LETTER natural truth, did Aristotle therefore adopt it, and I. the rest of the philosophers of Greece, or any of its subsequent mathematicians? Scarcely any. Aristotle only cites it, in order to attack it. It opposed his other prepossessions, and therefore he condemned it as unfounded. The greatest astronomers of the Alexandrian school equally discredited it.14 Did these just notions carry the mind of Philolaus himself to the other truths that were connected closely with them? Not at all. He thought and reasoned as wildly beyond the few realities he had imbibed, as if his whole mind had been one labyrinth of mistake.15 A Numa, indeed, adopted the opinion, and regulated the temple and rites of his Vesta, his goddess of sacred fire, according to it. But even asserted it; 1. viii. s. 85; tho he also notices Nicetas, a Syracusian, as the same opinion; to whom Theophrastus also assigned it. Cicero, Lucullus, p. 95. 14 Aristarchus, the Samian, is mentioned by Archimedes as stating the Sun and the Stars, not planetary, to be immoveable, and the Earth to be carried round the Sun in the circumference of a circle. Psam. p. 449. Plutarch also ascribes the opinion to him; de Fac. Lun. But neither Hipparchus, nor Eratosthenes, nor Posidonius, nor the later Ptolemy adopted it. It remained a discountenanced truth till Cardinal Cusa pressed it on the notice of his contemporaries in the fifteenth century; after which Copernicus happily espoused it. You will find Cusa's work quoted in my Modern Hist. Engl. v. iii. p. 10. 15 Philolaus thought that our Earth consisted of two separate earths, one the antipodes to the other. He placed the fiery body in the centre as the Vesta or focal hearth of the world, and in the second place the earth of the antipodes. The third station he gave to the Earth which we inhabit. This he said was opposite to the antipode one, and turned round it, which was the cause why we could not see its inhabitants.' Plut. Phil. 1. iii. c. 11. He also inculcated that the water of the Moon was thrown out of it by the circumvolution of the air, and by the exhalation of this the world was nourished. Plut. Phil. 1. ii. c. 5. He had several other strange fancies. His master, Pythagoras, taught likewise various things, which prove that he was either a great impostor or a very self-deluded man. 16 We learn this fact from Plutarch: It is said that Numa made his I. this patronage did not make the truth popular, either LETTER to the vulgar or to the learned. The error was preferred to the reality, until centuries of more knowlege disposed the human mind to accredit it. Hence it is our wisdom and our duty to be always self-mistrusting; never to make our individual opinions the standard of what is true or false; never to avert our eyes from what is better, because we dislike it; and reverentially to refrain from disregarding the sacred light that has been provided for us, because it is at first inconvenient or disturbing to us, or may bring with it some images or prospects that do not harmonize with our expectations or existing prepossessions. Let us then fix our determination to give a due portion of our leisure time to the study of the Divine Philosophy." Let us keep our mind his temple to Vesta circular, for the sacred fire to be kept unextinguished, intimating thereby the oxnpa of the whole world, in whose centre the Pythagoreans thought fire to be situate. For they do not believe the Earth to be immoveable or in the middle of the circumferent space, but to be carried as in a circle round the fire.' Plut. Vit. Numa. 17 It is interesting to see how prone the intelligent mind in all nations appears to be to muse upon the Deity. An instance of this occurs in the autobiography of Nana Farnewis, a Mahratta nobleman and minister, born 1742, and who was in the battle of Paniput in 1761. Tho attached to his Hindoo paganism, and injuriously affected by it, yet he could think and write thus:- Let me consider what is the semblance of the face of God. It is the emblem of truth; full of animation, and resplendent with its own effulgence. God passes His existence in watchfulness, in sleep, and in contemplation. His watchfulness is apparent throughout all Nature: His contemplation is displayed in the light of day: His sleep is typified in the stillness of night. HE to whom we attribute these qualities is the ONLY ONE; THE SPIRIT.' 'It is HE who, in the plenitude of His power, displays Himself in every thing. He is every where present at the same moment; moving without feet, seeing without eyes, touching without hands, hearing without ears; pervading all space. If it be asked, from what LETTER in a candid and impartial state while we are pursuing I. it; and let us draw our principles of it from those venerated writings, which were composed and have been preserved to convey this knowlege to the human race, wherever the introduction of Christianity should carry these in its train, and present them to the contemplation of the inquiring and grateful intellect. For grateful it must be, if it does but perceive what a Cimmerian darkness of mind we should have been in on these momentous subjects, and on all the others which they have improved, if they had never been written or circulated. We should have been what the Gothic and Sarmatian Pagans would have made us, if these conquering invaders had not been christianized. Can I then but be grateful for having been preserved, by what I am recommending, from being what I otherwise should have been, a savage worshipper and imitator of Thor and Odin, or of some other bloody and barbarous monstrosities of the same character and operation? we conclude that the Great Spirit pervades all space, and is a sole and single spirit? I reply, We derive this knowlege from the conviction of our reason, and from an innate consciousness arising out of sympathy.' Trans. Roy. As. Soc. v. ii. p. 96. No Greek or Roman philosopher has surpassed and few equalled these ideas. Yet he was unable to act consistently with them, for he was a zealous worshipper of Vishnu and Chrishna. His mind felt that there was something better than these, but had not, like ours, been associated with what is so. LETTER II. NATURE DISTINGUISHED INTO THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE MY DEAR SYDNEY, II. Of the Divine Philosophy, which I have been LETTER recommending to you, the Sacred History of the World will be the most important subject; and of this, the principal compartment, or at least that which cannot but be paramount to us, is the Sacred History of Man. For, altho this earth has not been devised or made for him alone, yet it has been manifestly formed with great and continual reference to him; and he is, beyond dispute, the pre-eminent being upon it, at least, of all that wears a visible shape, and by that, has become cognizable by us. Our eyesight, indeed, cannot be taken at any time as an absolute criterion of the existing. The apparent rising, semicircular journey and evening departure of the sun, are a daily testimony to our judgment, that our vision alone is not the certain teacher of the true. Nature is always indicating this circumstance to us, that we may not be led to call her invisibilities into question. LETTER II. We never see the warmth that delights us so often in a vernal day, when the cloud conceals from us 'Day's garish eye;' nor the cold which freezes us, altho he is shining as gaily on his winter throne. Thus the perception of the visible never authorizes us to confine every thing to it, nor to deny the existence of what is otherwise. Some have from singularity chosen to limit the knowable by the visible; but this would be only wilfully consigning ourselves to ignorance of some of the grandest realities of existing things; and whenever this feeling operates, it is the weakness, not the strength of the individual mind that leads any one to indulge it. Nature consists of both these descriptions of beings; of the unseen as well as of the seen; of that which is perceptible by our senses, and of that by which they are not affected. Nothing exists because we are conscious of it, nor depends upon our acquaintance with it, nor ceases to be or never has been, because it has not become a subject of our sensorial excitations. Invisibility is as much a character and state of creation as visibility and tangibility likewise are. Many things exist which we cannot touch, as well as others which we cannot see. Matter is in some of its forms as invisible to us as spirit, and even often imperceptible in its tenuity by any of our senses. But to be attenuated is no more nonexistence than to be unseen. It therefore resembles a childish error to disbelieve what we cannot see, or to suppose that nothing exists but what our eyes can behold. This seems so obvious, that it is almost chimerical to allude to it; and yet I have known that |