“Being asked whether the multitude of things existed before Heaven and Earth divided, he replied: There was merely the idea of each thing. Heaven and Earth generate all things, and throughout all time, ancient and modern, cannot be separated from all things.”
It should be remarked as illustrating the difficulties of translating the thought of one language into the words of another, that Mr. F. H. Balfour questions certain of Canon M’Clatchie’s renderings. Thus a sentence which M’Clatchie interprets, “In the entire universe where there is no fate there is no air, and where there is no air there is no fate,” Mr. Balfour would read instead of “fate” “mind,” and instead of “air” “matter,” the sentence becoming, “In the entire universe where there is no mind there is no matter, and where there is no matter there is no mind.” Such divergent renderings as this are to be expected in the case of any Oriental language. It will not be forgotten how George Smith, one of the first great interpreters of the Assyrian tablets, read the Hebrew story of the Garden of Eden in the vague phrasing of the cuneiform document, where, as Menant quickly demonstrated, the writer of the document had composed a quite different story. This “reading into Homer that which Homer never knew” is much too familiar a subject to require further elucidation; but it is peculiarly desirable to bear it in mind in dealing with the philosophical and religious notions of any alien people.
Turning from the Orient, it is of interest to interrogate the Greek writers as to the creation schemes that were current in classical times. In the histories of Greece and Rome, we shall have occasion to examine these somewhat more in detail. For the present purpose, perhaps, an excerpt from Diodorus, who wrote with a full knowledge both of Greek and Roman ideas at about the beginning of our era, will be sufficiently illuminative.
Diodorus begins his history of the World with a brief account of the current notions as to the creation. He says: “Of the origin, therefore, of men there are two opinions amongst the most famous and authentic naturalists and historians. Some of these are of opinion that the world had neither beginning nor ever shall have end, and likewise say that mankind was from eternity and there never was a time when he first began to be. Others, on the contrary, conceive both the world to be made, and to be corruptible, and that there was a certain time when men had first a being; for, whereas all things at the first were jumbled together, heaven and earth were in one mass and had one and the same form. But afterward they say when corporeal beings appeared one after another, the world at length presented itself in the order we now see, and that the air was in continual agitation, whose fiery parts ascended together to the highest place, its nature ‘by reason of its levity’ trending always upward, for which reason both the sun and that vast number of stars are contained within that orb; that the gross and earthy matter clotted together by moisture, by reason of its weight sunk down below into which place by continually whirling about. The sea was made of the humid, and the muddy earth of the more solid, as yet very soft, which by degrees at first was made crusty by the heat of the sun, and then, after the face of the earth was parched, and, as it were, fermented, the moisture afterward in many places bubbled up, as may be seen in standing ponds and marshy places, when, after the earth has been pierced with cold, the air grows hot on a sudden without a gradual alteration, and whereas moisture generates creatures from heat, things so generated by being enrapt in the dewy mists of the night grew and increased, and in the day solidified and were made hard by the heat of the sun, and thus the forms of all sorts of living creatures were brought forth into the light, and those that had most heat mounted aloft, and were fowls and birds of the air, but those that had more of earth were numbered in the order of creeping things and other creatures altogether suited to the earth. Then those beasts that were naturally watery and moist, called fishes, presently hastened to the place natural to them; and when the earth afterward became more dry and solid by the heat of the sun and the drying winds, it had not power at length to produce any more of the greater living creatures. And Euripides, the pupil of Anaxagoras, seems to be of the same opinion concerning the first generation of all things, for in his Menilippe he has these verses:
“‘A mass confused
Heaven and Earth once were
Of one form; but after separation
Then men, trees, beasts of the earth with fowls of the air
First sprang up in a generation.’
“But if this power of the earth to produce living creatures at the first origin of all things seem incredible to any, the Egyptians bring testimonies of this energy of the earth by the same things done there at this day; for they say that about Thebes in Egypt, after the overflowing of the river Nile, the earth thereby being covered by mud and slime, many places putrefy by the heat of the sun, and thence are bred multitudes of mice. It is certain, therefore, that out of the earth when it is hardened, and the air changed from its dew and natural temperament, animals are generated, by which means it came to pass that in the first beginning of all things various living creatures proceeded from the earth. And these are the opinions touching the original of all things.”