The three foundations of thought;—perspicuity, amplitude, and justness.
The three canons of perspicuity;—the word that is necessary, the quantity that is necessary, and the manner that is necessary.
The three canons of amplitude;—appropriate thought, variety of thought, and requisite thought.
[391] According to the Triads, the theology of the bards was pure monotheism. They taught also the transmigration of souls; believing that the soul passed by death through all the gradations of animal life, from Anoom, the bottomless abyss, or lowest degree of animation, up to the highest degree of spiritual existence next to the Supreme Being. Human nature was considered as the middle point of this scale. As this was a state of liberty, in which the soul could attach itself to either good or evil; if evil predominated, it was after death obliged to retrace its former transmigrations from a point in the animal creation equal to its turpitude, and it again and again became man till it was attached to good. Above humanity, though it might again animate the body of man, it was incapable of relapse; but continued progressively rising to a degree of goodness and happiness, inferior only to the Deity.
It is remarkable that many singular points of coincidence have been discovered in comparing the religious system of the Hindoos with that of the ancient Britons; and in the languages of these two people some striking similarities occur in those proverbs and forms of expression which are derived from national customs and religious ceremonies.
[392] This account of the druids, like some of the preceding paragraphs, is borrowed from Cæsar's description of the Gauls.
[393] Gen. xxi. 33.
[394] The worship and religious ceremonies of the druids have formed the subject of many and voluminous dissertations; and the mistletoe, from its connection with their sacred rites, is a plant that has always been interesting to antiquaries. In a letter recently received by the editor from the learned and scientific Professor of Botany, Dr. Daubeny, of Magdalen College, Oxford, that gentleman observes, that though the mistletoe is occasionally found on the oak in Britain, yet this occurs so rarely that it is difficult to suppose the druids could have got a supply for their purposes from such a source.
"There is a plant nearly allied to the mistletoe, the Loranthus Europæus, which grows freely on the oak, when it occurs; but unfortunately the most western locality known is the garden of Schoenbrunn near Vienna, but out of the limits, I believe, within which the druidical worship existed: it is very uncommon in Hungary.
"This circumstance has given rise to an hypothesis, which I may repeat without attaching to it any very great importance, namely, that the Loranthus is the mistletoe of the druids, and that when the druidical worship was exterminated, this plant, as being introduced into their rites, was extirpated from all those parts of Europe, where the druids were known."