A. Jesus Christ.”
There is a passage not less apposite in Donne's Epistle to Sir Edward, afterwards Lord Herbert of Cherbury.
Man is a lump where all beasts kneaded be;
Wisdom makes him an Ark where all agree.
The fool in whom these beasts do live at jar,
Is sport to others and a theatre;
Nor 'scapes he so, but is himself their prey,
All that was man in him is ate away;
And now his beasts on one another feed,
Yet couple in anger and new monsters breed.
How happy he which hath due place assign'd
To his beasts, and disaforested his mind,
Empaled himself to keep them out, not in;
Can sow and dares trust corn where they have been,
Can use his horse, goat, wolf and every beast,
And is not ass himself to all the rest.
To this purport the Patriarch of the Quakers writes where he saith “now some men have the nature of Swine, wallowing in the mire: and some men have the nature of Dogs, to bite both the sheep and one another: and some men have the nature of Lions, to tear, devour and destroy: and some men have the nature of Wolves, to tear and devour the lambs and sheep of Christ: and some men have the nature of the Serpent (that old destroyer) to sting, envenom and poison. He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear, and learn these things within himself. And some men have the natures of other beasts and creatures, minding nothing but earthly and visible things, and feeding without the fear of God. Some men have the nature of an Horse, to prance and vapour in their strength, and to be swift in doing evil. And some men have the nature of tall sturdy Oaks, to flourish and spread in wisdom and strength, who are strong in evil, which must perish and come to the fire. Thus the Evil is but one in all, but worketh many ways; and whatsoever a Man's or Woman's nature is addicted to that is outward, the Evil one will fit him with that, and will please his nature and appetite, to keep his mind in his inventions, and in the creatures from the Creator.”
To this purport the so-called Clemens writes in the Apostolical Constitutions when he complains that the flock of Christ was devoured by Demons and wicked men, or rather not men but wild beasts in the shape of men, πονηροῖς ἀνθρώποις, μᾶλλον δὲ οὐκ ἀνθρώποις, ἀλλὰ θηρίοις ἀνθρωποείδεσιν, by Heathens, Jews and godless heretics.
With equal triumph too did he read a passage in one of the numbers of the Connoisseur, which made him wonder that the writer from whom it proceeded in levity should not have been led on by it to the clear perception of a great truth. “The affinity,” says that writer, who is now known to have been no less a person than the author of the Task, “the affinity between chatterers and monkeys, and praters and parrots, is too obvious not to occur at once. Grunters and growlers may be justly compared to hogs. Snarlers are curs that continually shew their teeth, but never bite; and the spitfire passionate are a sort of wild cats, that will not bear stroking, but will purr when they are pleased. Complainers are screech-owls; and story-tellers always repeating the same dull note are cuckoos. Poets that prick up their ears at their own hideous braying are no better than asses; critics in general are venomous serpents that delight in hissing; and some of them, who have got by heart a few technical terms without knowing their meaning, are no better than magpies.”
So too the polyonomous Arabian philosopher Zechariah Ben Mohammed Ben Mahmud Al Camuni Al Cazvini. “Man,” he says, “partakes of the nature of vegetables, because like them he grows and is nourished; he stands in this farther relation to the irrational animals, that he feels and moves; by his intellectual faculties he resembles the higher orders of intelligences, and he partakes more or less of these various classes, as his inclination leads him. If his sole wish be to satisfy the wants of existence, then he is content to vegetate. If he partakes more of the animal than the vegetable nature, we find him fierce as the lion, greedy as the bull, impure as the hog, cruel as the leopard, or cunning as the fox; and if as is sometimes the case, he possesses all these bad qualities, he is then a demon in human shape.”
Gratifying as these passages were to him, some of them being mere sports of wit, and others only the produce of fancy, he would have been indeed delighted if he had known what was in his days known by no European scholar, that in the Institutes of Menu, his notion is distinctly declared as a revealed truth; there it is said, “In whatever occupation the Supreme Lord first employed any vital soul, that occupation the same soul attaches itself spontaneously, when it receives a new body again and again. Whatever quality, noxious or innocent, harsh or mild, unjust or just, false or true, he conferred on any being at its creation, the same quality enters it of course on its future births.”2
2 SIR W. JONES.
Still more would it have gratified him if he had known (as has before been cursorily observed) how entirely his own theory coincided with the Druidical philosophy, a philosophy which he would rather have traced to the Patriarchs, than to the Canaanites. Their doctrine, as explained by the Welsh translator of the Paradise Lost, in the sketch of Bardism which he has prefixed to the poems of Llywarc the Aged, was that “the whole animated creation originated in the lowest point of existence, and arrived by a regular train of gradations at the probationary state of humanity, the intermediate stages being all necessarily evil, but more or less so as they were removed from the beginning, which was evil in the extreme. In the state of humanity, good and evil were equally balanced, consequently it was a state of liberty, in which if the conduct of the free agent preponderated towards evil, death gave but an awful passage whereby he returned to animal life, in a condition below humanity equal to the degree of turpitude to which he had debased himself, when free to chuse between good and evil: and if his life were desperately wicked, it was possible for him to fall to his original vileness, in the lowest point of existence, there to recommence his painful progression through the ascending series of brute being. But if he had acted well in this his stage of probation, death was then to the soul thus tried and approved, what the word by which in the language of the Druids it is denoted, literally means, enlargement. The soul was removed from the sphere wherein evil hath any place, into a state necessarily good; not to continue there in one eternal condition of blessedness, eternity being what no inferior existence could endure, but to pass from one gradation to another, gaining at every ascent increase of knowledge, and retaining the consciousness of its whole preceding progress through all. For the good of the human race, such a soul might again be sent on earth, but the human being of which it then formed the life was incapable of falling.” In this fancy the Bardic system approached that of the Bramins, this Celtic avatar of a happy soul, corresponding to the twice-born man of the Hindus. And the Doctor would have extracted some confirmation for the ground of the theory from that verse of the Psalm which speaks of us as “curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.”