CHAPTER XIII

THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

§ 1. THE ITALIAN INFLUENCE

The negative bearing of the Reformation on freethought is made clear by

the historic fact that the new currents of thought which broadly mark

the beginning of the "modern spirit" arose in its despite, and derive

originally from outside its sphere. It is to Italy, where the political

and social conditions thus far tended to frustrate the Inquisition,

that we trace the rise alike of modern deism, modern Unitarianism,

modern pantheism, modern physics, and the tendency to rational

atheism. The deistic way of thinking, of course, prevailed long

before it got that name; and besides the vogue of Averroïsm we have

noted the virtual deism of More's Utopia (1516). The first explicit

mention of deism noted by Bayle, however, is in the epistle dedicatory

to the second and expanded edition of the Instruction Chrétienne of

the Swiss Protestant Viret (1563), where professed deists are spoken

of as a new species bearing a new name. On the admission of Viret,

who was the friend and bitter disciple of Calvin, they rejected all

revealed religion, but called themselves deists by way of repudiating

atheism; some keeping a belief in immortality, some rejecting it. In

the theological manner he goes on to call them all execrable atheists,

and to say that he has added to his treatise on their account an

exposition of natural religion grounded on the "Book of Nature";

stultifying himself by going on to say that he has also dealt with

the professed atheists. [2132] Of the deists he admits that among

them were men of the highest repute for science and learning. Thus

within ten years of the burning of Servetus we find privately avowed

deism and atheism in the area of French-speaking Protestantism.

Doubtless the spectacle of Protestant feuds and methods would go

far to foster such unbelief; but though, as we have seen, there were

aggressive Unitarians in Germany before 1530, who, being scholars,

may or may not have drawn on Italian thought, thereafter there is

reason to look to Italy as the source of the propaganda. Thence came

the two Sozzini, the founders of Socinianism, of whom Lelio, the uncle

of Fausto, travelled much in northern Europe (including England)

between 1546 and 1552. [2133] As the earlier doctrine of Servetus

shows clear affinities to that of the Sozzini, and his earlier books

were much read in Italy between 1532 and 1540, he may well have given

them their impulse. [2134] It is evidently to Servetus that Zanchi

referred when he wrote to Bullinger in 1565 that "Spain bore the hens,

Italy hatched the eggs, and we now hear the chickens piping." [2135]

Before Socinianism had taken form it was led up to, as we have seen, in

the later writings of the ex-monk Bernardino Ochino (1487-1564), who,

in the closing years of a much chequered career, combined mystical

and Unitarian tendencies with a leaning to polygamy and freedom

of divorce. [2136] His influence was considerable among the Swiss

Protestants, though they finally expelled him for his heresies. From

Geneva or from France, in turn, apparently came some of the English

freethought of the middle period of the sixteenth century; [2137]

for in 1562 Speaker Williams in the House of Commons, in a list of

misbelievers, speaks of "Pelagians, Libertines, Papists, and such

others, leaving God's commandments to follow their own traditions,

affections, and minds" [2138]--using theologically the foreign term,

which never became naturalized in English in its foreign sense. It was

about the year 1563, again, that Roger Ascham wrote his Scholemaster,

wherein are angrily described, as a species new in England, men who,

"where they dare," scorn both Protestant and Papist, "rejecting

scripture, and counting the Christian mysteries as fables." [2139]

He describes them as "atheoi in doctrine"; adding, "this last word is

no more unknowne now to plane Englishe men than the Person was unknown

somtyme in England, untill some Englishe man took peines to fetch that

develish opinion out of Italie." [2140] The whole tendency he connects

in a general way with the issue of many new translations from the

Italian, mentioning in particular Petrarch and Boccaccio. Among good

Protestants his view was general; and so Lord Burghley in his Advice to

his Son writes: "Suffer not thy sons to pass the Alps, for they shall

learn nothing there but pride, blasphemy, and atheism." As it happened,

his grandson the second Earl of Exeter, and his great-grandson Lord

Roos, went to Rome, and became not atheists but Roman Catholics.

Such episodes should remind us that in that age of ignorance and

superstition the Church had always an immense advantage. Those

who, like Gentillet in his raging Discours, commonly known as the

Contre-Machiavel (1576), ascribed to "atheism" and the teaching of

Machiavelli all the crimes and oppressions wrought by Catholics,

[2141] were ludicrously perverting the facts. Massacres in churches,

which are cited by Gentillet as impossible to believing Catholics,

were wrought, as we have seen, on the largest scale by the Church

in the thirteenth century. So, when Scaliger calls the Italians

of his day "a set of atheists," we are to understand it rather of

"the hypocrisy than of the professed skepticism of the time." [2142]

But rationalism and semi-rationalism did prevail in Italy more than

in any other country. [2143]

Like the old Averroïsm, the new pietistic Unitarianism persisted

in Italy and radiated thence afresh when it had flagged in other

lands. The exploded Unitarian tradition [2144] runs that the doctrine

arose in the year 1546 among a group of more than forty learned men who

were wont to assemble in secret at Vicenza, near Venice. Claudius of

Savoy, however, emphatically gave out his anti-Trinitarian doctrine at

Berne in 1534, after having been imprisoned at Strasburg and banished

thence; [2145] and Ochino and Lelio Sozzini left Italy in 1543. But

there seems to have been a continuous evolution of Unitarian heresy

in the south after the German movement had ceased. Giorgio Biandrata,

whom we have seen flying to Poland from Geneva, had been seized by the

Inquisition at Pavia for such opinion. Still it persisted. In 1562

Giulio Guirlando of Treviso, and in 1566 Francesco Saga of Rovigo,

were burned at Venice for anti-Trinitarianism. Giacomo Aconzio too,

who dedicated his Stratagems of Satan (Basel, 1565) to Queen Elizabeth,

and who pleaded notably for the toleration of heresy, [2146] was a

decided latitudinarian. [2147]

It is remarkable that the whole ferment occurs in the period of the

Catholic Reaction, the Council of Trent, and the subjection of Italy,

when the papacy was making its great effort to recover its ground. It

would seem that in the compulsory peace which had now fallen on

Italian life men's thoughts turned more than ever to mental problems,

as had happened in Greece after the rise of Alexander's empire. The

authority of the Church was outwardly supreme; the Jesuits had

already begun to do great things for education; [2148] the revived

Inquisition was everywhere in Italy; its prisons, as we have seen,

were crowded with victims of all grades during a whole generation;

Pius V and the hierarchy everywhere sought to enforce decorum in life;

the "pagan" academies formed on the Florentine model were dissolved;

and classic culture rapidly decayed with the arts, while clerical

learning flourished, [2149] and a new religious music began with

Palestrina. Yet on the death of Paul IV the Roman populace burned the

Office of the Inquisition to the ground and cast the pope's statue

into the Tiber; [2150] and in that age (1548) was born Giordano Bruno,

one of the types of modern freethought.

The great service of Italy to modern freethought, however, was to come

later, in respect of the impulse given to the scientific spirit by

Bruno, Vanini, and Galileo. On the philosophical or critical side, the

Italy of the middle of the sixteenth century left no enduring mark on

European thought, though her serious writers were numerous. Aconzio had

published, before his De Stratagematibus Satanæ, a treatise De Methodo,

sive recta investigandarum tradendarumque scientiarum ratione (Basel,

1558), wherein he pleads strenuously for a true logical method as the

one way to real knowledge of things. In this he anticipates Bacon, as

did, still earlier, Mario Nizolio in his Antibarbarus sive de veris

principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra pseudo-philosophos

(Parma, 1553). Nizolio's main effort is towards the discrediting of

Aristotle, whom, like so many in the generation following, he regarded

as the great bulwark of scholastic obscurantism. He insists that

all knowledge must proceed from sensation, which alone has immediate

certainty; and thus stands for direct scientific observation as against

tradition and verbalism. But Ludovicus Vives had before him (in his

De causis corruptarum artium, Antwerp, 1531) claimed that the true

Aristotelian went direct to nature, as Aristotle himself had done;

and Nizolio did nothing in practical science to substantiate his

polemic against the logic-choppers.

He and Aconzio in effect cancel each other. Each had glimpsed a

truth, one seeing the need for a right method in inference, the

other protesting against the idea that abstract reasoning could lead

to knowledge; but neither made good his argument by any treasure

trove of fact. Another writer of the same decade, Gomez Pereira,

joined in the revolt against Aristotelianism, publishing in 1554 his

Margarita Antoniana, wherein, in advance of Descartes, he maintained

the absence of sensation in brutes. [2151] For the rest, he championed

freedom in speculation, denying that authority should avail save in

matters of faith. But he too failed to bring forth fruits meet for

freedom. Neither by abstract exposition of right methods of reasoning,

nor by abstract attacks on wrong methods, could any vital impulse

yet be given to thought. What was lacking was the use of reason

upon actual problems, whether of human or of natural science. All

the while Europe was anchored to ancient delusion, historical and

scientific. Even as the horrors of age-long religious war could alone

drive men to something like toleration in the religious life, there

was needed the impact of actual discovery to win them to science as

against scholasticism. And rational thinking on the religion which

resisted all new science was to be still later of attainment, save

for the nameless men who throughout the ages of faith rejected the

creeds without publishing their unbelief. Of these Italy had always

a large sprinkling.

§ 2. SPAIN

The fact that sixteenth-century Spain could be charged, on the

score of Servetus, with producing the "hen" of Socinianism, is an

important reminder of the perpetuity of variation and of the fatality

of environment. The Portuguese Sanchez, whom we shall find laying new

potential foundations of skepticism in France alongside of Montaigne,

could neither have acquired nor propounded his philosophy in his

native land. But it is to be noted that an elder contemporary of

Sanchez, living and dying in Spain, was able, in the generation after

Servetus, to make a real contribution to the revival of freethought,

albeit under shelter of a firm profession of orthodoxy.

No book of the kind, perhaps, had a wider European popularity than

the Examen de Ingenios para las ciencias of Huarte de San Juan,

otherwise Juan Huarte y Navarro (c. 1530-1592). Like Servetus and

Sanchez and many another, Huarte had his bias to reason fostered by a

medical training; and it is as a "natural philosopher" that he stands

for a rational study of causation. As a pioneer of exact science,

indeed, he counts for next to nothing. Taking as his special theme

the divergences of human faculty, he does but found himself on the à

priori system of "humours" and "temperatures" passed on by Aristotle

to Galen and Hippocrates, inconsistently affirming on the one hand

that the "characters" not only of whole nations but of the inhabitants

of provinces are determined by their special climates and aliments,

and on the other hand that individual faculty is determined by the

proportions of hot and cold, moist and dry "temperatures" in the

parents. Apart from his insistence on the functions of the brain,

and from broadly rational deliverances as to the kinds of faculty

which determine success in theology and law, arms and arts, his

"science" is naught. Dealing with an obscure problem, he brought

to it none of the exact inductiveness which alone had yielded true

knowledge in the simpler field of astronomy. In virtue, however,

either of his confidence in affirmation or of his stand for rational

inquiry, or of both, Huarte's book, published in 1575, went the

round of Europe. Translated into Italian in 1582 (or earlier; new

rendering 1600), it was thence rendered into English by Richard Carew

in 1594. [2152] A French version appeared in 1598, and two others

in 1661 and 1671. A later English translation, from the original,

was produced in 1698; and Lessing thought the book worth putting into

German in 1785.

