accumulation of sands blown from the encroaching deserts; the Cimbri were impelled into Italy by the invasion of the sea on their possessions. There is not a shore in Europe which does not give similar evidence; the mouths of the Rhine, as they were in the Roman times, are obliterated; the eastern coast of England has been cut away for miles. In the Mediterranean the shore-line is altogether changed; towns, once on the coast, are far away inland; others have sunk beneath the sea. Islands, like Rhodes, have risen from the bottom. The North Adriatic, once a deep gulf, has now become shallow; there are leaning towers and inclining temples that have sunk with the settling of the earth. On the opposite extremity of Europe, the Scandinavian peninsula furnishes an instance of slow secular motion, the northern part rising gradually above the sea at the rate of about four feet in a century. This elevation is observed through a space of many hundred miles, increasing toward the north. The southern extremity, on the contrary, experiences a slow depression.

These slow movements are nothing more than a continuation of what has been going on for numberless ages. Since the tertiary period two-thirds of Europe have been lifted above the sea. The Norway coast has been elevated 600 feet, the Alps have been upheaved 2000 or 3000, the Apennines 1000 to 2000 feet. The country between Mont Blanc and Vienna has been thus elevated since the adjacent seas were peopled with existing animals. Since the Neolithic age, the British Islands have undergone a great change of level, and, indeed, have been separated from the continent through the sinking of England and the rising of Scotland.

Early inhabitants of Europe.

At the earliest period Europe presents us with a double population. An Indo-Germanic column had entered it from the east, and had separated into two portions the occupants it had encountered, driving one to the north, the other to the south-west. These primitive tribes betray, physiologically, a Mongolian origin; and there are indications of considerable weight that they themselves had been, in ancient times, intruders, who, issuing from their seats in Asia, had invaded and dislocated the proper autochthons of Europe. In the Pleistocene age there existed in Central Europe a rude race of hunters and fishers, closely allied to the Esquimaux. Man was contemporary with the cave bear, the cave lion, the amphibious hippopotamus, the mammoth. Caves that have been examined in France or elsewhere have furnished for the stone age, axes, knives, lance and arrow points, scrapers, hammers. The change from what has been termed the chipped, to the polished stone period, was very gradual. It coincides with the domestication of the dog, an epoch in hunting life. The appearance of arrow heads indicates the invention of the bow, and the rise of man from a defensive to an offensive mode of life. The introduction of barbed arrows shows how inventive talent was displaying itself; bone and horn tips, that the huntsman was including smaller animals, and perhaps birds, in his chase; bone whistles, his companionship with other huntsmen, or with his dog. The scraping knives of flint, indicate the use of skin for clothing, and rude bodkins and needles, its manufacture. Shells perforated for bracelets and necklaces, prove how soon a taste for personal adornment was acquired, the implements necessary for the preparation of pigments suggest the painting of the body, and perhaps, tattooing; and batons of rank bear witness to the beginning of a social organization.

We have thus as our starting-point a barbarian population, believers in sorcery, and, in some places, undoubtedly cannibals, maintaining, in the central and northern parts of Europe, their existence with difficulty by reason of the severity of the climate. In the southern, more congenial conditions permitted a form of civilization to commence, of which the rude Cyclopean structures here and there met with, such as the ruins of Orchomenos, the lion gate of Mycenæ, the tunnel of Lake Copais, are perhaps the vestiges.

Their social condition.

At what period this intrusive Indo-Germanic column made its attack cannot be ascertained. The national vocabularies of Europe, to which we must resort for evidence, might lead us to infer that the condition of civilization of the conquering people was not very advanced. They were acquainted with the use of domestic animals, farming implements, carts, and yokes; they were also possessed of boats, the rudder, oars, but were unacquainted with the movement of vessels by sails. These conclusions seem to be established by the facts that words equivalent to boat, rudder, oar, are common to the languages of the offshoots of the stock, though located very widely asunder; but those for mast and sails are of special invention, and differ in adjacent nations.

Their civil state deduced from their vocabularies.

In nearly all the Indo-Germanic tongues, the family names, father, mother, brother, sister, daughter, are the same respectively. A similar equivalence may be observed in a great many familiar objects, house, door, town, path. It has been remarked, that while this holds good for terms of a peaceful nature, many of those connected with warfare and the chase are different in different languages. Such facts appear to prove that the Asiatic invaders followed a nomadic and pastoral life. Many of the terms connected with such an avocation are widely diffused. This is the case with ploughing, grinding, weaving, cooking, baking, sewing, spinning; with such objects as corn, flesh, meat, vestment; with wild animals common to Europe and Asia, as the bear and the wolf. So, too, of words connected with social organization, despot, rex, queen. The numerals from 1 to 100 coincide in Sanscrit, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic; but this is not the case with 1000, a fact which has led comparative philologists to the conclusion that, though at the time of the emigration a sufficient intellectual advance had been made to invent the decimal system, perhaps from counting upon the fingers, yet that it was very far from perfection. To the inhabitants of Central Asia the sea was altogether unknown; hence the branches of the emigrating column, as they diverged north and south, gave it different names. But, though unacquainted with the sea, they were familiar with salt, as is proved by the recurrence of its name. Nor is it in the vocabularies alone that these resemblances are remarked; the same is to be said of the grammar. M. Max Müller shows that in Sanscrit, Zend, Lithuanian, Doric, Slavonic, Latin, Gothic, the forms of the auxiliary verb to be are all varieties of one common type, and that "the coincidences between the language of the Veda and the dialect spoken at the present day by the Lithuanian recruits at Berlin are greater by far than between French and Italian, and that the essential forms of grammar had been fully framed and established before the first separation of the Aryan family took place."

But it should not be overlooked that such interesting deductions founded on language, its vocabularies and grammar, must not be pressed too closely. The state of civilization of the Indo-Germanic column, as thus ascertained, must needs have been inferior to that of the centre from which it issued forth. Such we observe to be the case in all migratory movements. It is not the more intellectual or civilized portions of a community which voluntarily participate therein, but those in whom the physical and animal character predominates. There may be a very rough offshoot from a very polished stock. Of course, the movement we are here considering must have taken place at a period chronologically remote, yet not so remote as might seem to be indicated by the state of civilization of the invaders, used as an indication of the state of civilization of the country from which they had come. In Asia, social advancement, as far back as we can discover, has ever been very slow; but, at the first moment that we encounter the Hindu race historically or philologically, it is dealing with philosophical and theological questions of the highest order, and settling, to its own satisfaction, problems requiring a cultivated intellect even so much as to propose. All this implies that in its social advancement there must have already been consumed a very long period of time.

Commingling of blood and of ideas.

But what chiefly interests us is the relation which must have been necessarily maintained between the intrusive people and those whom they thus displaced, the commingling of the ideas of the one with those of the other, arising from their commingling of blood. It is because of this that we find coexisting in the pre-Hellenic times the sorcery of the Celt and the polytheism of the Hindu. There can be no doubt that many of the philosophical lineaments displayed by the early European mythology are not due to indigenous thought, but were derived from an Asiatic source.

Climate-modification of Asiatic intruders.

Moreover, at the earliest historic times, notwithstanding the disturbance which must have lasted long after the successful and perhaps slow advance of the Asiatic column, things had come to a state of equilibrium or repose, not alone socially, but also physiologically. It takes a long time for the conqueror and conquered to settle together, without farther disturbance or question, into their relative positions; it takes a long time for the recollection of conflicts to die away. But far longer does it take for a race of invaders to come into unison with the climate of the countries they have seized, the system of man accommodating itself only through successive generations, and therefore very slowly, to new physical conditions. It takes long before the skin assumes its determinate hue, and the skull its destined form. A period amply sufficient for all such changes to be accomplished in Europe had transpired at the very dawn of history, and strands of population in conformity with meteorological and geographical influences, though of such origin as has been described, were already distributed upon it. A condition of ethnical equilibrium had been reached. Along each isothermal or climatic band were its correspondingly modified men, spending their lives in avocations dictated by their environment. These strands of population were destined to be dislocated, and some of them to become extinct, by inventing or originating among themselves new and unsuitable artificial physical conditions.

First gleams of civilization

Already Europe was preparing a repetition of those events of which Asia from time immemorial has been the scene. Already among the nations bordering on the Mediterranean, inhabitants of a pleasant climate, in which life could be easily maintained—where the isothermal of January is 41° F., and of July 73½° F.—civilization was commencing. There was an improving agriculture, an increasing commerce, and, the necessary consequence thereof, germs of art, the accumulation of wealth. The southern peninsulas were offering to the warlike chieftains of middle Europe a tempting prize.

and first religious opinions.

