Further, the same reviewer shows us many of the identical ideas and all the material requisite to demonstrate the great discoveries of Tyndall and Huxley, in the works of Dr. Joseph Priestley, author of Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, and even in Herder’s Philosophy of History.
“Priestley,” adds the author, “was not molested by government, simply because he had no ambition to obtain fame by proclaiming his atheistic views from the house-top. This philosopher ... was the author of from seventy to eighty volumes, and the discoverer of oxygen.” It is in these works that “he puts forward those identical ideas which have been declared so ‘startling,’ ‘bold,’ etc., as the utterances of our present-day philosophers.”
“Our readers,” he proceeds to say, “remember what an excitement has been created by the utterances of some of our modern philosophers as to the origin and nature of ideas, but those utterances, like others that preceded and followed them, contain nothing new.” “An idea,” says Plutarch, “is a being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of its manifestation” (De Placitio Philosophorum).
Verily, no modern atheist, Mr. Huxley included, can outvie Epicurus in materialism; he can but mimic him. And what is his “protoplasm,” but a rechauffé of the speculations of the Hindu Swâbhâvikas or Pantheists, who assert that all things, the gods as well as men and animals, are born from Swâbhâva or their own nature?[416] As to Epicurus, this is what Lucretius makes him say: “The soul, thus produced, must be material, because we trace it issuing from a material source; because it exists, and exists alone in a material system; is nourished by material food; grows with the growth of the body; becomes matured with its maturity; declines with its decay; and hence, whether belonging to man or brute, must die with its death.” Nevertheless, we would remind the reader that Epicurus is here speaking of the Astral Soul, not of Divine Spirit. Still, if we rightly understand the above, Mr. Huxley’s “mutton-protoplasm” is of a very ancient origin, and can claim for its birthplace, Athens, and for its cradle, the brain of old Epicurus.
Further, still, anxious not to be misunderstood or found guilty of depreciating the labor of any of our scientists, the author closes his essay by remarking, “We merely want to show that, at least, that portion of the public which considers itself intelligent and enlightened should cultivate its memory, or remember the ‘advanced’ thinkers of the past much better than it does. Especially should those do so who, whether from the desk, the rostrum, or the pulpit, undertake to instruct all willing to be instructed by them. There would then be much less groundless apprehension, much less charlatanism, and above all, much less plagiarism, than there is.”[417]
Truly says Cudworth that the greatest ignorance of which our modern wiseacres accuse the ancients is their belief in the soul’s immortality. Like the old skeptic of Greece, our scientists—to use an expression of the same Dr. Cudworth—are afraid that if they admit spirits and apparitions they must admit a God too; and there is nothing too absurd, he adds, for them to suppose, in order to keep out the existence of God. The great body of ancient materialists, skeptical as they now seem to us, thought otherwise, and Epicurus, who rejected the soul’s immortality, believed still in a God, and Demokritus fully conceded the reality of apparitions. The preëxistence and God-like powers of the human spirit were believed in by most all the sages of ancient days. The magic of Babylon and Persia based upon it the doctrine of their machagistia. The Chaldean Oracles, on which Pletho and Psellus have so much commented, constantly expounded and amplified their testimony. Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Empedocles, Kebes, Euripides, Plato, Euclid, Philo, Boëthius, Virgil, Marcus Cicero, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Psellus, Synesius, Origen, and, finally, Aristotle himself, far from denying our immortality, support it most emphatically. Like Cardon and Pompanatius, “who were no friends to the soul’s immortality,” as says Henry More, “Aristotle expressly concludes that the rational soul is both a distinct being from the soul of the world, though of the same essence, and that “it does preëxist before it comes into the body.”[418]
Years have rolled away since the Count Joseph De Maistre wrote a sentence which, if appropriate to the Voltairean epoch in which he lived, applies with still more justice to our period of utter skepticism. “I have heard,” writes this eminent man, “I have heard and read of myriads of good jokes on the ignorance of the ancients, who were always seeing spirits everywhere; methinks that we are a great deal more imbecile than our forefathers, in never perceiving any such now, anywhere.”[419]
CHAPTER VIII.
“Think not my magic wonders wrought by aid
Of Stygian angels summoned up from Hell;