The rationalistic importance of Huarte lies in his insistence on the

study of "second causes" and his protest against the burking of all

inquiry by a reference to deity. On this head he anticipates much of

the polemic of Bacon. The explanation of all processes and phenomena

by the will of God, he observes, "is so ancient a manner of talk, and

the natural philosophers have so often refuted it, that the seeking to

take the same away were superfluous, neither is it convenient.... But

I have often gone about to consider the reason and the cause whence

it may grow that the vulgar sort is so great friend to impute all

things to God, and to reave them from Nature, and do so abhor the

natural means." [2153] His solution is the impatience of men over the

complexity of Nature, their spiritual arrogance, their indolence,

and their piety. For himself, he pronounces, as Middleton did in

England nearly two centuries later, that "God doth no longer those

unwonted things of the New Testament; and the reason is, for that on

his behalf he hath performed all necessary diligence that men might

not pretend ignorance. And to think that he will begin anew to do

the like miracles ... is an error very great.... God speaks once

(saith Job) and turns not to a second replial." [2154]

Only thus could the principle of natural causation be affirmed in the

Spain of Philip II. Huarte is careful to affirm miracles while denying

their recurrence; and throughout he writes as a good Scripturist and

Catholic. But he sticks to his naturalist thesis that "Nature makes

able," and avows that "natural philosophers laugh at such as say,

This is God's doing, without assigning the order and discourse of

the particular causes whence they may spring." [2155] The fact that

the book was dedicated to Philip tells of royal protection, without

which the author could hardly have escaped the Inquisition. Years

after, we shall find Lilly in England protesting on the stage against

the conception of Natura naturans; and Bacon powerfully reaffirming

Huarte's doctrine, with the same reservations. The Spaniard must have

counted for something as a pleader for elementary reason, if Bacon did.

But this is practically the only important contribution from Spain to

the intellectual renascence then going on in Europe. As we have seen,

it was not that Spaniards had any primordial bias to dogmatism and

persecution: it was simply that their whole socio-political evolution,

largely determined by Spanish discovery and dominion in the New World,

set up institutions and forces which became specially powerful to stamp

out freethought. The work of progress was done in lands where lack

of external dominion left on the one hand a greater fund of variant

energy, and on the other made for a lesser power of repression on

the part of Church and State.

§ 3. FRANCE

While Italy continues to be reputed throughout the sixteenth century

a hotbed of freethinking, styled "atheism," it appears to have been

in France, alongside of the wars of religion, that positive unbelief,

as distinct from scripturalist Unitarianism, made most new headway

among laymen. It was in France that the forces of change had greatest

play. The mere contact with Italy which began with the invasion of

Charles VII in 1494 meant a manifold moral and mental influence,

affecting French literature and life alike; and the age of strife and

destruction which set in with the first Huguenot wars could not but

be one of disillusionment for multitudes of serious men. We have seen

as much in the work of Bonaventure des Periers and Rabelais; but the

spread of radical unbelief is to be traced, as is usual in the ages

of faith, by the books written against it. Already in 1552 we have

seen Guillaume Postell publishing his book, Contra Atheos. [2156]

Unbelief increasing, there is published in 1564 an Atheomachie by

one De Bourgeville; but the Massacre must have gone far to frustrate

him. In 1581 appears another Atheomachie, ou réfutation des erreurs

et impiétés des Athéistes, Libertins, etc., issued at Geneva, but

bearing much on French life; and in the same year is issued the

long-time popular work of the Huguenot Philippe de Mornay, De la

vérité de la religion Chrestienne, Contre les Athées, Epicuriens,

Payens, Juifs, Mahumedistes, et autres Infidèles. [2157] In both the

Epistle Dedicatory (to Henry of Navarre) and the Preface the author

speaks of the great multiplication of unbelief, the refutation of

which he declares to be more needful among Christians than it ever

had been among the heathen. But, like most of the writers against

atheism in that age, he declares [2158] that there are no atheists

save a few young fools and utterly bad men, who turn to God as soon as

they fall sick. The reputed atheists of antiquity are vindicated as

having denied not the principle of deity but the false Gods of their

age--this after the universality of a belief in Gods in all ages had

been cited as one of the primary proofs of God's existence. In this

fashion is compiled a book of nine hundred pages, ostensibly for

the confutation of a few fools and knaves, described as unworthy of

serious consideration. Evidently the unbelief of de Mornay's day was

a more vigorous growth than he affected to think; and his voluminous

performance was followed by others. In 1586, Christophe Cheffontaines

published his Epitome novæ illustrationis Christianae Fidei adversus

Impios, Libertinos et Atheos; and still skepticism gained ground,

having found new abettors.

First came the Portuguese Francisco Sanchez (1552-1623?), born in

Portugal, but brought as a child to Bordeaux, which seems to have

been a place of refuge for many fugitive heretics from both sides of

the Peninsula. Sanchez has recorded that in his early youth he had no

bias to incredulity of any kind; but at some stage of his adolescence

he travelled in Italy and spent some time at Rome. The result was not

that special disbelief in Christianity which was proverbially apt

to follow, but a development on his part of philosophic skepticism

properly so-called, which found expression in a Latin treatise entitled

Quod Nihil Scitur--"That Nothing is Known." Composed as early as 1576,

in the author's twenty-fourth year, the book was not published till

1581, a year after the first issue of the Essais of Montaigne. It is

natural to surmise that while Sanchez was at Bordeaux he may have known

something of his famous contemporary; but though Montaigne is likely

to have read the Quod Nihil Scitur in due course, he nowhere speaks of

it; and in 1576 Sanchez was a Professor of Medicine at Montpellier,

then a town of Huguenot leanings. Soon he left it for Toulouse, the

hotbed of Catholic fanaticism, where he contrived to live out his

long life in peace, despite his production of a Pyrrhonist treatise

and of a remarkable Latin poem (1578) on the comet of 1577. The Quod

Nihil Scitur is a skeptical flank attack on current science, in no

way animadverting on religion, as to which he professed orthodoxy:

the poem is a frontal attack on the whole creed of astrology, then

commonly held by Averroïsts and Aristotelians, as well as by orthodox

Catholics. Yet he seems never to have been molested. It would seem as

if a skepticism which ostensibly disallowed all claims to "natural"

knowledge, while avowedly recognizing "spiritual," was then as later

thought to make rather for faith than against it. That such virtual

Pyrrhonism as that of Sanchez can ever have ministered to religious

zeal is not indeed to be supposed: it is rather as a weapon against

the confidence of the "Naturalist" that the skeptical method has

always recommended itself to the calculating priest. And inasmuch as

astrology could be, and was, held by a non-religious theory, though

many Christians added it to their creed, a polemic against that was

the least dangerous form of rationalizing then possible. At all times

there had been priests who so reasoned, though, as we have seen in

dealing with the men of the Protestant Reformation, the belief in

astral influences is too closely akin to the main line of religious

tradition to be capable of ejection on religious grounds.

With his hostility to credulous hopes and fears in the sphere of

Nature, Sanchez is naturally regarded as a forerunner and helper

of freethought. But there is nothing to show that his work had

any effect in undermining the most formidable of all the false

beliefs of Christendom. [2159] Like so many others of his age,

he flouted Aristotelean scholasticism, but was perforce silent as

to the verbalisms and sophistries of simple theology. It may fairly

be inferred that his poem on the comet of 1577 helped to create that

current of reasoned disbelief [2160] which we find throwing up almost

identical expressions in Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Molière, [2161]

concerning the folly of connecting the stars with human affairs. But

a skepticism which left untouched the main matter of the creeds could

not affect conduct in general; and while Sanchez passed unchecked the

watchdogs of the Inquisition, the fiery Bruno and Vanini were in his

day to meet their fiery death at its hands--the latter in Toulouse,

perhaps under the eyes of Sanchez. Having resigned his professorship

of medicine, he seems to have lived to a ripe age, dying in 1623.

Probably those very deaths availed more for the rousing of critical

thought than did the dialectic of the Pyrrhonist. To the life of

the reason may with perfect accuracy be applied the claim so often

made for that of religion--that it feeds on feeling and is rooted in

experience. Revolt from the cruelties and follies of faith plays a

great part in the history of freethought. In the greatest French writer

of that age, a professed Catholic, but in mature life averse alike

to Catholic and to Protestant bigotry, the shock of the Massacre of

Saint Bartholomew can be seen disintegrating once for all the spirit

of faith. Montaigne typifies the kind of skepticism produced in an

unscientific age by the practical demonstration that religion can

avail immeasurably more for evil than for good. [2162] A few years

before the Massacre he had translated for his dying father [2163] the

old Theologia Naturalis of Raymond of Sebonde; and we know from the

later Apology in the Essays that freethinking contemporaries declared

the argument of Raymond to be wholly insufficient. [2164] It is clear

from the same essay that Montaigne felt as much; though the gist of

his polemic is a vehement attack upon all forms of confident opinion,

religious and anti-religious alike. "In replying to arguments of so

opposite a tenour, Montaigne leaves Christianity, as well as Raimond

Sebonde, without a leg to stand upon. He demolishes the arguments of

Sebonde with the rest of human presumption, and allows Christianity,

neither held by faith nor provable by reason, to fall between

the two stools." [2165] The truth is that Montaigne's skepticism

was the product of a mental evolution spread over at least twenty

years. In his youth his vivid temperament kept him both credulous

and fanatical, so much so that in 1562 he took the reckless oath

prescribed by the Catholic Parlement of Paris. As he avows with

his incomparable candour, he had been in many things peculiarly

susceptible to outside influences, being always ready to respond to

the latest pressure; [2166] and the knowledge of his susceptibility

made him self-distrustful. But gradually he found himself. Beginning

to recoil from the ferocities and iniquities of the League, he yet

remained for a time hotly anti-Protestant; and it seems to have

been his dislike of Protestant criticism that led him to run amuck

against reason, at the cost of overthrowing the treatise he had set

out to defend. The common end of such petulant skepticism is a plunge

into uneasy yet unreasoning faith; but, though Montaigne professed

Catholicism to the end, the sheer wickedness of the Catholic policy

made it impossible for him to hold sincerely to the creed any more

than to the cause. [2167] Above all things he hated cruelty. [2168]

It was the Massacre that finally made Montaigne renounce public life;

[2169] it must have affected likewise his working philosophy.

That philosophy was not, indeed, an original construction: he found

it to his hand partly in the deism of his favourite Seneca; partly in

the stoical ethic of Epictetus, then so much appreciated in France;

and partly in the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus, of which the Latin

translation is known to have been among his books; from which he took

several of the mottoes inscribed on his library ceiling, [2170] and

from which he frequently quotes towards the end of his Apology. The

body of ideas compacted on these bases cannot be called a system: it

was not in Montaigne's nature to frame a logical scheme of thought;

and he was far from being the philosophic skeptic he set out to be

[2171] by way of confounding at once the bigots and the atheists. He

was essentially ondoyant et divers, as he freely admitted. As he put

it in a passage added to the later editions of the Essais, [2172]

he was a kind of métis, belonging neither to the camp of ignorant

faith nor to that of philosophic conviction, whether believing or

unbelieving. He early avows that, had he written what he thought and

knew of the affairs of his times, he would have published judgments "à

mon gré mesme et selon raison," in his opinion true and reasonable, but

"illégitimes et punissables." [2173] Again, "whatsoever is beyond the

compass of custom, we deem likewise to be beyond the compass of reason,

God knows how unreasonably, for the most part." [2174] Yet in the next

breath he will exclaim at those who demand changes. Often he comments

keenly on the incredible readiness of men to go to war over trifles;

but in another mood he accuses the nobility of his day of unwillingness

to take up arms "except upon some urgent and extreme necessity." [2175]

In the same page he will tell us that he is "easily carried away by

the throng," and that he is yet "not very easy to change, forsomuch

as I perceive a like weakness in contrary opinions." [2176] "I am

very easily to be directed by the world's public order," [2177] is

the upshot of his easy meditations. And a conformist he remained in

practice to the last, always bearing himself dutifully towards Mother

Church, and generally observing the proprieties, though he confesses

that he "made it a conscience to eat flesh upon a fish day." [2178]

His conformities, verbal and practical, have set certain

Catholics upon proving his orthodoxy, though his Essays are

actually prohibited by the Church. A Benedictine, Dom Devienne,

published in 1773 a Dissertation sur la Religion de Montaigne,

of which the main pleas are that the Essais often affirm the

divinity of the Christian faith; that the essayist received

the freedom of the city of Rome under the eyes of the pope; and

that his epitaph declared his orthodoxy! A generation later, one

Labouderie undertook to set forth Le Christianisme de Montaigne

in a volume of 600 pages (1819). This apologist has the courage

to face the protest of Pascal: "Montaigne puts everything in a

doubt so universal and so general that, doubting even whether

he doubts, his uncertainty turns upon itself in a perpetual and

unresting circle.... It is in this doubt which doubts of itself,

and in this ignorance which is ignorant of itself, that the essence

of his opinion consists.... In a word, he is a pure Pyrrhonist"

(Pensées, supp. to Pt. i, art. 11). The reply of the apologist

is that Montaigne never extends his skepticism to "revelation,"

but on the contrary declares that revelation alone gives man

certainties (work cited, p. 127).