Under such influences Europe may be considered as emerging from the barbarian state. It had lost all recollection of its ancient relations with India, which have only been disclosed to us by a study of the vocabularies and grammar of its diverse tongues. Upon its indigenous sorcery an Oriental star-worship had been ingrafted, the legends of which had lost their significance. What had at first been feigned of the heavenly bodies had now assumed an air of personality, and had become attributed to heroes and gods.

The negro under the equinoctial line, the dwarfish Laplander beyond the Arctic Circle—man everywhere, in his barbarous state, is a believer in sorcery, witchcraft, enchantments; he is fascinated by the incomprehensible. Any unexpected sound or sudden motion he refers to invisible beings. Sleep and dreams, in which one-third of his life is spent, assure him that there is a spiritual world. He multiplies these unrealities; he gives to every grotto a genius; to every tree, spring, river, mountain, a divinity.

Localization of the invisible.

Comparative theology, which depends on the law of continuous variation of human thought, and is indeed one of its expressions, universally proves that the moment man adopts the idea of an existence of invisible beings, he recognizes the necessity of places for their residence, all nations assigning them habitations beyond the boundaries of the earth. A local heaven and a local hell are found in every mythology. In Greece, as to heaven, there was a universal agreement that it was situated above the blue sky; but as to hell, much difference of opinion prevailed. There were many who thought that it was a deep abyss in the interior of the earth, to which certain passages, such as the Acherusian cave in Bithynia, led. But those who with Anaximenes considered the earth to be like a broad leaf floating in the air, and who accepted the doctrine that hell was divided into a Tartarus, or region of night on the left, and an Elysium, or region of dawn on the right, and that it was equally distant from all parts of the upper surface, were nearer to the original conception, which doubtless placed it on the under or shadowy side of the earth. The portals of descent were thus in the west, where the sun and stars set, though here and there were passages leading through the ground to the other side, such as those by which Hercules and Ulysses had gone. The place of ascent was in the east, and the morning twilight a reflection from the Elysian Fields.

The anthropocentric stage of thought.

The picture of Nature thus interpreted has for its centre the earth; for its most prominent object, man. Whatever there is has been made for his pleasure, or to minister to his use. To this belief that every thing is of a subordinate value compared with himself, he clings with tenacity even in his most advanced mental state.

Not without surprise do we trace the progress of the human mind. The barbarian, as a believer in sorcery, lives in incessant dread. All Nature seems to be at enmity with him and conspiring for his hurt. Out of the darkness he cannot tell what alarming spectre may emerge; he may, with reason, fear that injury is concealed in every stone, and hidden behind every leaf. How wide is the interval from this terror-stricken condition to that state in which man persuades himself of the human destiny of the universe! Yet, wonderful to be said, he passes that interval at a single step.

In the infancy of the human race, geographical and astronomical ideas are the same all over the world, for they are the interpretation of things according to outward appearances, the accepting of phenomena as they are presented, without any of the corrections that reason may offer. This universality and homogeneity is nothing more than a manifestation of the uniform mode of action of human organization.

From homogeneous ideas the comparative sciences emerge.

But such homogeneous conclusions, such similar pictures, are strictly peculiar to the infancy of humanity. The reasoning faculty at length inevitably makes itself felt, and diversities of interpretation ensue. Comparative geography, comparative astronomy, comparative theology thus arise, homogeneous at first, but soon exhibiting variations.

To that tendency for personification which marks the early life of man are due many of the mythologic conceptions. It was thus that the Hours, the Dawn, and Night with her black mantle bespangled with stars, Introduction of personified forms. received their forms. Many of the most beautiful legends were thus of a personified astronomical origin; many were derived from terrestrial or familiar phenomena. The clouds were thus made to be animated things; a moving spirit was given to the storm, the dew, the wind. The sun setting in the glowing clouds of the west became Hercules in the fiery pile; the morning dawn extinguished by the rising sun was embodied in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. These legends still survive in India.

The gradual and affiliated advance of Greek theological ideas.

But it must not be supposed that all Greek mythology can be thus explained. It is enough for us to examine the circumstances under which, for many ages, the European communities had been placed, to understand that they had forgotten much that their ancestors had brought from Asia. Much that was new had also spontaneously arisen. The well-known variations of their theogony are not merely similar legends of different localities, they are more frequently the successive improvements of one place. The general theme upon which they are based requires the admission of a primitive chaotic disturbance of incomprehensible gigantic powers, brought into subjection by Divine agency, that agency dividing and regulating the empire it had thus acquired in a harmonious way. To this general conception was added a multitude of adventitious ornaments, some of which were of a rude astronomical, some of a moral, some, doubtless, of a historical kind. The primitive chaotic conflicts appear under the form of the war of the Titans; their end is the confinement of those giants in Tartarus; whose compulsory subjection is the commencement of order: The composite nature of the resulting mythology. thus Atlas, the son of Iapetos, is made to sustain the vault of heaven in its western verge. The regulation of empire is shadowed forth in the subdivision of the universe between Zeus and his brothers, he taking the heavens, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the under world, all having the earth as their common theatre of action. The moral is prefigured by such myths as those of Prometheus and Epimetheus, the fore-thinker and the after-thinker; the historical in the deluge of Deucalion, the sieges of Thebes and of Troy. A harmony with human nature is established through the birth and marriage of the gods, and likewise by their sufferings, passions, and labours. The supernatural is gratified by Centaurs, Gorgons, Harpies, and Cyclops.

It would be in vain to attempt the reduction of such a patchwork system to any single principle, astronomical or moral, as some have tried to do—a system originating from no single point as to country or to time. The gradual growth of many ages, its diversities are due to many local circumstances. Like the romances of a later period, it will not bear an application of the ordinary rules of life. It recommended itself to a people who found pleasure in accepting without any question statements no matter how marvellous, impostures no matter how preposterous. Gods, heroes, monsters, and men might figure together without any outrage to probability when there was no astronomy, no geography, no rule of evidence, no standard of belief. But the downfall of such a system was inevitable as soon as men began to deal with facts; as soon as history commenced to record, and philosophy to discuss. Yet not without reluctance was the faith of so many centuries given up. The extinction of a religion is not the abrupt movement of a day, it is a secular process of many well-marked stages—the rise of doubt among the candid; the disapprobation of the conservative; the defence of ideas fast becoming obsolete by the well-meaning, who hope that allegory and new interpretations may give renewed probability to what is almost incredible. But dissent ends in denial at last.

Primitive astronomy and geography.

Before we enter upon the history of that intellectual movement which thus occasioned the ruin of the ancient system, we must bring to ourselves the ideas of the Greek of the eighth century before Christ, who thought that the blue sky is the floor of heaven, the habitation of the Olympian gods; that the earth, man's proper abode, is flat and circularly extended like a plate beneath the starry canopy. On its rim is the circumfluous ocean, the source of the rivers, which all flow to the Mediterranean, appropriately in after ages so called, since it is in the midst, in the centre of the expanse of the land. "The sea-girt disk of the earth supports the vault of heaven." Impelled by a celestial energy, the sun and stars, issuing forth from the east, ascend with difficulty the crystalline dome, but down its descent they more readily hasten to their setting. No one can tell what they encounter in the land of shadows beneath, nor what are the dangers of the way. In the morning the dawn mysteriously appears in the east, and swiftly spreads over the confines of the horizon; in the evening the twilight fades gradually away. Besides the celestial bodies, the clouds are continually moving over the sky, for ever changing their colours and their shape. No one can tell whence the wind comes or whither it goes; perhaps it is the breath of that invisible divinity who launches the lightning, or of him who rests his bow against the cloud. Not without delight men contemplated the emerald plane, the sapphire dome, the border of silvery water, ever tranquil and ever flowing. The under world and its spectres. Then, in the interior of the solid earth, or perhaps on the other side of its plane—under world, as it was well termed—is the realm of Hades or Pluto, the region of Night. From the midst of his dominion, that divinity, crowned with a diadem of ebony, and seated on a throne framed out of massive darkness, looks into the infinite abyss beyond, invisible himself to mortal eyes, but made known by the nocturnal thunder which is his weapon. The under world is also the realm to which spirits retire after death. At its portals, beneath the setting sun, is stationed a numerous tribe of spectres—Care, Sorrow, Disease, Age, Want, Fear, Famine, War, Toil, Death and her half-brother Sleep—Death, to whom it is useless for man to offer either prayers or sacrifice. In that land of forgetfulness and shadows there is the unnavigable lake Avernus, Acheron, Styx, the groaning Cocytus, and Phlegethon, with its waves of fire. There are all kinds of monsters and forms of fearful import: Cerberus, with his triple head; Charon, freighting his boat with the shades of the dead; the Fates, in their garments of ermine bordered with purple; the avenging Erinnys; Rhadamanthus, before whom every Asiatic must render his account; Æacus, before whom every European; and Minos, the dread arbiter of the judgment-seat. There, too, are to be seen those great criminals whose history is a warning to us: the giants, with dragons' feet extended in the burning gulf for many a mile; Phlegyas, in perpetual terror of the stone suspended over him, which never falls; Ixion chained to his wheel; the daughters of Danaus still vainly trying to fill their sieve; Tantalus, immersed in water to his chin, yet tormented with unquenchable thirst; Sisyphus despairingly labouring at his ever-descending stone. Warned by such examples, we may learn not to contemn the gods. Beyond these sad scenes, extending far to the right, are the plains of pleasure, the Elysian Fields; and Lethe, the river of oblivion, of which whoever tastes, though he should ascend to the eastern boundary of the earth, and return again to life and day, forgets whatever he has seen.

