Even the most celebrated sages of antiquity, extremely imperfect as we know the philosophy of the early ages to have been, elucidated, by the purity of their lives and the morality of their doctrines, the truth of the position,—that the cultivation of natural wisdom, unaided as it then was by the lights of revelation, encreased every propensity to moral virtue. Such were Socrates, Plato his disciple, and Anaxagoras; who flourished between four and five centuries before the Christian era.
The life of Socrates, who is styled by Cicero the Father of Philosophers, afforded a laudable example of moderation, patience, and other virtues; and his doctrines abound with wisdom. Anaxagoras and Plato united with some of the nobler branches of natural science, very rational conceptions of moral truth. Both of them had much higher claims to the title of philosophers, than Aristotle, who appeared about a century afterwards. This philosopher, however,—for, as such, he continued for many ages to be distinguished in the schools,—was, like Socrates, more a metaphysician than an observer of the natural world. His morality is the most estimable part of his works; though his conceptions of moral truths were much less just than those of Anaxagoras and Plato:[[5]] for his physics are replete with notions and terms alike vague, unmeaning and obscure.[[6]] The intimate connexion that subsists between the physical and moral fitness of things, in relation to their respective objects, was more evidently known to Anaxagoras and Plato, than to either Socrates or Aristotle: and the reason is obvious;—both of the former cultivated the sublime science of Astronomy.
To this cause, then, may be fairly attributed the half-enlightened notions of the Deity,[[7]] and of a future state, entertained by these pagan searchers after truth. To the same cause may be traced the sentiment that dictated the reply made by Anaxagoras,—when, in consequence of his incessant contemplation of the stars, he was asked, “if he had no concern for his country?”—“I incessantly regard my country,” said he, pointing to Heaven.
Plato’s attention to the same celestial science unquestionably enlarged his notions of the Deity, and enabled him to think the more justly of the moral attributes of human nature. According to Plato—whose morality, on the whole, corresponds with the system maintained by Socrates,[[8]]—the human soul is a ray from the Divinity. He believed, that this minute portion of infinite Wisdom, Goodness and Power, was omniscient, while united with the Parent stock from which it emanated; but, when combined with the body, that it contracted ignorance and impurity from that union. He did not, like his master Socrates, neglect natural philosophy; but investigated many principles which relate to that branch of knowledge:—and, according to this philosopher, all things consisted of two principles,—God and matter.
It is evident that Plato believed in the immortality of the soul of man; but he had, at the same time, very inadequate conceptions of the mode or state of its existence, when separated from the body. It seems to have been reserved for the Christian dispensation, to elucidate this great arcanum, hidden from the most sagacious of the heathen philosophers.[[9]] It was the difficulty that arose on this subject, the incapability of knowing how to dispose of the soul, or intellectual principle in the constitution of our species, after its disentanglement from the body; a difficulty by which all the philosophers, antecedent to the promulgation of Christianity, were subjected to unsurmountable perplexities;—it was this, that rendered even the expansive genius of Anaxagoras utterly incompetent to conceive of the possibility that the soul should exist, independent of some union with matter. He therefore invented the doctrine of the Metempsychosis; in order to provide some receptacle of organised matter for that imperishable intellectual principle attached to our nature here, after its departure from the human frame; and to which new vehicle of the vital spirit of its original but abandoned abode, the extinguished corporeal man, its union with it should impart the powers and faculties of animal life.
Cultivating, as Plato did, the mind-expanding science of Astronomy, faintly even as the true principles of this branch of science were then perceived,[[10]] this philosopher could not fail to derive, from the vastness, beauty and order, manifested in the appearances and revolutions of the heavenly bodies, a conviction of the perpetual existence of a great intelligent First Cause. It was, indeed, as the Abbé Barthelemy justly remarks, the order and beauty apparent through the whole universe, that compelled men to resort to a First Cause:[[11]] This, he observes, the early philosophers of the Ionian school (which owed its origin to Thales) had acknowledged. But Anaxagoras[[12]] was the first who discriminated that First Cause from matter; and not only this distinguished pupil of Thales,[[13]] but Anaximander, who, antecedently to him, taught philosophy at Athens, with Archelaus the master of Socrates, all treated in their writings of the formation of the universe, of the nature of things, and of geometry and astronomy.
According to Mr. Gibbon, the philosophers of Greece deduced their morals from the nature of man, rather than from that of God. They meditated, however, as we are informed by this very ingenious historian, on the Divine Nature, as a most curious and important speculation; and, in the profound enquiry, they displayed both the strength and the weakness of the human understanding. The Stoics and the Platonists endeavoured to reconcile the interests of reason with their notions of piety. The opinions of the Academicians and Epicureans, the two other of the four most celebrated schools, were of a less religious cast: But, continues Mr. Gibbon, whilst the modest science of the former induced them to doubt, the positive ignorance of the latter urged them to deny, the providence of a Supreme Ruler.
Cicero[[14]] denominated the God of Plato the Maker, and the God of Aristotle the Governor, of the world.[[15]] It is somewhere observed, that it is no reflection on the character of Plato, to have been unable, by the efforts of his own reason, to acquire any notion of a proper creation; since we, who have the advantage of his writings, nay of writings infinitely more valuable than his, to instruct us, find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to conceive how any thing can first begin to have an existence. We believe the fact, on the authority of Revelation.
Great were, undoubtedly, the improvements in astronomy, made by the Greek philosophers of early ages, on such of its rudiments as were handed down to them from those nations by whom it was first cultivated:[[16]] Yet it can scarcely be conceived, that, until the celebrated Euclid of Alexandria,[[17]] and his followers, had reduced the mathematics of Thales and others of those philosophers, into regular systems of arithmetical and geometrical science, the true principles of astronomy could be ascertained. In fact, seventeen centuries and an half had elapsed, from the time of that great geometrician, before Copernicus appeared: when this wonderful genius, availing himself of such remnants of the ancient philosophy, as the intervening irruptions of the barbarous nations of the north upon the then civilized world had left to their posterity, opened to the view of mankind the real system of the universe.[[18]]—So vast was the chasm, during which the nobler branches of physics remained uncultivated and neglected, that, from the age of Euclid, fourteen centuries passed away, before Roger Bacon, an English Franciscan friar, began his successful enquiries into experimental philosophy.—This extraordinary man is said to have been almost the only astronomer of his age; and he himself tells us, that there were not, then, more than three or four persons in the world who had made any considerable proficiency in the mathematics!
But after the appearance of Copernicus,[[19]] succeeded by the ingenious Tycho Brahe[[20]] and sagacious Kepler,[[21]] arose the learned physiologist Bacon, Viscount of St. Albans,—one of the most illustrious contributors to the yet scanty stock of experimental philosophy.[[22]] And soon after, in the same age and nation, was manifested to the world, in the full glory of meridian splendour, that great luminary of natural science, who first enlightened mankind by diffusing among them the rays of well-ascertained truths; clearly exhibiting to all, those fundamental principles of the laws of nature, by which the grand, the stupendous system of the material universe is both sustained and governed:—