That is of course merely the device of a hundred skeptics of the

Middle Ages; the old shibboleth of a "twofold truth" modified

by a special disparagement of reason, with no attempt to meet

the rejoinder that, if reason has no certainties, there can be

no certainty that revelation is what it claims to be. When the

apologist concludes that Montaigne's aim en froissant la raison

humaine is to "oblige men to recognize the need of a revelation

to fix his incertitudes," it suffices to answer that Montaigne in

so many words declares at the outset of the Apologie de Raimond

Sebonde that he knows nothing of theology, which is equivalent

to saying that he is not a student of the Bible. As a matter of

fact he never quotes it!

In the last and most characteristic essay of all, discoursing at large

Of Experience, he makes the most daring attack on laws in general,

as being always arbitrary and often irrational, and not seldom more

criminal than the offences they punish. After a planless discourse

of diseases and diets, follies of habit and follies of caprice, the

wisdom of self-rule and the wisdom of irregularity, he contrives to

conclude at once that we should make the best of everything and that

"only authority is of force with men of common reach and understanding,

and is of more weight in a strange language"--a plea for Catholic

ritual. Yet in the same page he pronounces that "Supercelestial

opinions and under-terrestrial manners are things that amongst us I

have ever seen to be of singular accord."

There is no final recognition here of religion as even a useful

factor in life. In point of fact Montaigne's whole habit of mind

is perfectly fatal to orthodox religion; and it is clear that,

despite his professions of conformity, he did not hold the Christian

beliefs. [2179] He was simply a deist. Again and again he points to

Sokrates as the noblest and wisest of men; there is no reference to

Jesus or any of the saints. Whatever he might say in the Apology, in

the other essays he repeatedly reveals a radical unbelief. The essay

on Custom strikes at the root of all orthodoxy, with its thrusts

at "the gross imposture of religions, wherewith so many worthy and

sufficient men have been besotted and drunken," and its terse avowal

that "miracles are according to the ignorance wherein we are by

nature, and not according to nature's essence." [2180] Above all, he

rejected the great superstition of the age, the belief in witchcraft;

and, following the lead of Wier, [2181] suggested a medical view of

the cases of those who professed wizardry. [2182] This is the more

remarkable because his rubber-ball fashion of following impulsions

and rebounding from certainty made him often disparage other men's

certainties of disbelief just because they were certainties. Declaring

that he prefers above all things qualified and doubtful propositions,

[2183] he makes as many confident assertions of his own as any man

ever did. But the effect of the whole is a perpetual stimulus to

questioning. His function in literature was thus to set up a certain

mental atmosphere, [2184] and this the extraordinary vitality of

his utterance enabled him to do to an incalculable extent. He had

the gift to disarm or at least to baffle hostility, to charm kings,

[2185] to stand free between warring factions. No book ever written

conveys more fully the sensation of a living voice; and after three

hundred years he has as friendly an audience as ever.

Owen notes (French Skeptics, p. 446; cp. Champion, pp. 168-69)

that, though the papal curia requested Montaigne to alter certain

passages in the Essays, "it cannot be shown that he erased or

modified a single one of the points." Sainte-Beuve, indeed, has

noted many safeguarding clauses added to the later versions of

the essay on Prayers (i, 56): but they really carry further the

process of doubt. M. Champion has well shown how the profession of

personal indecision and mere self-portraiture served as a passport

for utterances which would have brought instant punishment on an

author who showed any clear purpose. As it was, nearly a century

passed before the Essais were placed upon the Roman Index Librorum

Prohibitorum (1676).

To the orthodox of his own day Montaigne seems to have given entire

satisfaction. Thus Florimond de Boemond, in his Antichrist (2e

éd. 1599, p. 4), begins his apologetic with a skeptical argument,

which he winds up by referring the reader with eulogy to the

Apologie of Montaigne. The modern resort to the skeptical method

in defence of traditional faith seems to date from this time. See

Prof. Fortunat Strowski, Histoire du sentiment religieux en France

au xviie siècle; 1907, i, 55, note. (De Montaigne à Pascal.)

The momentum of such an influence is seen in the work of Charron

(1541-1603), Montaigne's friend and disciple. The Essais had

first appeared in 1580; the expanded and revised issue in 1588;

and in 1601 there appeared Charron's De la Sagesse, which gives

methodic form and as far as was permissible a direct application to

Montaigne's naturalistic principles. Charron's is a curious case of

mental evolution. First a lawyer, then a priest, he became a highly

successful popular preacher and champion of the Catholic League;

and as such was favoured by the notorious Marguerite (the Second

[2186]) of Navarre. On the assassination of the Duke of Guise by

order of Henri III he delivered an indignant protest from the pulpit,

of which, however, he rapidly repented. [2187] Becoming the friend

of Montaigne in 1586, he shows already in 1593, in his Three Truths,

the influence of the essayist's skepticism, [2188] though Charron's

book was expressly framed to refute, first, the atheists; second,

the pagans, Jews, Mohammedans; and, third, the Christian heretics

and schismatics. The Wisdom, published only eight years later, is a

work of a very different cast, proving a mental change. Even in the

first work "the growing teeth of the skeptic are discernible beneath

the well-worn stumps of the believer"; [2189] but the second almost

testifies to a new birth. Professedly orthodox, it was yet recognized

at once by the devout as a "seminary of impiety," [2190] and brought

on its author a persecution that lasted till his sudden death from

apoplexy, which his critics pronounced to be a divine dispensation. In

the second and rearranged edition, published a year after his death,

there are some modifications; but they are so far from essential [2191]

that Buckle found the book as it stands a kind of pioneer manual of

rationalism. [2192] Its way of putting all religions on one level,

as being alike grounded on bad evidence and held on prejudice, is

only the formal statement of an old idea, found, like so many others

of Charron's, in Montaigne; but the didactic purpose and method

turn the skeptic's shrug into a resolute propaganda. So with the

formal and earnest insistence that true morality cannot be built on

religious hopes and fears--a principle which Charron was the first to

bring directly home to the modern intelligence, [2193] as he did the

principle of development in religious systems. [2194] Attempting as it

does to construct a systematic practical philosophy of life, the book

puts aside so positively the claims of the theologians, [2195] and

so emphatically subordinates religion to the rule of natural reason,

[2196] that it constitutes a virtual revolution in public doctrine

for Christendom. As Montaigne is the effective beginner of modern

literature, so is Charron the beginner of modern secular teaching. He

is a Naturalist, professing theism; and it is not surprising to find

that for a time his book was even more markedly than Montaigne's the

French "freethinker's breviary."

Strowski, as cited, pp. 164-65, 183 sq., founding on Garasse and

Mersenne. Strowski at first pronounces Charron "in reality only a

collector of commonplaces" (p. 166); but afterwards obliviously

confesses (p. 191) that "his audacities are astonishing,"

and explains that "he formulates, perhaps without knowing

it, a whole doctrine of irreligion which outgoes the man and

the time--a thought stronger than the thinker!" And again he

forgetfully speaks of "cette critique hardie et méthodique,

j'allais écrire scientifique" (p. 240). All this would be a new

form of commonplace.

It was only powerful protection that could save such a book from

proscription; but Charron and his book had the support at once of Henri

IV and the President Jeannin--the former a proved indifferentist to

religious forms; the latter the author of the remark that a peace with

two religions was better than a war which had none. Such a temper had

become predominant even among professed Catholics, as may be gathered

from the immense popularity of the Satyre Menippée (1594). Ridiculing

as it did the insensate fanaticism of the Catholic League, that

composition was naturally described as the work of atheists; but there

seems to have been no such element in the case, the authors being

all Catholics of good standing, and some of them even having a record

for zeal. [2197] The Satyre was in fact the triumphant revolt of the

humorous common sense of France against the tyranny of fanaticism,

which it may be said to have overthrown at one stroke, [2198] inasmuch

as it made possible the entry of Henri into Paris. By a sudden appeal

to secular sanity and the sense of humour it made the bulk of the

Catholic mass ashamed of its past course. [2199] On the other hand,

it is expressly testified by the Catholic historian De Thou that all

the rich and the aristocracy held the League in abomination. [2200]

In such an atmosphere rationalism must needs germinate, especially

when the king's acceptance of Catholicism dramatized the unreality

of the grounds of strife.

After the assassination of the king in 1610, the last of the bloody

deeds which had kept France on the rack of uncertainty in religion's

name for three generations, the spirit of rationalism naturally did

not wane. In the Paris of the early seventeenth century, doubtless, the

new emancipation came to be associated, as "libertinism," with licence

as well as with freethinking. In the nature of the case there could be

no serious and free literary discussion of the new problems either of

life or belief, save insofar as they had been handled by Montaigne and

Charron; and, inasmuch as the accounts preserved of the freethought

of the age are almost invariably those of its worst enemies, it is

chiefly their side of the case that has been presented. Thus in 1623

the Jesuit Father François Garasse published a thick quarto of over

a thousand pages, entitled La Doctrine Curieuse des Beaux Esprits

de ce temps, ou prétendus tels, in which he assails the "libertins"

of the day with an infuriated industry. The eight books into which

he divides his treatise proceed upon eight alleged maxims of the

freethinkers, which run as follows:--

I. There are very few good wits [bons Esprits] in the world;

and the fools, that is to say, the common run of men, are not

capable of our doctrine; therefore it will not do to speak freely,

but in secret, and among trusting and cabalistic souls.

II. Good wits [beaux Esprits] believe in God only by way of form,

and as a matter of public policy (par Maxime d'Etat).

III. A bel Esprit is free in his belief, and is not readily to

be taken in by the quantity of nonsense that is propounded to

the simple populace.

IV. All things are conducted and governed by Destiny, which

is irrevocable, infallible, immovable, necessary, eternal, and

inevitable to all men whomsoever.

V. It is true that the book called the Bible, or the Holy

Scripture, is a good book (un gentil livre), and contains a lot of

good things; but that a bon esprit should be obliged to believe

under pain of damnation all that is therein, down to the tail of

Tobit's dog, does not follow.

VI. There is no other divinity or sovereign power in the world but

Nature, which must be satisfied in all things, without refusing

anything to our body or senses that they desire of us in the

exercise of their natural powers and faculties.

VII. Supposing there be a God, as it is decorous to admit, so

as not to be always at odds with the superstitious, it does not

follow that there are creatures which are purely intellectual

and separated from matter. All that is in Nature is composite,

and therefore there are neither angels nor devils in the world,

and it is not certain that the soul of man is immortal.