If the interior or the under side of the earth is thus occupied by phantoms and half-animated shades of the dead, its upper surface, inhabited by man, has also its wonders. In its centre is the Mediterranean Sea, as we have said, round which are placed all the known countries, each full of its own mysteries and marvels. Of these how The Argonautic voyage. many we might recount if we followed the wanderings of Odysseus, or the voyage of Jason and his heroic comrades in the ship Argo, when they went to seize the golden fleece of the speaking ram. We might tell of the Harpies, flying women-birds of obscene form; of the blind prophet; of the Symplegades, self-shutting rocks, between which, as if by miracle, the Argonauts passed, the cliffs almost entrapping the stern of their vessel, but destined by fate from that portentous moment never to close again; of the country of the Amazons, and of Prometheus groaning on the rock to which he was nailed, of the avenging eagle for ever hovering and for ever devouring; of the land of Æêtes, and of the bulls with brazen feet and flaming breath, and how Jason yoked and made them plough, of the enchantress Medea, and the unguent she concocted from herbs that grew where the blood of Prometheus had dripped; of the field sown with dragons' teeth, and the mail-clad men that leaped out of the furrows; of the magical stone that divided them into two parties, and impelled them to fight each other; of the scaly dragon that guarded the golden fleece, and how he was lulled with a charmed potion, and the treasure carried away; of the River Phasis, through whose windings the Argo sailed into the circumfluous sea, of the circumnavigation round that tranquil stream to the sources of the Nile; of the Argonauts carrying their sentient, self-speaking ship on their shoulders through the sweltering Libyan deserts, of the island of Circe, the enchantress; of the rock, with its grateful haven, which in the height of a tempest rose out of the sea to receive them; of the arrow shot by Apollo from his golden bow; of the brazen man, the work of Hephæstos, who stood on the shore of Crete, and hurled at them as they passed vast fragments of stone; of their combat with him and their safe return to Iolcos; and of the translation of the ship Argo by the goddess Athene to heaven.

Such were some of the incidents of that celebrated voyage, the story of which enchanted all Greece before the Odyssey was written. I have not space to tell of the wonders that served to decorate the geography of those times. On the north there was the delicious country of the Hyperboreans, beyond the reach of winter; Union of the geographical and the marvellous. in the west the garden of the Hesperides, in which grew apples of gold; in the east the groves and dancing-ground of the sun; in the south the country of the blameless Ethiopians, whither the gods were wont to resort. In the Mediterranean itself the Sirens beguiled the passers-by with their songs near where Naples now stands; adjoining were Scylla and Charybdis; in Sicily were the one-eyed Cyclops and cannibal Læstrygons. In the island of Erytheia the three-headed giant Geryon tended his oxen with a double-headed dog. I need not speak of the lotus-eaters, whose food made one forget his native country; of the floating island of Æolus; of the happy fields in which the horses of the sun were grazing; of bulls and dogs of immortal breed; of hydras, gorgons, and chimeras; of the flying man Dædalus, and the brazen chamber in which Danae was kept. There was no river, no grotto that had not its genius; no island, no promontory without its legend.

Earliest Greek theological ideas indicate a savage state.

It is impossible to recall these antique myths without being satisfied that they are, for the most part, truly indigenous, truly of European growth. The seed may have been brought, as comparative philologists assert, from Asia, but it had luxuriantly germinated and developed under the sky of Europe. Of the legends, many are far from answering to their reputed Oriental source; their barbarism and indelicacy represent the state of Europe. The outrage of Kronos on his father Uranos speaks of the savagism of the times; the story of Dionysos tells of man-stealing and piracy; the rapes of Europa and Helen, of the abduction of women. The dinner at which Itys was served up assures us that cannibalism was practised; the threat of Laomedon that he would sell Poseidon and Apollo for slaves shows how compulsory labour might be obtained. The polygamy of many heroes often appears in its worst form under the practice of sister-marriage, a crime indulged in from the King of Olympus downward. Upon the whole, then, we must admit that Greek mythology indicates a barbarian social state, man-stealing, piracy, human sacrifice, polygamy, cannibalism, and crimes of revenge that are unmentionable. A personal interpretation, such as man in his infancy resorts to, is embodied in circumstances suitable to a savage time. It was not until a later period that allegorical phantasms, such as Death, and Sleep, and Dreams were introduced, and still later when the whole system was affected by Lydian, Phrygian, Assyrian, and Egyptian ideas.

Their gradual improvement in the historic times.

Not only thus from their intrinsic nature, but also from their recorded gradual development, are we warranted in imputing to the greater part of the myths an indigenous origin. The theogony of Homer is extended by Hesiod in many essential points. He prefixes the dynasty of Uranos, and differs in minor conceptions, as in the character of the Cyclops. The Orphic theogony is again another advance, having new fictions and new personages, as in the case of Zagreus, the horned child of Jupiter by his own daughter Persephone. Indeed, there is hardly one of the great and venerable gods of Olympus whose character does not change with his age, and, seen from this point of view, the origin of the Ionic philosophy becomes a necessary step in the advance. That philosophy, as we shall soon find, was due not only to the expansion of the Greek intellect and the necessary The inevitable tendency is to the Ionic philosophy. improvement of Greek morals; an extraneous cause, the sudden opening of the Egyptian ports, 670 B.C., accelerated it. European religion became more mysterious and more solemn. European philosophy learned the error of its chronology, and the necessity of applying a more strict and correct standard of evidence for ancient events.

It was an ominous circumstance that the Ionian Greeks, who first began to philosophize, commenced their labours by depersonifying the elements, and treating not of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, but of Air, Water, Fire. The destruction of theological conceptions led irresistibly to the destruction of religious practices. To divinities whose existence he denied, the philosopher ceased to pray. Of what use were sacrificial offerings and entreaties directed to phantasms of the imagination? but advantages might accrue from the physical study of the impersonal elements.

Inevitable destruction of Greek religious ideas

Greek religion contained within itself the principles of its own destruction. It is for the sake of thoroughly appreciating this that I have been led into a detail of what some of my readers may be disposed to regard as idle and useless myths. Two circumstances of inevitable occurrence insured the eventual overthrow of the whole system; they were geographical discovery and the rise of philosophical criticism. Our attention is riveted by the fact that, two thousand years later, the same thing again occurred on a greater scale.

by geographical discovery.

As to the geographical discovery, how was it possible that all the marvels of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, the sorcerers, enchanters, giants, and monsters of the deep, should survive when those seas were daily crossed in all directions? How was it possible that the notion of a flat earth, bounded by the horizon and bordered by the circumfluous ocean, could maintain itself when colonies were being founded in Gaul, and the Phœnicians were bringing tin from beyond the Pillars of Hercules? Moreover, it so happened that many of the most astounding prodigies were affirmed to be in the track which circumstances had now made the chief pathway of commerce. Not only was there a certainty of the destruction of mythical geography as thus presented on the plane of the earth looking upward to day; there was also an imminent risk, as many pious persons foresaw and dreaded, that what had been asserted as respects the interior, or the other face looking downward into night, would be involved in the ruin too. Well, therefore, might they make the struggle they did for the support of the ancient doctrine, taking the only course possible to them, of converting what had been affirmed to be actual events into allegories, under which, they said, the wisdom of ancient times had concealed many sacred and mysterious things. But it is apparent that a system forced to this necessity is fast hastening to its end.