VIII. It is true that to live happily it is necessary to extinguish

and drown all scruples; but all the same it does not do to appear

impious and abandoned, for fear of offending the simple or losing

the support of the superstitious.

This is obviously neither candid [2201] nor competent writing; and as

it happens there remains proof, in the case of the life of La Mothe le

Vayer, that "earnest freethought in the beginning of the seventeenth

century afforded a point d'appui for serious-minded men, which neither

the corrupt Romanism nor the narrow Protestantism of the period could

furnish." [2202] Garasse's own doctrine was that "the true liberty

of the mind consists in a simple and docile (sage) belief in all that

the Church propounds, indifferently and without distinction." [2203]

The later social history of Catholic France is the sufficient comment

on the efficacy of such teaching to regulate life. In any case the

new ideas steadily gained ground; and on the heels of the treatise of

Garasse appeared that of Marin Mersenne, L'impieté des Déistes, Athées

et Libertins de ce temps combattue, avec la refutation des opinions

de Charron, de Cardan, de Jordan Brun, et des quatraines du Déiste

(1624). In a previous treatise, Quæstiones celeberrimæ in Genesim

... in quo volumine Athei et Deisti impugnantur et expugnantur (1623),

Mersenne set agoing the often-quoted assertion that, while atheists

abounded throughout Europe, they were so specially abundant in France

that in Paris alone there were some fifty thousand. Even taking the

term "atheist" in the loosest sense in which such writers used it,

the statement was never credited by any contemporary, or by its author;

but neither did anyone doubt that there was an unprecedented amount of

unbelief. The Quatraines du Déiste, otherwise L'Antibigot, was a poem

of one hundred and six stanzas, never printed, but widely circulated

in manuscript in its day. It is poor poetry enough, but its doctrine

of a Lucretian God who left the world to itself sufficed to create

a sensation, and inspired Mersenne to write a poem in reply. [2204]

Such were the signs of the times when Pascal was in his cradle.

Mersenne's statistical assertion was made in two sheets of the

Quæstiones Celeberrimæ, "qui ont été supprimé dans la plupart

des exemplaires, à cause, sans doute, de leur exagération"

(Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartésienne, 1854, i, 28, where

the passage is cited). The suppressed sheets included a list of

the "atheists" of the time, occupying five folio columns. (Julian

Hibbert, Plutarchus and Theophrastus on Superstition, etc., 1828;

App. Catal. of Works written against Atheism, p. 3; Prosper

Marchand, Lettre sur le Cymbalum Mundi, in éd. Bibliophile

Jacob, 1841, p. 17, note; Prof. Strowski, De Montaigne à Pascal,

1907, p. 138 sq.) Mersenne himself, in the preface to his book,

stultifies his suppressed assertion by declaring that the impious

in Paris boast falsely of their number, which is really small,

unless heretics be reckoned as atheists. Garasse, writing against

them, all the while professed to know only five atheists, three

of them Italians (Strowski, as cited).

END OF VOL. I.

NOTES

[1] Cp. Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus, 1841, p. 458;

A. S. Farrar, Critical History of Freethought, 1862, p. 588; Larousse's

Dictionnaire, art. Libre Pensée; Sayous, Les déistes anglais et le

Christianisme, 1882, p. 203.

[2] Jesus is made to apply it either to his disciples or to willing

followers in Matt. xvii, 17, where the implication seems to be that

lack of faith alone prevents miraculous cures. So with apistia in

Matt. xiii, 58. In the Epistles, a pagan as such is apistos--e.g.,

1 Cor. vi, 6. Here the Vulgate has infideles: in Matt. xiii, 58,

the word is incredulitatem.

[3] Cp. Luke xii, 46; Tit. i, 15; Rev. xxi, 8.

[4] In the prologue to the first print of the old (1196) Revelation

of the Monk of Evesham, 1482.

[5] Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Viret, Note D.

[6] Essais, liv. iii. ch. 12. Édit. Firmin-Didot, 1882, ii, 518.

[7] See F. T. Perrens, Les Libertins en France au xviie Siècle, 1896,

Introd. § 11, for a good general view of the bearings of the word. It

stood at times for simple independence of spirit, apart from religious

freethinking. Thus Madame de Sevigné (Lettre à Mme. de Grignan,

28 juin, 1671) writes: "Je suis libertine, plus que vous."

[8] Stähelin, Johannes Calvin, 1863, i, 383 sq.; Perrens as cited,

pp. 5-6; Mosheim, Eccles. Hist., 13 Cent., part ii, ch. v, §§ 9-12,

and notes; 14 Cent., part ii, ch. v, §§ 3-5; 16 Cent., § 3, part ii,

ch. ii. §§ 38-42.

[9] A. Bossert, Calvin, 1906. p. 151.

[10] Burckhardt, Renaissance in Italy, Eng. tr. ed. 1892, p. 542, note.

[11] Answer to Sir T. More, Parker Soc. rep. 1850, pp. 53-54.

[12] Controversy with Harding, Parker Soc. rep. of Works, 1845, i, 305.

[13] Paradise Lost, i, 582; Samson Agonistes, 221.

[14] The New Inn, 1628-9, Act iii. Sc. 2.

[15] The New English Dictionary gives instances in 1526 and 1552.

[16] If Mr. Froude's transcript of a manuscript can here be relied

on. History, ed. 1870, x, 545. (Ed. 1872, xi, 199.)

[17] Four Questions Propounded (pref. to Acts and Monuments).

[18] Answer to the Bishop of Winchester, Parker Soc. rep., p. 129.

[19] Works, ed. 1850, ii, 752.

[20] B. V, ch. i, § 3. Works, i, 429.

[21] De civitate Dei, xx, 30, end; xxi, 5, beginn., etc.

[22] Religio Medici, 1642, pt. i. §§ 19, 20.

[23] Essay II, Of Scepticism and Certainty (rep. of reply to Thomas

White, app. to Scepsis Scientifica in 1665) in Glanvill's collected

Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion,

1676, pp. 38, 44.

[24] Plus Ultra: or, The Progress and Advancement of Knowledge since

the Days of Aristotle, 1668, p. 146.

[25] History of the Royal Society, 1667, p. 73. Describing the

beginnings of the Society, Sprat remarks that Oxford had at that time

many members "who had begun a free way of reasoning" (p. 53).

[26] Buckle, Introd. to Hist. of Civ. in Eng., 1-vol. ed. p. 211.

[27] Sprat, p. 375 (printed as 367).

[28] Id., p. 83. The French Academy had the same rule.

[29] Some of Sprat's uses of the term have a very general sense, as

when he writes (p. 87) that "Amsterdam is a place of Trade without the

mixture of men of freer thoughts." The latter is an old application,

as in "the free sciences" or "the liberal arts."

[30] Cited by Archbishop Trench, The Study of Words, 19th ed., p. 230,

from the Clarendon State Papers, App. Vol. III, p. 40.

[31] Art. Rationalismus and Supernaturalismus in Herzog and Plitt's

Real-Encyk. für prot. Theol. und Kirche, 1883. xii, 509.

[32] Philosophical Works of Bacon, ed. Ellis and Spedding, iii,

583. See the same saying quoted among the Apophthegms given in

Tenison's Baconiana (Routledge's ed. of Works, p. 895).

[33] Every Man in his Humour (1598), Act iii, sc. 3.

[34] Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of his

Friends, 1708, p. 190.

[35] Id. p. 133.

[36] Ed. Rotterdam, 1686. p. 195.

[37] B. II, pt. ii, § 1.

[38] Ch. on Logic, cited by Professor Fowler in his ed. of the Novum

Organum, 1878, introd. p. 118.

[39] §§ 3 and 4.

[40] Letters, 1746, p. 5.

[41] Orig. ed. iii, 305, 306, 311; ed. J. M. R., 1900, ii, 349, 353.

[42] Nos. 12, 111, 135.

[43] Cp. Johnson on A. Philips in Lives of the Poets. Swift, too,

issued his Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs in 1714.

[44] Thus Bentley, writing as Phileleutherus Lipsiensis against

Collins, claims to have been "train'd up and exercis'd in Free Thought

from my youth." Dr. Samuel Clarke somewhere makes a similar statement;

and the point is raised by Berkeley in his Minute Philosopher,

Dial. i, § 10. One of the first replies to Collins, A Letter to the

Free-thinkers, By a Layman, dated February 24, 1712-13, likewise

insists on the right of believers to the title, declaring that

"a free-thinker may be the best or worst of men." Shaftesbury on

the other side protests that the passion of orthodoxy "holds up the

intended chains and fetters and declares its resolution to enslave"

(Characteristics, iii. 305; ed. 1900, ii, 345). Later, the claim of

Bentley and Clarke became common; and one tract on Christian evidences,

A Layman's Faith, 1732, whose author shows not a grain of the critical

spirit, professes to be written "by a Freethinker and a Christian."

[45] Written in 1898.

[46] Cp. Hauréau, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique,

ed. 1870-1872, i, 543-46.

[47] Second ed. with enlarged Appendix (of authorities and references),

1808, 2 vols.

[48] Farrar, pref., p. x; Riddle, p. 99; Van Mildert, i, 105, etc.

[49] Van Mildert even recast his first manuscript. See the Memoir of

Joshua Watson, 1863, p. 35.

[50] Cp. W. A. Schmidt, Geschichte der Denk- und Glaubensfreiheit im

ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und des Christenthums, 1847,

pp. 12-13.

[51] Its legitimacy on that side is expressly contended for by

Professor William James in his volume The Will to Believe (1897),

the positions of which were criticized by the present writer in the

University Magazine, April and June, 1897.

[52] Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed., p. 135.

[53] A religious basis for sexual licence is of course a common feature

in non-Christian religions also. Classic instances are well known. As

to sexual promiscuity in an "intensely religious" savage community,

see Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, p. 290.

[54] E. B. Tylor, Anthropology, 1881, p. 439. Cp. Lang, Custom and

Myth, ed. 1893, p. 72; J. G. Frazer, Lectures on the Early History

of the Kingship, 1905, pp. 85-87.

[55] Theal, The Beginning of South African History, 1902, p. 57. See

also the Rev. J. Macdonald, Light in Africa, 1890, p. 192.

[56] Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians,

5th ed. 1871, i, 280, note.

[57] Life of Mr. Yukichi Fukuzawa, Tokyo, 1902, pp. 48-53, 56-69.

[58] See Tylor, Primitive Culture, 3rd ed. i, 71, as to savage

conservatism in handicraft; but compare his Researches into the Early

History of Mankind, 1865, p. 160, as to countervailing forces.

[59] E.g., in the first chapter of Saint-Simon's Mémoires, the account

of the French soldiers who at the siege of Namur burned and broke

the images of Saint Médard for sending so much rain. Cp. Irvine,

Letters on Sicily, 1813, p. 72; and Ramage, Wanderings through Italy,

ed. 1868, p. 113. Constant, De la religion, 1824, vol. i, ptie. ii,

p. 34, gives a number of Christian instances.

[60] Rev. J. B. Stair, Old Samoa, 1897, pp. 181-82.

[61] Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Mathematicos, ix, 14, 29; Pseudo-Plutarch,

De placitis philosophorum, i, 7; Lactantius, De ira Dei, x, 47;

Cicero, De natura Deorum, i, 42; Augustine, De civitate Dei, iv,

32. It is noteworthy that the skeptic Sextus rejects the opinion as

absurd, even as does the high-priest Cotta in Cicero.