Fictitious marvels replaced by grand actualities.

Nor was it maritime discovery only that thus removed fabulous prodigies and gave rise to new ideas. In due course of time the Macedonian expedition opened a new world to the Greeks and presented them with real wonders; climates in marvellous diversity, vast deserts, mountains covered with eternal snow, salt seas far from the ocean, colossal animals, and men of every shade of colour and every form of religion. The numerous Greek colonies founded all over Asia gave rise to an incessant locomotion, and caused these natural objects to make a profound and permanent impression on the Hellenic mind. If through the Bactrian empire European ideas were transmitted to the far East, through that and other similar channels Asiatic ideas found their way to Europe.

Development of Mediterranean commerce.

At the dawn of trustworthy history, the Phœnicians were masters of the Mediterranean Sea. Europe was altogether barbarous. On the very verge of Asiatic civilization the Thracians scalped their enemies and tattooed themselves; at the other end of the continent the Britons daubed their bodies with ochre and woad. Contemporaneous Egyptian sculptures show the Europeans dressed in skins like savages. It was the instinct of the Phœnicians everywhere to establish themselves on islands and coasts, and thus, for a long time, they maintained a maritime supremacy. By degrees a spirit of adventure was engendered among the Greeks. In 1250 B.C. they sailed round the Euxine, giving rise to the myth of the Argonautic voyage, and creating a profitable traffic in gold, dried fish, and corn. They had also become infamous for their freebooting practices. From every coast they stole men, women, and children, thereby maintaining a considerable slave-trade, the relic of which endures to our time in the traffic for Circassian women. Minos, King of Crete, tried to suppress these piracies. His attempts to obtain the dominion of the Mediterranean were imitated in succession by the Lydians, Thracians, Rhodians, the latter being the inventors of the first maritime code, subsequently incorporated into Roman law. The manner in which these and the inhabitants of other towns and islands supplanted one another shows on what trifling circumstances the dominion of the eastern basin depended. Meantime Tyrian seamen stealthily sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, visiting the Canaries and Azores, and bringing tin from the British Islands. They used every precaution to keep their secret to themselves. The adventurous Greeks followed those mysterious navigators step by step; but in the time of Homer they were so restricted to the eastern basin that Italy may be said to have been to them an unknown land. The Phocæans first explored the western basin; one of their colonies built Marseilles. At length Coleus of Samos passed through the frowning gateway of Hercules into the circumfluous sea, the Atlantic Ocean. No little interest attaches to the first colonial cities; they dotted the shores from Sinope to Saguntum, and were at once trading depôts and foci of wealth. In the earliest times the merchant was his own captain, and sold his commodities by auction at the place to which he came. The primitive and profitable commerce of the Mediterranean was peculiar—it was for slaves, mineral products, and articles of manufacture; for, running coincident with parallels of latitude, its agricultural products were not very varied, and the wants of its populations the same. But tin was brought from the Cassiterides, amber from the Baltic, and dyed goods and worked metals from Syria. Wherever these trades centred, the germs of taste and intelligence were developed; thus the Etruscans, in whose hands was the amber trade across Germany, have left many relics of their love of art. Though a mysterious, they were hardly a gloomy race, as a great modern author has supposed, if we may judge from their beautiful remains.

Effect of philosophical criticism.

Added to the effect of geographical discovery was the development of philosophical criticism. It is observed that soon after the first Olympiad the Greek intellect very rapidly expanded. Whenever man reaches a certain point in his mental progress, he will not be satisfied with less than an application of existing rules to ancient events. Experience has taught him that the course of the world to-day is the same as it was yesterday; he unhesitatingly believes that this will also hold good for to-morrow. He will not bear to contemplate any break in the mechanism of history; he will not be satisfied with a mere uninquiring faith, but insists upon having the same voucher for an old fact that he requires for one that is new. Before the face of History Mythology cannot stand.

Secession of literary men from the public faith.

The operation of this principle is seen in all directions throughout Greek literature after the date that has been mentioned, and this the more strikingly as the time is later. The national intellect became more and more ashamed of the fables it had believed in its infancy. Of the legends, some are allegorized, some are modified, some are repudiated. The great tragedians accept the myths in the aggregate, but decline them in particulars; some of the poets transform or allegorize them; some use them ornamentally, as graceful decorations. It is evident that between the educated and the vulgar classes a divergence is taking place, that the best men of the times see the necessity of either totally abandoning these cherished fictions to the lower orders, or of gradually replacing them with something more suitable. Such a frittering away of sacred things was, however, very far from meeting with public approbation in Athens itself, although so many people in that city had reached that state of mental development in which it was impossible for them to continue to accept the national faith. They tried to force themselves to believe that there must be something true in that which had been believed by so many great and pious men of old, which had approved itself by lasting so many centuries, and of which it was by the common people asserted that absolute demonstration could be given. But it was in vain; intellect had outgrown faith. They had come into that condition to which all men are liable—aware of the fallacy of their opinions, yet angry that another should remind them thereof. When the social state no longer permitted them to take the life of a philosophical offender, they found means to put upon him such an invisible pressure as to present him the choice of orthodoxy or beggary. Thus they disapproved of Euripides permitting his characters to indulge in any sceptical reflections, and discountenanced the impiety so obvious in the 'Prometheus Bound' of Æschylus. It was by appealing to this sentiment that Aristophanes added no little to the excitement against Socrates. They who are doubting themselves are often loudest in public denunciations of a similar state in others.

Secession of the philosophers.

If thus the poets, submitting to common sense, had so rapidly fallen away from the national belief, the philosophers pursued the same course. It soon became the universal impression that there was an intrinsic opposition between philosophy and religion, and herein public opinion was not mistaken; the fact that polytheism furnished a religious explanation for every natural event made it essentially antagonistic to science. It was the uncontrollable advance of knowledge that overthrew Greek religion. Socrates himself never hesitated to denounce physics for that tendency; and the Athenians extended his principles to his own pursuits, their strong common sense telling them that the philosophical cultivation of ethics must be equally bad. He was not loyal to science, but sought to support his own views by exciting a theological odium against his competitors—a crime that educated men ought never to forgive. In the tragedy that ensued the Athenians only paid him in his own coin. The immoralities imputed to the gods were doubtless strongly calculated to draw the attention of reflecting men, but the essential nature of the pursuit in which the Ionian and Italian schools were engaged bore directly on the doctrine of a providential government of the world. It not only turned into a fiction the time-honoured dogma of the omnipresence of the Olympian divinities—it even struck at their very existence, by leaving them nothing to do. For those personifications it introduced impersonal nature or the elements. Instead of uniting scientific interpretations to ancient traditions, it modified and moulded the old traditions to suit the apparent requirements of science. We shall subsequently see what was the necessary issue of this—the Divinity became excluded from the world he had made, the supernatural merged in natural agency; Zeus was superseded by the air, Poseidon by the water; and while some of the philosophers received in silence the popular legends, as was the case with Socrates, or, like Plato, regarded it as a patriotic duty to accept the public faith, others, like Xenophanes, denounced the whole as an ancient blunder, converted by time into a national imposture.

Antagonism of science and polytheism.

As I shall have occasion to speak of Greek philosophy in a detailed manner, it is unnecessary to enter into other particulars here. For the present purpose it is enough to understand that it was radically opposed to the national faith in all countries and at all times, from its origin with Thales down to the latest critic of the Alexandrian school.

Secession of historians.

As it was with philosophers, so it was with historians; the rise of true history brought the same result as the rise of true philosophy. In this instance there was added a special circumstance which gave to the movement no little force. Whatever might be the feigned facts of the Grecian foretime, they were altogether outdone in antiquity and wonder by the actual history of Egypt. What was a pious man like Herodotus to think when he found that, at the very period he had supposed a superhuman state of things in his native country, the ordinary passage of affairs was taking place on the banks of the Nile? And so indeed it had been for untold ages. To every one engaged in recording recent events, it must have been obvious that a chronology applied where the actors are superhuman is altogether without basis, and that it is a delusion to transfer the motives and thoughts of men to those who are not men. Under such circumstances there is a strong inducement to decline traditions altogether; for no philosophical mind will ever be satisfied with different tests for the present and the past, but will insist that actions and their sequences were the same in the foretime as now.

Universal disbelief of the learned.

Thus for many ages stood affairs. One after another, historians, philosophers, critics, poets, had given up the national faith, and lived under a pressure perpetually laid upon them by the public, adopting generally, as their most convenient course, an outward compliance with the religious requirements of the state. Herodotus cannot reconcile the inconsistencies of the Trojan War with his knowledge of human actions; Thucydides does not dare to express his disbelief of it; Eratosthenes sees contradictions between the voyage of Odysseus and the truths of geography; Anaxagoras is condemned to death for impiety, and only through the exertions of the chief of the state is his sentence mercifully commuted to banishment. Plato, seeing things from a very general point of view, thinks it expedient, upon the whole, to prohibit the cultivation of the higher branches of physics. Euripides tries to free himself from the imputation of heresy as best he may. Æschylus is condemned to be stoned to death for blasphemy, and is only saved by his brother Aminias raising his mutilated arm—he had lost his hand in the battle of Salamis. Socrates stands his trial, and has to drink hemlock. Even great statesmen like Pericles had become entangled in the obnoxious opinions. No one has anything to say in explanation of the marvellous disappearance of demigods and heroes, why miracles are ended, or why human actions alone are now to be seen in the world. An ignorant public demands the instant punishment of every suspected man. In their estimation, to distrust the traditions of the past is to be guilty of treason to the present.

Attempts at a reformation.

But all this confusion and dissent did not arise without an attempt among well-meaning men at a reformation. Some, and they were, perhaps, the most advanced intellectually, wished that the priests should abstain from working any more miracles; that relics should be as little used as was consistent with the psychical demands of the vulgar, and should be gradually abandoned; that philosophy should no longer be outraged with the blasphemous anthropomorphisms of the Olympian deities. Some, less advanced, were disposed to reconcile all difficulties by regarding the myths as allegorical; some wished to transform them so as to bring them into harmony with the existing social state; some would give them altogether new interpretations. With one, though the fact of a Trojan War is not to be denied, it was only the eidolon of Helen whom Paris carried away; with another expressions, perhaps once intended to represent actual events, are dwindled into mere forms of speech. Unwilling to reject the attributes of the Olympian divinities, their human passions and actions, another asserts that they must once have all existed as men. While one denounces the impudent atheists who find fault with the myths of the Iliad, ignorant of its allegorical meaning, another resolves all its heroes into the elements; and still another, hoping to reconcile to the improved moral sense of the times the indecencies and wickednesses of the gods, imputes them all to demons; an idea which found much favour at first, but became singularly fatal to polytheism in the end.

Inveterate superstition of the vulgar.

In apparent inconsistency with this declining state of belief in the higher classes, the multitude, without concern, indulged in the most surprising superstitions. With them it was an age of relics, of weeping statues, and winking pictures. The tools with which the Trojan horse was made might still be seen at Metapontum, the sceptre of Pelops was still preserved at Chæroneia, the spear of Achilles at Phaselis, the sword of Memnon at Nicomedia; the Tegeates could still show the hide of the Calydonian boar, very many cities boasted their possession of the true palladium from Troy. There were statues of Athene that could brandish spears, paintings that could blush, images that could sweat, and numberless shrines and sanctuaries at which miracle-cures were performed. Into the hole through which the deluge of Deucalion receded the Athenians still poured a customary sacrifice of honey and meal. He would have been an adventurous man who risked any observation as to its inadequate size. And though the Their jealous intolerance of doubts. sky had been proved to be only space and stars, and not the firm floor of Olympus, he who had occasion to refer to the flight of the gods from mountain tops into heaven would find it to his advantage to make no astronomical remark. No adverse allusions to the poems of Homer, Arctinus, or Lesches were tolerated; he who perpetrated the blasphemy of depersonifying the sun went in peril of death. It was not permitted that natural phenomena should be substituted for Zeus and Poseidon; whoever was suspected of believing that Helios and Selene were not gods, would do well to purge himself to public satisfaction. The people vindicated their superstition in spite of all geographical and physical difficulties, and, far from concerning themselves with the contradictions which had exerted such an influence on the thinking classes, practically asserted the needlessness of any historical evidence.

Slowness of the decline and fall of Polytheism.

It is altogether erroneous to suppose that polytheism maintained its ground as a living force until the period of Constantine and Julian. Its downfall commenced at the time of the opening of the Egyptian ports. Nearly a thousand years were required for its consummation. The change first occurred among the higher classes, and made its way slowly through the middle ranks of society. For many centuries the two agencies—geographical discovery, arising from increasing commerce and the Macedonian expedition, and philosophical criticism—silently continued their incessant work, and yet it does not appear that they could ever produce a change in the lowest and most numerous division of the social grade. In process of time, a third influence was added to the preceding two, enabling them to address themselves even to the humblest rank of life; The secondary causes of its downfall. this influence was the rise of the Roman power. It produced a wonderful activity all over the Mediterranean Sea and throughout the adjoining countries. It insured perpetual movements in all directions. Where there had been only a single traveller there were now a thousand legionaries, merchants, government officials, with their long retinues of dependents and slaves. Where formerly it was only the historian or philosopher in his retirement who compared or contrasted the laws and creeds, habits and customs of different nations incorrectly reported, now the same things were vividly brought under the personal observation of multitudes. The crowd of gods and goddesses congregated in Rome served only to bring one another into disrepute and ridicule.

The alarm of good and religious men.

Long, therefore, previous to the triumph of Christianity, paganism must be considered as having been irretrievably ruined. Doubtless it was the dreadful social prospect before them—the apparent impossibility of preventing the whole world from falling into a totally godless state, that not only reconciled so many great men to give their support to the ancient system, but even to look without disapprobation on that physical violence to which the uneducated multitude, incapable of judging, were so often willing to resort. They never anticipated that any new system could be introduced which should take the place of the old, worn-out one; they had no idea that relief in this respect was so close at hand; unless, perhaps, it might have been Plato, who, profoundly recognizing that, though it is a Plato's remedy for the evil. hard and tedious process to change radically the ideas of common men, yet that it is easy to persuade them to accept new names if they are permitted to retain old things, proposed that a regenerated system should be introduced, with ideas and forms suited to the existing social state, prophetically asserting that the world would very soon become accustomed to it, and give to it an implicit adhesion.

The Greek movement has been repeated on a greater scale by all Europe.

In this description of the origin and decline of Greek religion I have endeavoured to bring its essential features into strong relief. Its fall was not sudden, as many have supposed, neither was it accomplished by extraneous violence. There was a slow, and, it must be emphatically added, a spontaneous decline. But, if the affairs of men pass in recurring cycles—if the course of events with one individual has a resemblance to the course of events with another—if there be analogies in the progress of nations, and circumstances reappear after due periods of time, the succession of events thus displayed before us in the intellectual history of Greece may perhaps be recognised again in grander proportions on the theatre of all Europe. If there is for the human mind a predetermined order of development, may we not reasonably expect that the phenomena we have thus been noticing on a small scale in a single nation will reappear on the great scale in a continent; that the philosophical study of this history of the past will not only serve as an interpretation of many circumstances in the history of Europe in the Dark and Middle Ages, but will also be a guide to us in pointing out future events as respects all mankind? For, though it is true that the Greek intellectual movement was anticipated, as respects its completion, by being enveloped and swallowed up in the slower but more gigantic movements of the southern European mind, just as a little expanding circle upon the sea may be obliterated and borne away by more imposing and impetuous waves, so even the movement of a continent may be lost in the movement of a world. It was criticism and physical discovery, and intellectual activity, arising from political concentration, that so profoundly affected the modes of Grecian thought, and criticism and discovery have within the last four hundred years done the same in all Europe. To one who forms his expectations of the future from the history of the past—who recalls the effect produced by the establishment of the Roman empire, in permitting free personal intercommunication among all the Mediterranean nations, and thereby not only destroying the ancient forms of thought which for centuries had resisted all other means of attack, but also replacing them by a homogeneous idea—it must be apparent that the wonderfully increased facilities for locomotion, the inventions of our own age, are the ominous precursors of a vast philosophical revolution.