[62] Vico was one of the first, after Sextus Empiricus and his modern

commentator Fabricius, to insist (following the saying of Petronius,

Primus in orbe deos fecit timor) that "False religions were founded

not by the imposture of some, but by the credulity of all" (Scienza

Nuova [1725], lib. i, prop. 40). Yet when denying (id., De' Principii,

ed. 1852, p. 114) the assertions of travellers as to tribes without

religion, he insisted that they were mere fictions planned to sell

the authors' books--here imputing fraud as lightly as others had done

in the case of the supposed founders of religions.

[63] E.g., the Elizabethan play Selimus (Huth Lib. ed. of Greene,

vol. xiv, ed. Grosart), dated 1594, vv. 258-262. (In "Temple

Dramatists" ed., vv. 330-334.) See also below, vol. ii, ch. xiii.

[64] On the principle of self-expression in religion, cp. Feuerbach,

Das Wesen der Religion, in Werke, ed. 1846-1849, i, 413, 445, 498, etc.

[65] Bishop Thirlwall, History of Greece, ed. 1839, i, 186,

204. Cp. Curtius, Griechische Geschichte, 1858, i, 389.

[66] Tiele, Outlines of the Hist. of Religions, Eng. tr.,

p. 96. Cp. Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church,

2nd ed., p. 141, note.

[67] Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia,

1904, pp. 258, 347, 366, 373, 492.

[68] See the article by E. J. Glave, of Stanley's force, on

"Fetishism in Congoland," in the Century Magazine, April, 1891,

p. 836. Compare F. Schultze, Der Fetischismus, 1871, pp. 137, 141,

142, 144, etc.; Theal, The Beginning of South African History, 1902,

pp. 49, 52; Kranz, Natur- und Kulturleben der Zulus, 1880, pp. 110,

113-14; Moffat, Missionary Labours, 35th thous., pp. 69, 81-84;

A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples, 1887, pp. 125-29, 137-39, 142;

Sir G. S. Robertson, The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, ed. 1899, pp. 405,

417; E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, p. 149; Turner, Samoa,

1884, p. 272. It is certain that the wizards of contemporary savage

races are frequently killed as impostors by their own people. See

below, p. 35.

[69] Tylor, Anthropology, p. 406; Primitive Culture, 3rd ed., i, 38.

[70] The fact that this phenomenon occurs everywhere among primitives,

from the South Seas to Lapland, should be noted in connection with

the latterly revived claims of so-called "Mysticism."

[71] Cp. E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, pp. 149, 263.

[72] Glave, article cited, pp. 835-36.

[73] Cp. Max Müller, Natural Religion, 1889, p. 133; Anthropological

Religion, 1892, p. 150; Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, 2nd ed. ii,

358 sq.

[74] Compare Bishop Butler's Charge to the Clergy of Durham, and Bishop

Wordsworth On Religious Restoration in England, 1854, p. 75, etc.

[75] P. von Bradke, Dyâus Asura, Ahura Mazda, und die Asuras,

Halle. 1885, p. 115.

[76] Rig-Veda, x, 121 (as translated by Muir, Müller, Dutt, and von

Bradke); and x, 82 (Dutt's rendering). It is to be noted that the

refrain "Who is the God whom we should worship?" is entirely different

in Ludwig's rendering of x, 121. [Bertholet's Religionsgeschichtliches

Lesebuch (1908) compiled on the principle that "the best translations

are good enough for us," follows the rendering of Muir, Müller, Dutt,

and von Bradke (p. 165).] Cp. Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 302,

and Natural Religion, pp. 227-229, citing R. V., viii, 100, 3, etc.,

for an apparently undisputed case of skepticism. See again Langlois's

version of vi, 7, iii, 3 (p. 459). He cannot diverge much more from

the German and English translators than they do from each other.

[77] Junod, as above cited, pp. 341, 343, 350, 388. Cp. Dalton,

as cited, p. 115.

[78] E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, pp. 146-7.

[79] On the other hand, there might be genuine defect of knowledge of

the religion of others of the tribe. This is said to occur in thousands

of cases in Christian countries: why not also among savages? See the

express testimony of Sir G. S. Robertson, The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush,

ed. 1899, pp. 377, 409.

[80] E.g., Moffat, Missionary Labours, end of ch. xvi and beginning

of ch. xix.

[81] See Dr. Gasquet, The Great Pestilence, 1893.

[82] Missionary Labours, ch. xix: stereo. ed. pp. 81, 82. It is

noteworthy that the women were the first to avow unbelief in an

unsuccessful rainmaker (Id. p. 84).

[83] Missionary Labours, as cited, p. 85.

[84] Cp. Schultze, Der Fetischismus, 1871, pp. 155-56; A. H. Keane,

Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 49; Thurston, Castes and Tribes of

Southern India, 1909, i, 86.

[85] Travels in Southern Africa in the Years 1803-1806, 1815, ii,

61. Cp. Rev. J. Macdonald, Light in Africa, 1890, p. 192, as to

the compulsion on men of superior intelligence to play the wizard,

by reason of the common connection of wizardry with any display of

mental power. There is no more tragical aspect in the life-conditions

of primitive peoples.

[86] The Lake Regions of Central Africa, 1860, ii, 351.

[87] Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884,

pp. 304-305. Cp. Herodotos, iv, 68, as to the slaying of "false

prophets" among the Scythians; and i, 128, as to the impaling of the

Magi by Astyages.

[88] Paul Kollmann, The Victoria Nyanza, 1899, p. 168.

[89] Sir A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast,

1887, p. 127.

[90] E.g., an aged female relative of the writer, quite orthodox

in all her habits, and devout to the extent of calling the Book of

Esther "Godless" because the word "God" does not occur in it, yet

at a pinch declared that she had "never heard of Providence putting

a boll of meal inside anybody's door." Her daughter-in-law, also of

quite religious habits, quoted the saying with a certain sense of its

audacity, but endorsed it, as she had cause to do. Yet both regularly

practised prayer and asserted divine beneficence.

[91] See B. Seeman, "Fiji and the Fijians," in Galton's Vacation

Tourists, 1862, pp. 275-76, as to the terrorism resorted to by Fijian

priests against unbelievers. "Punishment was sure to overtake the

skeptic, let his station in life be what it might"--i.e., supernatural

punishment was threatened, and the priests were not likely to let it

fail. Cp. Basil Thomson, The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom,

1909, introd., p. xi: "The reformers of primitive races never lived

long: if they were low-born they were clubbed, and that was the end of

them and their reforms; if they were chiefs, and something happened

to them, either by disease or accident, men saw therein the figure

of an offended deity; and obedience to the existing order of things

became stronger than before." Cp. Pagan Christs, 2nd ed., pp. 60-62,

as to kings who wished to put down human sacrifices.

[92] See Pagan Christs, 2nd ed., pp. 1-2.

[93] E. J. Glave, art. cited, p. 825. Cp. Lubbock, Prehistoric Times,

pp. 582, 594.

[94] Cp. the Rev. J. Macdonald, Light in Africa, 1890, pp. 222-23,

as to the "universal suspicion" which falls upon tribesmen of

rationalistic and anti-superstitious tendencies, making them "almost

doubt their own sanity."

[95] Sir H. H. Johnston, The River Congo, ed. 1805, p. 289. Cp. Moffat,

as cited above.

[96] Colenso, The Pentateuch, vol. i, pref. p. vii; introd. p. 9.

[97] Spencer, Principles of Sociology, iii, § 583.

[98] W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 1831, iv, 30-31, 126-28.

[99] Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, compiled from the

communications of W. Mariner, by John Martin, M.D., 3rd ed. 1827,

i, 289-300, 306-307, 338-39; ii, 27-28, 83-86, 134. Mariner, who saw

much of the priests, found no reason to suspect them of any systematic

deception. See ii, 129. But his narrative leaves small room for doubt

as to the procedure of the priest of Toobo Totai.

[100] Dr. A. Kropf, Das Volk der Xosa-Kaffern in östlichen Südafrika,

Berlin, 1899, pp. 203-204. Dr. Kropf, a missionary of forty years'

experience, states that many of the Kaffirs latterly disbelieve

in their sorcerers; but this may be partly a result of missionary

teaching--not so much the religious as the scientific. See the

testimony of the Rev. J. Macdonald, Life in Africa, 1890, pp. 47-48.

[101] Rev. J. Macdonald, Life in Africa, pp. 225-26.

[102] It is clear that in the Christianization of Europe much use

was made of the argument that the best lands had fallen to the

Christian peoples. See the epistle of Bishop Daniel of Winchester

to St. Boniface (Ep. lxvii) cited in Schlegel's note to Mosheim,

Reid's ed. of Murdock's translation, p. 262.

[103] Bede, Eccles. Hist., ii, 13.

[104] Cp. A. H. Mann in Social England, illustr. ed., i, 217.

[105] Teutonic Mythology, Eng. trans. 1882, i, 7.

[106] Crichton and Wheaton, Scandinavia, 1837, i, 198, note. Compare

Dr. Ph. Schweitzer, Geschichte der Skandinavischen Litteratur, i, 25:

"In the higher circles [in the pagan period] from an early date (schon

lange) unbelief and even contempt of religion flourished ... probably

never reaching the lower grades of the people." See also C. F. Allen,

Histoire de Danemark, French trans., Copenhagen, 1878, i, 55.

[107] Æneid, vii, 648; x, 773, 880. Mezentius does not deny that Gods

exist: see x, 743.

[108] Sir G. S. Robertson, The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, ed. 1899,

p. 379.

[109] Professor T. Clifford Allbutt, Harveian Oration on Science and

Medieval Thought, 1901, p. 82.

[110] Mr. Basil Thomson, in the able introduction to his excellent work

on The Fijians, speaks of primitive reformers (p. xi) as "rare souls

born before their time." But there is no special "time" for reformers,

who, as such, must be in advance of their average contemporaries.

[111] Garcilasso, 1. viii, c. 8; 1. ix, c. 10; Herrera, Dec. v, 1. iv,

c. 4. See the passages in Réville's Hibbert Lectures, pp. 162-65.

[112] Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, Kirk's ed., pp. 81 sq., 91-93,

97; H. H. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, v, 427-29;

Clavigero, History of Mexico, Eng. tr. ed. 1807, B. iv, §§ 4, 15;

vii. § 42.

[113] See the author's Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 60-62,

361. Cp. Lafcadio Hearn, Japan, 1904, pp. 313-14.

[114] Cp. T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, ed. 1870, i, 231; Turner,

Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, p. 202.

[115] "A long time elapses between each step that their [missionaries']

stations advance: and when they do it invariably is under the influence

of some chief that they are even then led on." Dalton, Narrative of

an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, ed. 1891, p. 102.

[116] See Professor Sully's Studies of Childhood, 1895.

[117] Rev. S. Smith, Church Work among the Deaf and Dumb, 1875, cited

by Spencer, Principles of Sociology, iii, § 583. Cp. the testimony

cited there from Dr. Kitto, Lost Senses, p. 200.

[118] Die griechischen Culte und Mythen, 1887, pp. 263, 276, 277,

etc. What is true as regards the thesis is that some of the central

insanities of religion, such as the cult of human sacrifice, seem to

have been propagated in all directions from an Asiatic centre. See

the author's Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 273, 292, 343, 354, 362,

etc. Cp. the Rev. D. Macdonald's Asiatic Origin of the Oceanic

Languages, Luzac & Co., 1894; the Nubische Grammatik of Lepsius,

1880; and Terrien de Lacouperie, Western Origin of the Early Chinese

Civilization, 1894, pp. 134, 362-63.

[119] Dr. Andrew White, A History of the Warfare of Science with

Theology in Christendom, 1896, i, 23.

[120] Dr. B. Seeman, Viti, 1862, pp. 179-82.

[121] Cp. Lang (Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i, 91) as to the

contemptuous disbelief of savages in Christian myths. Mr. Lang

observes that this shows savages and civilized men to have "different

standards of credulity." That, however, does not seem to be the true

inference. Each order of believer accepts the myths of his own creed,

and derides others.

[122] Cp. Decharme, La Critique des trad. relig. chez les Grecs,

1904, p. 121.

[123] The same process will be recorded later in the case of the

intercourse of Crusaders and Saracens; and in the seventeenth century

it is noted by La Bruyère (Caractères, ch. xvi, Des esprits forts,

par. 3) as occurring in his day. The anonymous English author of an

essay on The Agreement of the Customs of the East Indians with those of

the Jews (1705, pp. 152-53) naïvely endorses La Bruyère. Macaulay's

remark to the Edinburgh electors, on the view taken of sectarian

strifes by a man who in India had seen the worship of the cow, is

well known.

[124] Cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 96, 121-22; Robertson Smith,

Religion of the Semites, p. 74; Tiele, Egyptian Religion, p. 36;

and Outlines, p. 52.

[125] Cp. Tiele, Outlines, pp. 109-110, and Fischer, Heidenthum und

Offenbarung, p. 59. Professor Max Müller's insistence that the lines of

Vedic religion could not have been "crossed by trains of thought which

started from China, from Babylon, or from Egypt" (Physical Religion,

p. 251), does not affect the hypothesis put above. The Professor

admits (p. 250) the exact likeness of the Babylonian fire-cult to

that of Agni.

[126] But cp. Müller, Anthropolog. Relig., p. 164, as to possible

later developments; and see above, pp. 45-47, as to the many cases in

which conquering races have actually adopted the Gods of the conquered.

[127] Muir, Original Sanskrit Texts, ii (2nd ed.), 372, 379, 384.

[128] Id. p. 395.

[129] Max Müller, Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 207-208.

[130] Cp. Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda, 1894, pp. 94, 98-99;

Ghosha, Hist. of Hindu Civ. as illust. in the Vedas, Calcutta, 1889,

pp. 190-91; Max Müller, Phys. Relig., 1891, pp. 197-98.

[131] Max Müller, Selected Essays, ii, 237.

[132] Muir, Original Sanskrit Texts, v, 268.

[133] Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 302, citing R. V., viii, 100,

3; and ii, 12, 5. The first passage runs: "If you wish for strength,

offer to Indra a hymn of praise: a true hymn, if Indra truly exist;

for some one says, Indra does not exist! Who has seen him? Whom shall

we praise?" The hymn of course asseverates his existence.

[134] Cp. Rig-Veda, i, 164, 46; x, 90 (cited by Ghosa, pp. 191,

198); viii, 10 (cited by Müller, Natural Religion, pp. 227-29);

and x, 82, 121, 129 (cited by Romesh Chunder Dutt, Hist. of Civ. in

Anc. India, ed. 1893, i, 95-97); Muir, Sanskrit Texts, v, 353 sq.;

Tiele, Outlines, p. 125; Weber, Hist. of Ind. Lit., Eng. trans.,

p. 5; Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, ed. 1880, pp. 298-304, 310, 315;

Phys. Relig., p. 187; Barth, Religions of India, Eng. trans., p. 8;

Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii, 354.

[135] Barth, Religions of India, pp. 26, 31, citing Rig-Veda, v, 3,

1; i, 164, 46; viii, 68, 2. The phrase as to Agni is common in the

Brâhmanas, but is not yet so in the Vedas. The second text cited is

rendered by Müller: "That which is one the sages speak of in many

ways--they call it Agni, Yama, Mâtarisvan" (Selected Essays, 1881,

ii, 240).

[136] Colebrooke's Miscellaneous Essays, ed. 1873, i, 375-76. Weber

(Ind. Lit., pp. 27, 137, 236, 284-85) has advanced the view that

the adherents of this doctrine, who gradually became stigmatized as

heretics, were the founders or beginners of Buddhism. But the view

that the universe is a self-existent totality appears to enter into the

Brahmans' Sankhya teaching, which is midway between the popular Nyaya

system and the esoteric Vedânta (Ballantyne, Christianity Contrasted

with Hindu Philosophy, 1859, pp. xviii, 59, 61). As to the connection

between the Sankhya system and Buddhism, see Oldenberg, Der Buddha,

sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde, 3te Aufl., Excurs, pp. 443.

[137] H. H. Wilson, Works, 1862-71, ii, 346.

[138] Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 236.

[139] Ballantyne, pp. 58, 61; Major Jacob, Manual of Hindu Pantheism,

1881, p. 13.

[140] Cp. Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, ed. 1880, i,

228-232, and Banerjea's Dialogues on the Hindu Philosophy, p. 73,

cited by Major Jacob, Hindu Pantheism, p. 13.

[141] Jacob, as cited, p. 3.

[142] Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 340-41. Cp. Barth, Religions

of India, p. 81.

[143] Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 139.

[144] Cp. Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 28.

[145] Id. pp. 28, 220-22.

[146] Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 139, note, citing Panini, iv,

4, 60.

[147] Apparently belonging to the later or middle Buddhist

period. Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 141.

[148] On these cp. Müller, p. 139, note; Garbe, Philos. of Anc. India,

Eng. tr. 2nd ed. Chicago, 1899, p. 25; and Weber, Ind. Lit. p. 246,

note, with the very full research of Professor Rhys Davids, Dialogues

of the Buddha, 1899, pp. 166-72.

[149] Müller, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 140-41. Cp. Garbe. p. 28.

[150] Garbe, as cited.

[151] Rhys Davids, Dialogues of the Buddha, p. 171.

[152] Id. pp. 169-71.

[153] Id. p. 172.

[154] Id. ib.

[155] Trans. in English by Cowell and Gough, 1882.

[156] Garbe, as cited, p. 25.

[157] See Müller, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 141-42, citing Burnouf.

[158] Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 310.

[159] Bk. I, Stories ii, 7, 8, 16; vii. 180.

[160] Bk. I, 11, 40; St. ii, 32.

[161] St. vi. 162.

[162] Major Jacob, as cited, preface.

[163] Müller, Psychol. Relig., pp. 95, 97, 126; Lect. on the Vedânta

Philos., 1894, p. 32.

[164] Chunder Dutt, Hist. of Civ. in Anc. India, as cited, i, 112-13.

[165] Rhys Davids, trans. of Dialogues of the Buddha, p. 166. Cp. his

Buddhism, p. 143, as to Buddhist censures of an extravagant skepticism

which denied every religious theory. In one of the Dialogues (ii,

25, p. 74) a contemporary sophist is cited as flatly denying a future

state. Mr. Lillie, however (Buddhism in Christendom, 1887, p. 187),

contends as against Professor Rhys Davids that the Upanishads were only

"whispered to pupils who had gone through a severe probation."

[166] Prof. Weber (Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 4) says the peoples of the

Punjaub never at all submitted to the Brahmanical rule and caste

system. But the subject natives there must at the outset have been

treated as an inferior order. Cp. Tiele, Outlines, p. 120 and refs.;

and Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 23.

[167] Cp. Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 236, 284-85; Max Müller,

Chips, i, 228-32; Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 258-64; and the

general discussion of the problem in the author's Pagan Christs,

2nd ed. pp. 239-63.

[168] Brahmanism had itself been by this time influenced by aboriginal

elements, even to the extent of affecting its language. Weber, as

cited, p. 177. Cp. Müller, Anthrop. Relig., p. 164.

[169] Major Jacob, as cited, p. 12.

[170] I.e., "the enlightened," a title given to sages in

general. Weber, p. 284.

[171] Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 179, 299; Müller, Natural Religion,

p. 299.

[172] See Senart, Essai sur la légende de Buddha, 2e édit., p. 297 ff.

[173] Cp. Weber, pp. 286-87, 303.

[174] See Weber, pp. 301, 307; also Rhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 43,

83, etc.

[175] Tiele, Outlines, p. 117.

[176] Cp. Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 27, 284-87; Max Müller, Natural

Religion, p. 555; Jacobi, as there cited; Tiele, Outlines, pp. 135-36;

Rhys Davids, American Lectures on Buddhism, pp. 115-16; Buddhism,

p. 84; and the author's Pagan Christs, pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 8-13.

[177] Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 4, 39.

[178] Barth, Religions of India, p. 146.

[179] Rhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 35, 79, 99.

[180] Cp. Pagan Christs, pp. 248-50.

[181] Rhys Davids, trans. of Dialogues, pp. 188-89; Amer. Lec. on

Buddhism, 1896, pp. 127-34; Hibbert Lectures, 1881, p. 109; Buddhism,

pp. 95, 98-99.

[182] Max Müller, Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 295.

[183] As the context in Professor Müller's work shows, these phrases

are inaccurate.

[184] Cp. Weber, Ind. Lit., p. 289, note; and Banerjea, Dialogues on

the Hindu Philosophy, p. 520, cited by Major Jacob, pp. 29-30.

[185] See Muir, Sanskrit Texts, iv, 50 (cited by Jacob, pp. 30-31),

as to the Brahman view of the licence ascribed to Krishna. And see

iii, 32 (cited by Jacob, p. 14), as to a remarkable disparagement of

Vedism in the Bhagavat Gita.

[186] Müller, Selected Essays, ii, 363: H. H. Wilson, as last cited,

ii, 368 sq.

[187] See this brought out in a strikingly dramatic way in Mr. Dennis

Hird's novel, The Believing Bishop.

[188] Cp. Dr. A. Jeremias, Monotheistische Strömungen innerhalb der

Babylonischen Religion, 1904, p. 44--a very candid research.

[189] The Hammurabi Code, by Chilperic Edwards, 1904, pp. 67, 68, 70

(§§ 240, 249, 266). The invocations of named Gods by Hammurabi at the

close of the code, however, suggest that the force of the word was

"a God." Cp. p. 76 with what follows; and see note on p. 93. On this

question compare Jeremias, as cited, pp. 39, 43.

[190] Maspero, Hist. anc. des peup. de l'orient, 4e éd. p. 139; Sayce,

Hib. Lect., pp. 121, 213, 215; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt., i (1884),

161 (§ 133); iii (1901), 167 sq. (§ 103).

[191] Sayce, pp. 219, 344; Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, Eng. ed. p. 127.

[192] Jastrow, Religions of Babylonia and Assyria, 1898, p. 318.

[193] Jastrow, p. 187; Sayce, pp. 128, 267-68. Cp. Kuenen, Religion of

Israel, Eng. tr., i, 91; Menzies, History of Religion, 1895, p. 171;

Gunkel, Israel und Babylonien, 1903, p. 30; Jeremias, as cited,

pp. 5-6.

[194] Meyer, iii, 168; Jastrow, p. 79; Sayce, p. 331 sq., 367 sq.;

Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 112; Jeremias, pp. 7-23.

[195] Sayce, p. 305. Cp. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites,

p. 452.

[196] Jastrow, p. 190, note, p. 319; Sayce, pp. 191-92, 367; Lenormant,

pp. 112, 113, 119, 133; Jeremias, p. 26.

[197] Tiele, Outlines, p. 78; Sayce, Ancient Empires of the East,

pp. 152-53; Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, 2nd ed. iii, 13; Maspero,

p. 139.

[198] Strabo, xvi, c. 1, § 6.

[199] Cp. Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, i, 110; iii, 12-13.

[200] Hibbert Lectures, p. 385.

[201] Meyer, iii, § 103; Sayce, pp. 192, 345.

[202] Cp. Jastrow, p. 662; Sayce, p. 78; and Tiele, Hist. Comparée,

p. 209. It seems probable that human sacrifice was latterly restricted

to the case of criminals.