The organization of hypocrisy.

Between that period during which a nation has been governed by its imagination and that in which it submits to reason, there is a melancholy interval. The constitution of man is such that, for a long time after he has discovered the incorrectness of the ideas prevailing around him, he shrinks from openly emancipating himself from their dominion, and, constrained by the force of circumstances, he becomes a hypocrite, publicly applauding what his private judgment condemns. Where a nation is making this passage, so universal do these practices become that it may be truly said hypocrisy is organized. It is possible that whole communities might be found living in this deplorable state. Such, I conceive, must have been the case in many parts of the Roman empire just before the introduction of Christianity. Even after ideas have given way in public opinion, their political power may outlive their intellectual vigour, and produce the disgraceful effect we here consider.

It is not to be concealed, however, that, to some extent, this evil is incident to the position of things. Indeed, it would be unfortunate if national hypocrisy could not find a better excuse for itself than in that of the individual. In civilized life, society is ever under the imperious necessity of moving onward in legal forms, nor can such forms be avoided without the most serious disasters ensuing. To absolve communities too abruptly from the restraints of ancient ideas is not to give them liberty, but to throw them into political vagabondism, and hence it is that great statesmen will authorize and even compel observances the essential significance of which has disappeared, and the intellectual basis of which has been undermined. Truth reaches her full action by degrees, and not at once; she first operates upon the reason, the influence being purely intellectual and individual; she then extends her sphere, exerting a moral control, particularly through public opinion; at last she gathers for herself physical and political force. It is in the time consumed in this gradual passage that organized hypocrisy prevails. To bring nations to surrender themselves to new ideas is not the affair of a day.

CHAPTER III.

DIGRESSION ON HINDU THEOLOGY AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION.

Comparative Theology of India; its Phase of Sorcery; its Anthropocentric Phase.

Vedaism the Contemplation of Matter, or Adoration of Nature, set forth in the Vedas and Institutes of Menu.—The Universe is God.—Transmutation of the World.—Doctrine of Emanation.—Transmigration.—Absorption.—Penitential Services.—Happiness in Absolute Quietude.

Buddhism the Contemplation of Force.—The supreme impersonal Power.—Nature of the World—of Man.—The Passage of every thing to Nonentity.—Development of Buddhism into a vast monastic System marked by intense Selfishness.—Its practical Godlessness.

Egypt a mysterious Country to the old Europeans.—Its History, great public Works, and foreign Relations.—Antiquity of its Civilization and Art.—Its Philosophy, hieroglyphic Literature, and peculiar Agriculture.

Rise of Civilization in rainless Countries.—Geography, Geology, and Topography of Egypt—The Inundations of the Nile lead to Astronomy.

Comparative Theology of Egypt.—Animal Worship, Star Worship.—Impersonation of Divine Attributes—Pantheism.—The Trinities of Egypt.—Incarnation.—Redemption.—Future Judgment.—Trial of the Dead.—Rituals and Ceremonies.

At this stage of our examination of European intellectual development, it will be proper to consider briefly two foreign influences—Indian and Egyptian—which affected it.

Of Hindu philosophy.

From the relations existing between the Hindu and European families, as described in the preceding chapter, a comparison of their intellectual progress presents no little interest. The movement of the elder branch indicates the path through which the younger is travelling, and the goal to which it tends. In the advanced condition under which we live we notice Oriental ideas perpetually emerging in a fragmentary way from the obscurities of modern metaphysics—they are the indications of an intellectual phase through which the Indo-European mind must pass. And when we consider the ready manner in which these ideas have been adopted throughout China and the entire East, we may, perhaps, extend our conclusion from the Indo-European family to the entire human race. From this we may also infer how unphilosophical and vain is the expectation of those who would attempt to restore the aged populations of Asia to our state. Their intellectual condition has passed onward, never more to return. It remains for them only to advance as far as they may in their own line and to die, leaving their place to others of a different constitution and of a renovated blood. In life there is no going back; the morose old man can never resume the genial confidence of maturity; the youth can never return to the idle and useless occupations, the frivolous amusements of boyhood; even the boy is parted by a long step from the innocent credulity of the nursery.

The phase of sorcery, and anthropocentric phase.

The earlier stages of the comparative theology of India are now inaccessible. At a time so remote as to be altogether prehistoric the phase of sorcery had been passed through. In the most ancient records remaining the Hindu mind is dealing with anthropocentric conceptions, not, however, so much of the physical as of the moral kind. Man had come to the conclusion that his chief concern is with himself. "Thou wast alone at the time of thy birth, thou wilt be alone in the moment of death; alone thou must answer at the bar of the inexorable Judge."

Comparative theology advances in two directions—Matter, Force.
Vedaism contemplates matter, Buddhism force.

From this point there are two well-marked steps of advance. The first reaches the consideration of material nature; the second, which is very grandly and severely philosophical, contemplates the universe under the conceptions of space and force alone. The former is exemplified in the Vedas and Institutes of Menu, the latter in Buddhism. In neither of these stages do the ideas lie idle as mere abstractions; they introduce a moral plan, and display a constructive power not equalled even by the Italian papal system. They take charge not only of the individual, but regulate society, and show their influence in accomplishing political organizations, commanding our attention from their prodigious extent, and venerable for their antiquity.

I shall, therefore, briefly refer, first, to the older, Vedaism, and then to its successor, Buddhism.

Among a people possessing many varieties of climate, and familiar with some of the grandest aspects of Nature—mountains the highest upon earth, noble rivers, a vegetation Vedaism is the adoration of Nature. incomparably luxuriant, periodical rains, tempestuous monsoons, it is not surprising that there should have been an admiration for the material, and a tendency to the worship of Nature. These spectacles leave an indelible impression on the thoughts of man, and, the more cultivated the mind, the more profoundly are they appreciated.

The Vedas, which are the Hindu Scriptures, and of which there are four, the Rig, Yagust, Saman and Atharvan, are asserted to have been revealed by Brahma. The fourth is, however, rejected by some authorities and bears internal evidence of The Vedas and their doctrines. a later composition, at a time when hierarchical power had become greatly consolidated. These works are written in an obsolete Sanscrit, the parent of the more recent idiom. They constitute the basis of an extensive literature, Upavedas, Angas, &c., of connected works and commentaries. For the most part they consist of hymns suitable for public and private occasions, prayers, precepts, legends, and dogmas. The Rig, which is the oldest, is composed chiefly of hymns, the other three of liturgical formulas. They are of different periods and of various authorship, internal evidence seeming to indicate that if the later The Veda doctrine of God, were composed by priests, the earlier were the production of military chieftains. They answer to a state of society advanced from the nomad to the municipal condition. They are based upon an acknowledgment of a universal Spirit pervading all things. Of this God they therefore necessarily acknowledge the unity: "There is in truth but one Deity, the Supreme Spirit, the Lord of the universe, whose work is the universe." "The God above all gods, who created the earth, the and of the world. heavens, the waters." The world, thus considered as an emanation of God, is therefore a part of him; it is kept in a visible state by his energy, and would instantly disappear if that energy were for a moment withdrawn. Even as it is, it is undergoing unceasing transformations, every thing being in a transitory condition. The moment a given phase is reached, it is departed from, or ceases. In these perpetual movements the present can scarcely be said to have any existence, for as the Past is ending the Future has begun.

Its transformation.

In such a never-ceasing career all material things are urged, their forms continually changing, and returning as it were, through revolving cycles to similar states. For this reason it is that we may regard our earth, and the various celestial bodies, as having had a moment of birth, as having a time of continuance, in which they are passing onward to an inevitable destruction, and that after the lapse of countless ages similar progresses will be made, and similar series of events will occur again and again.

It is the visi-semblance of God.

But in this doctrine of universal transformation there is something more than appears at first. The theology of India is underlaid with Pantheism. "God is One because he is All." The Vedas, in speaking of the relation of nature to God, make use of the expression that he is the Material as well as the Cause of the universe, "the Clay as well as the Potter." They convey the idea that while there is a pervading spirit existing everywhere of the same nature as the soul of man, though differing from it infinitely in degree, visible nature is essentially and inseparably connected therewith; that as in man the body is perpetually undergoing changes, perpetually decaying and being renewed, or, as in the case of the whole human species, nations come into existence and pass away, yet still there continues to exist what may be termed the universal human mind, so for ever associated and for ever connected are the material and the spiritual. And under this aspect we must contemplate the Supreme Being, not merely as a presiding intellect, but as illustrated by the parallel case of man, whose mental principle shows no tokens except through its connexion with the body; so matter, or nature, or the visible universe, is to be looked upon as the corporeal manifestation of God.