[203] Cp. Meyer, iii, 173.

[204] Meyer, i, 187, and note.

[205] Cp. T. G. Pinches, The Old Testament in the Light of the

Hist. Records of Assyria and Babylonia, 1902, pp. 161-63.

[206] Jastrow, pp. 187, 256; Sayce, pp. 316, 320, 322, 327; Meyer,

i, 183; Lenormant, p. 110; Jeremias, p. 5.

[207] Sayce, pp. 326, 341; cp. Jastrow, p. 317.

[208] Meyer, i, 599; Sayce, Hib. Lect., pp. 85-91; Anc. Emp. of the

East, p. 245.

[209] Meyer, iii, § 57.

[210] Herod. i, 131.

[211] Jer. xi, 13, etc.

[212] Ezek. chs. vi, viii.

[213] Cp. the recent literature on the recovered Code of Hammurabi.

[214] Herod. i, 101.

[215] Id. iii, 79.

[216] Cp. Grote, History of Greece, pt. ii, ch. 33 (ed. 1888, iii,

442), note.

[217] Meyer, Gesch. des Alt., i, 505 (§ 417), 542 (§ 451), 617 (§

515); Tiele, Outlines, p. 164.

[218] Herod. i, 130.

[219] Cp. Herod. iii, 94, 98; Grote, vol. iii, p. 448.

[220] Meyer, as cited, i, 505, 530 (§ 439); Tiele, Outlines, pp. 163,

165.

[221] Meyer, i, 528 (§ 438).

[222] Darmesteter, The Zendavesta (S. B. E. ser.), vol. i, introd.,

p. lx (1st ed.).

[223] Rawlinson, Religions of the Anc. World, p. 105; Meyer, §§

417, 450-51.

[224] Meyer, i, 507 (§ 418).

[225] Cp. Meyer, i, 506-508; Renan, as cited by him, p. 508;

Darmesteter, as cited, cc. iv-ix, 2nd ed.; Tiele, Outlines, p. 165.

[226] Meyer, i, 520 (§ 428).

[227] Meyer, i, 524 (§ 433); Tiele, Outlines, p. 178; Darmesteter,

Ormazd et Ahriman, 1877, pp. 7-18.

[228] Meyer, i, § 450 (p. 541).

[229] Tiele, Outlines, p. 167. Cp. Lenormant (Chaldean Magic, p. 229),

who attributes the heresy to immoral Median Magi; and Spiegel (Avesta,

1852, i, 271), who considers it a derivation from Babylon.

[230] Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures on Relig. of Anc. Egypt,

2nd ed. p. 92; Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians,

Eng. tr. 1897, p. 109. Cp. p. 260. Renouf (pp. 93-103) supplies an

interesting analysis.

[231] Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 83; Wiedemann, as cited, p. 103 sq.

[232] Cp. Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906,

pp. 354, 417, 433.

[233] Wiedemann, as cited, p. 136.

[234] Meyer, p. 81 (§ 66); Tiele, Hist. of the Egypt. Relig. Eng. tr.,

pp. 119, 154.

[235] Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 240.

[236] Meyer, Geschichte des Alten Egyptens, in Oncken's series,

1877, B. iii, Kap. 3, p. 249; Gesch. des Alt. i. 109; Tiele,

Egypt. Relig. pp. 149, 151, 157; Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de

l'orient, 4é ed., pp. 278-80; Le Page Renouf, as cited, pp. 215-30;

Wiedemann, pp. 12, 13, 301; Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion,

Eng. tr. 1907, p. 57.

[237] Erman, pp. 59, 60.

[238] Tiele, Egypt. Rel. pp. 153, 155, 156.

[239] Tiele, p. 157.

[240] Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter, 1884;

1 Hälfte, pp. 90-91; Kuenen, Religion of Israel, Eng. trans. i,

395-97; Tiele, pp. 226-30; Erman, pp. 71, 103-105.

[241] Cp. Wiedemann, p. 302.

[242] Tiele, pp. 114, 118, 154. Cp. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums,

i, 101-102 (§ 85). Wiedemann, p. 260.

[243] Dr. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, 1899, end.

[244] Tiele, p. 157. Cp. p. 217.

[245] Cp. Maspero, as cited, pp. 274-76.

[246] Meyer, i, 72.

[247] Maspero's spelling.

[248] Von Bissing's spelling.

[249] De Garis Davies, The Tombs of Amarna.

[250] Maspero (Hist. anc. des peuples de l'orient, ed. 1905, p. 251)

says he respected also Osiris and Horus.

[251] Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, ed. 1891, p. 216. Maspero

(as cited, p. 250) recognizes no such revolt.

[252] Maspero, Hist. anc. de l'orient, 7e éd. pp. 248-54; Brugsch,

Hist. of Egypt under the Pharaohs, Eng. trans. ed. 1891, ch. x;

Meyer, Geschichte des alten Aegyptens, B. iii, Kap. 4, 5; Gesch. des

Alterthums, i, 271-74; Tiele, pp. 161-65; Flinders Petrie, History

of Egypt, iii (1905), 10; Wiedemann, pp. 35-39; Erman, pp. 61-70;

L. W. King and H. H. Hall, Egypt and Western Asia in the Light of

Recent Discoveries, 1907, pp. 383-87; F. W. von Bissing, Geschichte

Aegyptens in Umriss, 1904, pp. 52-53.

[253] Tiele, p. 144; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 135.

[254] "We do not find magic predominant [in the tales] until the

Ptolemaic age. At that time the physical magic of the early times

reappears in full force" (Petrie, Religion and Conscience in Ancient

Egypt, 1898, p. 29. Cp. Maspero, p. 286; Budge, Egyptian Magic,

pp. 64, 233).

[255] Petrie, Hist. iii, 174-75, 180.

[256] Tiele, pp. 180-82; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 140-43.

[257] Tiele, pp. 184-85, 196, 217.

[258] Herodotos, ii, 48, 60-64, etc. Cp. Maspero, p. 286.

[259] "The Osiride and Cosmic Gods rose in importance as time went

on, while the Abstract Gods continually sank on the whole. This

agrees with the general idea that the imported Gods have to yield

their position gradually to the older and more deeply-rooted faiths"

(Petrie, as last cited, p. 95).

[260] The familiar narrative of Herodotos is put in doubt by the

monuments. Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 246. But cp. Meyer, i, 611

(§ 508).

[261] Tiele, p. 158.

[262] See figures 209, 212, 221, 235, 242, 249, 250, in Sharpe's

Hist. of Egypt, 7th ed.

[263] Cp. Sharpe, ii, 287-95; Budge, Egyptian Magic, p. 64.

[264] Compare the orthodox view of Bishop Westcott, Essays in the

History of Religious Thought in the West, 1891, pp. 197-200.

[265] These fights had not ceased even in the time of Julian (Sharpe,

ii, 280). Cp. Juvenal, Sat. xv, 33 sq.

[266] Metamorphoses, B., xi.

[267] Cp. Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, passim.

[268] Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 232-33.

[269] Meyer, i, 237.

[270] Put by Canon Rawlinson, History of Phoenicia, 1889, p. 321.

[271] As to the universality of this tendency, see Meyer, ii, 97.

[272] Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i, 251, § 209; Tiele, Outlines,

p. 84; Histoire comparée des anciennes religions, Fr. tr. pp. 320-21.

[273] Rawlinson, Phoenicia, p. 340; Sayce, Anc. Emp. p. 204; Menzies,

Hist. of Relig. p. 168.

[274] Præparatio Evangelica, B. i, c. 9-10.

[275] Meyer, i, 249.

[276] Cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 159, as to Persian methods of

the same kind.

[277] Div. Inst. i, 23.

[278] E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 104, 105.

[279] As to Greek instances, cp. Bury, Hist. of Greece, ed. 1906,

pp. 53, 55, 65, 92, 104; and as to Roman, see Ettore Pais, Ancient

Legends of Roman History, Eng. trans. 1906, ch. x, where it is shown

that Virginia and Lucretia are primarily ancient Latin divinities; and

(ch. vii) that both Numa and Servius Tullius are probably in the same

case, Servius Rex being in all likelihood the servus rex Nemorensis of

the Arician grove, round whom turns the research of Dr. J. G. Frazer's

Golden Bough; while tullius is an old Latin word for a spring. See also

ch. iv as to Acca Larentia, another Goddess reduced by the historians

to the status of a hetaira, as was Flora. Horatius Cocles (id. p. 157)

is also a God reduced to a hero.

[280] So Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 204.

[281] Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 202.

[282] Legge, Religions of China, 1880, pp. 11, 16; Douglas,

Confucianism and Taouism, 1879, pp. 12, 82.

[283] Menzies, History of Religion, p. 158.

[284] Legge, pp. 12, 19, 23, 25, 26; Tiele, Outlines, p. 27; Douglas,

p. 79.

[285] Legge, Religions of China, p. 142.

[286] See the citations made by Legge, p. 5.

[287] Id. p. 139; cp. Menzies, p. 109.

[288] Legge, p. 140; cp. p. 117; Douglas, p. 81.

[289] Legge, Religions, p. 117; Life and Teachings of Confucius,

4th ed. p. 101; Douglas, p. 68; Tiele, Outlines, p. 29.

[290] Tiele, p. 31; Legge, Religions, p. 143.

[291] Tiele, pp. 31-32; Douglas, pp. 68, 84. But cp. Legge, Religions,

pp. 123, 127.

[292] Legge, Life and Teachings, pp. 100-101.

[293] Douglas, pp. 179, 184.

[294] See the author's Pagan Christs, pp. 214-22.

[295] Pauthier, Chine Moderne, p. 351. There is a tradition that

Lao-Tsze took his doctrine from an ancient sage who flourished

before 1120 B.C.; and he himself (Tau Teh King, trans. by Chalmers,

The Speculations of Lao-Tsze, 1868, ch. 41) cites doctrine as to Tau

from "those who have spoken (before me)." Cp. cc. 22, 41, 62, 65, 70.

[296] Cp. E. J. Simcox, Primitive Civilizations, 1894, ii, 18.

[297] Pauthier, p. 358; Chalmers, pp. 14, 37.

[298] Legge, Religions, p. 137.

[299] Tau Teh King, as cited, pp. 38. 49, ch. 49, 63; Pauthier,

p. 358; Legge, p. 223.

[300] Analects, xxv, 36; Legge, Religions, p. 143; Life and Teachings,

p. 113; Douglas, p. 144.

[301] Legge, Religions, p. 164. We do find, however, an occasional

allusion to deity, as in the phrase "the Great Architect" (Chalmers'

trans. 1868. ch. lxxiv, p. 57), and "Heaven" is spoken of in a somewhat

personalized sense. Still, Mr. Chalmers complains (p. xv) that Lao-Tsze

did not recognize a personal God, but put "an indefinite, impersonal,

and unconscious Tau" above all things (ch. iv).

[302] F. H. Balfour, Art. "A Philosopher who Never Lived," in Leaves

from my Chinese Scrap-book, 1887, p. 83 sq.

[303] Id. pp. 86-90.

[304] Id. p. 134.

[305] Legge, Religions of China, p. 147; Tiele, Outlines, p. 33.

[306] Legge, Life and Works of Mencius, 1875, pp. 29, 50, 77, etc.

[307] Tiele, p. 33.

[308] Legge, Life and Works of Mencius, pp. 44, 47, 56, 57, etc.

[309] Miss Simcox, Primitive Civilizations, ii, 36-37, following

Chavannes.

[310] Legge's Mencius, p. 49; cp. p. 48.

[311] Cp. Legge's Mencius, pp. 47, 131; Chalmers' Lao-Tsze, pp. 23,

28, 53, 58 (chs. xxx, xxxi, xxxvi, lxvii, lxxiv); Douglas, Taouism,

chs. ii, iii.