The nature of mundane changes.

Secular changes taking place invisible objects, especially those of an astronomical kind, thus stand as the gigantic counterparts both as to space and time of the microscopic changes which we recognize as occurring in the body of man. However, in adopting these views of the relations of material nature and spirit, we must continually bear in mind that matter "has no essence independent of mental perception; that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms; that external appearances and sensations are illusory, and would vanish into nothing if the divine energy which alone sustains them were suspended but for a moment."

Of the soul of man.

As to the relation between the Supreme Being and man, the soul is a portion or particle of that all-pervading principle, the Universal Intellect or Soul of the World, detached for a while from its primitive source, and placed in connexion with the bodily frame, but destined by an inevitable necessity sooner or later to be restored and rejoined—as inevitably as rivers run Its final absorption in God. back to be lost in the ocean from which they arose. "That Spirit," says Varuna to his son, "from which all created beings proceed, in which, having proceeded, they live, toward which they tend, and in which they are at last absorbed, that Spirit study to know: it is the Great One." Since a multitude of moral considerations assure us of the existence of evil in the world, and since it is not possible for so holy a thing as the spirit of man to be exposed thereto without undergoing contamination, it comes to pass that an unfitness may be contracted for its rejoining the infinitely pure essence from which it Of purifying penances, was derived, and hence arises the necessity of its undergoing a course of purification. And as the life of man is often too short to afford the needful opportunity, and, indeed, its events, in many instances, tend rather to increase than to diminish the stain, the season of purification is prolonged by perpetuating a connexion of the sinful spirit with other forms, and permitting its transmigration to other bodies, in which, by the penance it undergoes, and the trials to which it is exposed, its iniquity may be washed away, and satisfactory preparation be made for its absorption in the ocean of infinite purity. Considering thus the and transmigration of souls. relation in which all animated nature stands to us, being a mechanism for purification, this doctrine of the transmigration of the soul leads necessarily to other doctrines of a moral kind, more particularly to a profound respect for life under every form, human, animal, or insect.

The religious use of animal life.

The forms of animal life, therefore, furnish a grand penitential mechanism for man. Such, on these principles, is their teleological explanation. In European philosophy there is no equivalent or counterpart of this view. With us animal life is purposeless. Hereafter we shall find that in Egypt, though the doctrine of transmigration must of course have tended to similar suggestions, it became disturbed in its practical application by the base fetich notions of the indigenous African population. Hence the doctrine was cherished by the learned for philosophical reasons, and by the multitude for the harmony of its results with their idolatries.

Of proper modes of devotion.

From such theological dogmas a religious system obviously springs having for its object to hasten the purification of the soul, that it may the more quickly enter on absolute happiness, which is only to be found in absolute rest. The methods of shortening its wanderings and bringing it to repose are the exercises of a pious life, penance, and prayer, and more especially a profound contemplation of the existence and attributes of the Supreme Being. In this profound contemplation many holy men have passed their lives.

Such is a brief statement of Vedic theology, as exhibited in the connected doctrines of the Nature of God, Universal Animation, Transmutation of the World, Emanation of the Soul, Manifestation of Visible Things, Transmigration, Absorption, the uses of Penitential Services, and Contemplation for the attainment of Absolute Happiness in Absolute Rest. The Vedas also recognize a series of creatures superior to man, the gods of the elements and stars; they likewise personify the attributes of the Deity. The three Vedic divinities, Agni, Indra, and Surya, are Minor Vedic doctrine. not to be looked upon as existing independently, for all spirits are comprehended in the Universal Soul. The later Hindu trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, is not recognized by them. They do not authorize the worship of deified men, nor of images, nor of any visible forms. They admit the adoration of subordinate spirits, as those of the planets, or of the demigods who inhabit the air, the waters, the woods; these demigods are liable to death. They inculcate universal charity—charity even to an enemy: "The tree doth not withdraw its shade from the woodcutter." Prayers are to be made thrice a day, morning, noon, evening; fasting is ordained, and ablution before meals; the sacrificial offerings consist of flowers, fruits, money. Considered as a whole their religious tendency is selfish: it puts in prominence the baser motives, and seeks the gratification of the animal appetites, as food, pleasure, good fortune. They suggest no proselyting spirit, but rather adopt the principle that all religions must be equally acceptable to God, since, if it were otherwise, he would have instituted a single one, and, considering his omnipotence, none other could have possibly prevailed. They contain no authorization of the division of castes, which probably had arisen in the necessities of antecedent conquests, but which have imposed a perpetual obstacle to any social progress, keeping each class of society in an immovable state, and concentrating knowledge and power in a hierarchy. Neither in them, nor, it is affirmed, in the whole Indian literature, is there a single passage indicating a love of liberty. The Asiatics cannot understand what value there is in it. They have balanced Freedom against Security; they have deliberately preferred the latter, and left the former for Europe to sigh for. Liberty is alone appreciated in a life of action; but the life of Asia is essentially passive, its desire is for tranquillity. Some have affirmed that this imbecility is due to the fact that that continent has no true temperate zone, and that thus, for ages, the weak nations have been in contact with the strong, and therefore the hopeless aspirations for personal freedom have become extinct. But nations that are cut off from the sea, or that have accepted the dogma that to travel upon it is unholy, can never comprehend liberty. From the general tenor of the Vedas, it would appear that the condition of women was not so much restrained as it became in later times, and that monogamy was the ordinary state. From the great extent of these works, their various dates and authorship, it is not easy to deduce from them consistent principles, and their parts being without any connexion, complete copies are very scarce. They have undergone mutilation and restoration, so that great discordances have arisen.

The Institutes of Menu.

In the Institutes of Menu, a code of civil and religious law, written about the ninth century before Christ, though, like the Vedas, betraying a gradual origin, the doctrine of the Divine unity becomes more distinctly mixed up with Pantheistic ideas. They present a description of creation, of the nature of God, and contain prescribed rules for the duty of man in every station of life from the moment of birth to death. Their imperious regulations in all these minute details are a sufficient proof of the great development and paramount power to which the priesthood had now attained, but their morality is discreditable. They indicate a high civilization and demoralization, deal with crimes and a policy such as are incident to an advanced social condition. Their arbitrary and all-reaching spirit reminds one of the papal system; their recommendations to sovereigns, their authorization of immoralities, recall the state of Italian society as reflected in the works of Machiavelli. They hold learning in the most signal esteem, but concede to the prejudices of the illiterate in a worship of the gods with burnt-offerings of clarified butter and libations of the juices of plants. As respects the constitution of man, they make a distinction between the soul and the vital principle, asserting that it is the latter only which expiates sin by transmigration. They divide society into four castes—the priests, the military, the industrial, the servile. They make a Brahmin the chief of all created things, and order that his life shall be divided into four parts, one to be spent in abstinence, one in marriage, one as an anchorite, and one in profound meditation; he may then "quit the body as a bird leaves the branch of a tree." They vest the government of society in an absolute monarch, having seven councillors, who direct the internal administration by a chain of officials, the revenue being derived from a share of agricultural products, taxes on commerce, imposts on shopkeepers, and a service of one day in the month from labourers.

Both the Vedas and Institutes are pantheistic.

In their essential principles the Institutes therefore follow the Vedas, though, as must be the case in every system intended for men in the various stages of intellectual progress from the least advanced to the highest, they show a leaning toward popular delusions. Both are pantheistic, for both regard the universe as the manifestation of the Creator; both accept the doctrine of Emanation, teaching that the universe lasts only for a definite period of time, and then, the Divine energy being withdrawn, absorption of everything, even of the created gods, takes place, and thus, in great cycles of prodigious duration, many such successive emanations and absorptions of universe occur.

Disappearance of the philosophical classes, and consequent prominence of anthropocentric ideas.

The changes that have taken place among the orthodox in India since the period of the Institutes are in consequence of the diminution or disappearance of the highly philosophical classes, and the comparative predominance of the vulgar. They are stated by Mr. Elphinstone as a gradual oblivion of monotheism, the neglect of the worship of some gods and the introduction of others, the worship of deified mortals. The doctrine of human deification is carried to such an extent that Indra and other mythological gods are said to tremble lest they should be supplanted by men. This introduction of polytheism and use of images has probably been connected with the fact that there have been no temples to the Invisible God, and the uneducated mind feels the necessity of some recognizable form. In this manner the Trinitarian conception of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, with fourteen other chief gods, has been introduced. Vishnu and Siva are never mentioned in the Institutes, but they now engross the public devotions; besides these there are angels, genii, penates, and lares, like the Roman. Brahma has only one temple in all India, and has never been much worshipped. Chrishna is the great favourite of the women. The doctrine of incarnation has also become prevalent; the incarnations of Vishnu are innumerable. The opinion has also been spread that faith in a particular god is better than contemplation, ceremonial, or good works. A new ritual, instead of the Vedas, has come into use, these scriptures being the eighteen Puranas, composed between the eighth and sixteenth centuries. They contain theogonies, accounts of the creation, philosophical speculations, fragmentary history, and may be brought to support any sectarian view, having never been intended as one general body, but they are received as incontrovertible authority. In former times great efficacy was attached to sacrifice and religious austerities, but the objects once accomplished in that way are now compassed by mere faith. In the Baghavat Gita, the text-book of the modern school, the sole essential for salvation is dependence on some particular teacher, which makes up for everything else. The efficacy which is thus ascribed to faith, and the facility with which sin may be expiated by penance, have led to great mental debility and superstition. Force has been added to the doctrine of a material paradise of trees, flowers, banquets, hymns; and to a hell, a dismal place of flames, thirst, torment, and horrid spectres.

The philosophical schools.

If such has been the gradual degradation of religion, through the suppression or disappearance of the most highly cultivated minds, the tendency of philosophy is not less strikingly marked. It is said that even in ancient times not fewer than six distinct philosophical schools may be recognized: 1, the prior Mimansa; 2, the later Mimansa, or Vedanta, founded by Vyasa about 1400 B.C. having a Vedanta literature of prodigious extent; 3, the Logical school, bearing a close resemblance to that of Aristotle, even in its details; 4, the Atomic school of Canade; 5, the Atheistical school of Capila; 6, the Theistical school of Patanjali.

The rise of Buddhism.

This great theological system, enforced by a tyrannical hierarchy, did not maintain itself without a conflict. Buddhism arose as its antagonist. By an inevitable necessity, Vedaism must pass onward to Buddhism. The prophetic foresight of the great founder of this system was justified by its prodigious, its unparalleled and enduring success—a success that rested on the assertion of the dogma of the absolute equality of all men, and this in a country that for ages had been oppressed by castes. If the Buddhist admits the existence of God, it is not as a Creator, for matter is equally eternal; and since it possesses a property of inherent organization, even if the universe should perish, this quality would quickly restore it, and carry it on to new regenerations and new decays without any external agency. It also is endued with intelligence and consciousness. The Buddhists agree with the Brahmins in the doctrine of Quietism, in the care of animal life, in transmigration. They deny the Vedas and Puranas, have no castes, and, agreeably to their cardinal principle, draw their priests from all classes like the European monks. They live in monasteries, dress in yellow, go barefoot, their heads and beards being shaved; they have constant services in their chapels, chanting, incense, and candles; erect monuments and temples over the relics of holy men. They place an especial merit in celibacy; renounce all the pleasures of sense; eat in one hall; receive alms. To do these things is incident to a certain phase of human progress.

Life of Arddha Chiddi.

Buddhism arose about the tenth century before Christ, its founder being Arddha Chiddi, a native of Capila, near Nepaul. Of his epoch there are, however, many statements. The Avars, Siamese, and Cingalese fix it B.C. 600; the Cashmerians, B.C. 1332; the Chinese, Mongols, and Japanese, B.C. 1000. The Sanscrit words occurring in Buddhism attest its Hindu origin, Buddha itself being the Sanscrit for intelligence. After the system had spread widely in India, it was carried by missionaries into Ceylon, Tartary, Thibet, China, Japan, Burmah, and is now professed by a greater portion of the human race than any other religion. Until quite recently, the history of Arddha Chiddi and the system he taught have, notwithstanding their singular interest, been very imperfectly known in Europe. He was born in affluence and of a royal family. In his twenty-ninth year he retired from the world, the pleasures of which he had tasted, and of which he had become weary. The spectacle of a gangrened corpse first arrested his thoughts. Leaving his numerous wives, he became a religious mendicant. It is said that he walked about in a shroud, taken from the body of a female slave. Profoundly impressed with the vanity of all human affairs, he devoted himself to philosophical meditation, by severe self-denial emancipating himself from all worldly hopes and cares. When a man has brought himself to this pass he is able to accomplish great things. For the name by which his parents had called him he substituted that of Gotama, or "he who kills the senses," and subsequently Chakia Mouni, or the Penitent of Chakia. Under the shade of a tree Gotama was born; under the shade of a tree he overcame the love of the world and the fear of death; under the shade of a tree he preached his first sermon in the shroud; under the shade of a tree he died. In four months after he commenced his ministry he had five disciples; at the close of the year they had increased to twelve hundred. In the twenty-nine centuries that have passed since that time, they have given rise to sects counting millions of souls, outnumbering the followers of all other religious teachers. The system still seems to retain much of its pristine vigour; yet religions are perishable. There is no country, except India, which has the same religion now that it had at the birth of Christ.

The organization of Buddhism.

Gotama died at the advanced age of eighty years; his corpse was burnt eight days subsequently. But several years before this event his system must be considered as thoroughly established. It shows how little depends upon the nature of a doctrine, and how much upon effective organization, that Buddhism, the principles of which are far above the reach of popular thought, should have been propagated with so much rapidity, for it made its converts by preaching, and not, like Mohammedanism, by the sword. Shortly after Gotama's death, a council of five hundred ecclesiastics assembled for the purpose of settling the religion. A century later a second council met to regulate the monastic institution; and in B.C. 241, a third council, for the expulsion of fire-worshippers. Under the auspices of King Asoka, whose character presents singular points of resemblance to that of the Roman emperor who summoned the Council of Nicea, for he, too, was the murderer of his own family, and has been handed down to posterity, because of the success of the policy of his party, as a great, a virtuous, and a pious sovereign—under his auspices missionaries were sent out in all directions, and monasteries richly endowed were everywhere established. The singular efficacy of monastic institutions was rediscovered in Europe many centuries subsequently.

In proclaiming the equality of all men in this life, the Buddhists, as we have seen, came into direct collision with the orthodox creed of India, long carried out into practice in the institution of castes—a collision that was embittered by the abhorrence the Buddhists displayed for any distinction between the clergy and laity. To be a Brahmin a man must be born one, but a Buddhist priest might voluntarily come from any rank—from the very dregs of society. In the former system marriage was absolutely Contest between the Brahmans and Buddhists. essential to the ecclesiastical caste; in the latter it was not, for the priestly ranks could be recruited without it. And hence there followed a most important advantage, that celibacy and chastity might be extolled as the greatest of all the virtues. The experience of Europe, as well as of Asia, has shown how powerful is the control obtained by the hierarchy in that way. In India there was, therefore, no other course for the orthodox than to meet the danger with bloody persecutions, and in the end, the Buddhists, expelled from their native seats, were scattered throughout Eastern Asia. Persecution is the mother of proselytes.

Buddhism is founded on the conception of Power or Force.

The fundamental principle of Buddhism is that there is a supreme power, but no Supreme Being. From this it might be inferred that they who adopt such a creed cannot be pantheists, but must be atheists. It is a rejection of the idea of Being, an acknowledgment of that of Force. If it admits the existence of God, it declines him as a Creator. It asserts an impelling power in the universe, a self-existent and plastic principle, but not a self-existent, an eternal, a personal God. It rejects inquiry into first causes as being unphilosophical, and considers that phenomena alone can be dealt with by our finite minds. Not without an air of intellectual majesty, it tolerates the Asiatic time-consecrated idea of a trinity, pointing out one not of a corporeal, but of an impersonal kind. Its trinity is the Past, the Present, the Future. It does not recognize a personal God, For the sake of aiding our thoughts, it images the Past with his hands folded, since he has attained to rest, but the others with their right hands extended in token of activity. Since he has no God, the Buddhist cannot expect absorption; the pantheistic Brahmin looks forward to the return of his soul to the Supreme Being as a drop of rain returns to the sea. The Buddhist has no religion, but only a ceremonial. How can there be a religion where there is no God?