[312] Legge, Religions of China, p. 147. The ruler in question seems

to have been of non-Chinese descent. E. H. Parker, China, 1901, p. 18.

[313] Legge, Religions of China, p. 159.

[314] Id. p. 60.

[315] Tiele, p. 37.

[316] Douglas, p. 222.

[317] Id. p. 239.

[318] Tiele, p. 35; Douglas, p. 287. Taouism, however, has a rather

noteworthy ethical code. See Douglas, ch. vi. It has to be noted that

the translations of the Tâo Têh King have varied to a disquieting

degree. Cp. Drews, Gesch. des Monismus, p. 121.

[319] Details are given in the author's Pagan Christs, pt. iv.

[320] Nadaillac (L'Amérique préhistorique, 1883, pp. 273-84) gives

them little of this credit, pronouncing them at once cruel and

degenerate. He credits them, however, with being the first makers of

roads and aqueducts in Central America, and cites the record of their

free public hospitals, maintained by the sacerdotal kings. Prescott,

on the other hand, overstated the bloodlessness of their religion

(Conquest of Mexico, Kirk's ed. 1890, p. 41 and ed. note).

[321] Réville, Hibbert Lectures, On the Native Religions of Mexico

and Peru, 1884, pp. 62-67.

[322] J. G. Müller, Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen,

ed. 1867, pp. 577-90; H. H. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific

States, iii, 279. (Passage cited in author's Pagan Christs,

pp. 402-403; where is also noted Dr. Tylor's early view, discarded

later, that Quetzalcoatl was a real personage.)

[323] Cp. Prescott, as cited.

[324] Réville, p. 66.

[325] J. G. Müller, as cited, pp. 473-74; Réville, p. 46. Dr. Réville

speaks of the worship of the unifying deity as pretty much "effaced"

by that of the lower Gods. It seems rather to have been a priestly

effort to syncretize these. Still, such an effacement did take place,

as we have seen, in Central Asia in ancient times, after a syncretic

idea had been reached (above, p. 45). As to the alleged monotheism of

King Netzahuatl (or Netzahualcoyotl), of Tezcuco, mentioned above,

p. 39, see Lang, Making of Religion, p. 270, note, and p. 282;

Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, as cited, p. 92; and J. G. Müller,

as cited, pp. 473-74, 480.

[326] As to the capabilities of the Aztec language, see Bancroft,

Native Races, ii, 727-28 (quoted in Pagan Christs, p. 416, note).

[327] Refs. above, p. 41. Cp. Lang, Making of Religion, p. 270,

note, and p. 282; J. G. Müller, as cited, pp. 473-74; and Nadaillac,

as cited, p. 289.

[328] The Christianized descendant of the Tezcucan kings, Ixtilxochitl,

who wrote their history, adds the words, "Cause of Causes"--a very

unlikely formula in the place and circumstances.

[329] Above, p. 41. Cp. Lang, as last cited, pp. 263, 282.

[330] Cp. Kirk's ed. of Prescott's Conquest of Peru, 1889, p. 44;

Réville, p. 189-90; Lang, as cited below.

[331] Réville, p. 152, citing Garcilasso. See same page for a story

of resistance to the invention of an alphabet.

[332] Réville, p. 50. citing Torquemada, 1. viii, c. 20. end.

[333] History of the Affairs of New Spain, French trans. 1880,

1. vi, ch. 7, pp. 342-43. Cp. Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, Kirk's

ed. pp. 31, 33.

[334] Prescott, p. 34.

[335] "The priest says, 'the spirit is hungry.' the fact being that he

himself is hungry. He advises the killing of an animal" (Max Müller,

Anthropological Religion, p. 307).

[336] On the general tendency cp. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manual

of the Science of Religion, pp. 77-84.

[337] In the windows of the shop of the S. P. C. K., in London,

may be often seen large displays of reproduced Madonna-pictures,

by Catholic artists, at popular prices.

[338] Compare the author's Pagan Christs, pp. 66-95.

[339] Jud. xvii, xviii.

[340] Gen. xxxi, 19, 34, 35.

[341] Compare Hugo Winckler, Geschichte Israels, i, 56-58.

[342] Compare Tiele, Outlines, p. 87; Hist. comp. des

anc. relig. p. 342 sq.; Kuenen, Relig. of Israel, iii, 35, 44,

398. Winckler (Gesch. Israels, i, 34-38) pronounces the original

Semitic Yahu, and the Yahweh evolved from him, to have been each a

"Wetter-Gott."

[343] The word is applied to the apparition of Samuel in the story

of the Witch of Endor (1 Sam. xxviii, 13).

[344] The unlearned reader may here be reminded that in Gen. i the

Hebrew word translated "God" is "Elohim" and that the phrase in

Gen. ii rendered "the Lord God" in our versions is in the original

"Yah-weh-Elohim." The first chapter, with its plural deity, is,

however, probably the later as well as the more dignified narrative,

and represents the influence of Babylonian quasi-science. See,

for a good general account of the case, The Witness of Assyria, by

C. Edwards, 1893, ch. ii. Cp. Wellhausen, Proleg. to Hist. of Israel,

Eng. tr. pp. 196-308; E. J. Fripp, Composition of the Book of Genesis,

1892, passim; Driver, Introd. to the Lit. of the Old Test. 1891,

pp. 18-19.

[345] Winckler, Gesch. Isr. i, 29-30.

[346] Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 398.

[347] See the myth of the offerings put in it by the Philistines

(1 Sam. vi).

[348] 1 Sam. iii, 3. Cp. ch. ii, 12-22. Contrast Lev. xvi, 2, ff.

[349] 1 Sam. iv, 3-11. Cp. v. vii, 2.

[350] 2 Sam. vi.

[351] 1 Kings xii, 28; Hosea viii, 4-6. Cp. Jud. viii. 27; Hosea

viii, 5.

[352] Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 196. But see above, p. 79.

[353] 11th cent. B.C.

[354] 2 Kings xviii, 4, 22; xxiii, 48.

[355] 2 Kings xxiii.

[356] Jer. i, 18; iii, 16; vi, 13; vii, 4-22; viii, 8; xviii, 18;

xx, 1, 2; xxiii, 11.

[357] Jer. ii, 28; xi, 13.

[358] So Kuenen, vol. i. App. i to Ch. 1.

[359] Amos v, 21, 22.

[360] Hosea ii, 11; vi, 6.

[361] Isa. i, 11-14.

[362] Mic. vi, 6-8.

[363] Cp. M. Müller, Nat. Rel. pp. 560-61; Psychol. Rel. pp. 30-32;

Wellhausen, Israel, p. 465. If the Moabite Stone be genuine--and it

is accepted by Stade (Gesch. des Volkes Israel, in Oncken's Series,

1881, i, 86) and by most contemporary scholars--the Hebrew alphabetic

writing is carried back to the ninth century B.C. An account of the

Stone is given in The Witness of Assyria, by C. Edwards, ch. xi. See

again Mommsen, Hist. of Rome, bk. i, ch. 14, Eng. tr. 1894, i, 280,

for a theory of the extreme antiquity of the alphabet.

[364] Dr. Cheyne (Art. Amos in Encyc. Biblica) gives some good reasons

for attaching little weight to such objections, but finally joins in

calling Amos "a surprising phenomenon."

[365] Driver, Introd. to Lit. of Old Test. ch. vi, § 2 (p. 290,

ed. 1891). Cp. Kuenen, Relig. of Israel, i, 86; and Robertson Smith,

art. Joel, in Encyc. Brit.

[366] Cp. Wellhausen, Israel, p. 501; Driver, ch. vii (1st ed. pp. 352

sq., esp. pp. 355, 361, 362, 365); Stade, Gesch. des Volkes Israel,

i, 85.

[367] E.g. Ps. l, 8-15; li, 16-17, where v. 19 is obviously a priestly

addition, meant to countervail vv. 16, 17.

[368] Cp. Kuenen, i, 156; Wellhausen, Prolegomena, p. 139; Israel,

p. 478.

[369] As to a possible prehistoric connection of Hebrews and

Perso-Aryans, see Kuenen, i, 254, discussing Tiele and Spiegel, and

iii, 35, 44, treating of Tiele's view, set forth in his Godsdienst

van Zarathustra, that fire-worship was the original basis of

Yahwism. Cp. Land's views, discussed by Kuenen, p. 398; and Renan,

Hist. des langues sémit. p. 473.

[370] Cheyne, Introd. to Isaiah, Prol. pp. xxx, xxxviii, following

Kosters.

[371] There is a cognate dispute as to the condition of the Samaritans

at the time of the Return. Stade (Gesch. den Volkes Israel,

i, 602) holds that they were numerous and well-placed. Winckler

(Alttestamentliche Untersuchungen, 1892, p. 107) argues that, on the

contrary, they were poor and unorganized, and looked to the Jews for

help. So also E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iii (1901), 214.

[372] Cp. Rowland Williams, The Hebrew Prophets, ii (1871), 38. This

translator's rendering of the phrase cited by Zephaniah runs:

"Neither good does the eternal nor evil."

[373] Cp. E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, iii, 216.

[374] Mal. ii, 17; iii, 13. Cp. ii, 8, 11.

[375] Cp. Jer. xxxiii, 24; xxxviii, 19.

[376] Eccles. iii, 19-21.

[377] Ch. v. Renan's translation lends lucidity.

[378] Driver, Introduction, p. 378. Prof. Dillon (Skeptics of the

Old Testament, p. 155) goes so far as to pronounce Agur a "Hebrew

Voltaire," which is somewhat of a straining of the few words he has

left. Cp. Dr. Moncure Conway, Solomon and Solomonic Literature, 1899,

p. 55. In any case, Agur belongs to an age of "advanced religious

reflection" (Cheyne, Job and Solomon, p. 152).

[379] Driver, Introduction, p. 378.

[380] Biscoe, Hist. of the Acts of the Apostles, ed. 1829, p. 80,

following Selden and Lightfoot.

[381] S. Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 1896, p. 189, citing Sanhedrin,

386, and Pseudo-Jonathan to Gen. iv, 8. Cp. pp. 191-92, citing a

mention of Epicurus in the Mishna.

[382] The familiar phrase in the Psalms (xiv, i; liii, 1), "The fool

hath said in his heart, there is no God," supposing it to be evidence

for anything, clearly does not refer to any reasoned unbelief. Atheism

could not well be quite so general as the phrase, taken literally,

would imply.

[383] Cp. W. R. Sorley, Jewish Christians and Judaism, 1881,

p. 9; Robertson Smith, Old Test. in the Jewish Ch. ed. 1892,

pp. 48-49. These writers somewhat exaggerate the novelty of the view

they accept. Cp. Biscoe, History of the Acts, ed. 1829, p. 101.

[384] Wisdom, c. 2.

[385] Cp. the implications in Ecclesiasticus, vi, 4-6; xvi, 11-12,

as to the ethics of many believers.

[386] Kuenen, ii, 242-43.

[387] Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, xxv, 8, pt. ii, p. 548.

[388] In the Wisdom of Solomon, iii, 13; iv, 1, the old desire for

offspring is seen to be in part superseded by the newer belief in

personal immortality.

[389] Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 1896, p. 216. Compare pp. 193-94.

[390] See Supernatural Religion, 6th ed. i, 97-100, 103-21; Mosheim,

Comm. on Christ. Affairs before Constantine, Vidal's tr. i, 70;

Schürer, Jewish People in the Time of Jesus, Eng. tr. Div. II,

vol. iii, p. 152.

[391] Sat. xiv, 96-106.

[392] Cp. Horace, 1 Sat. v, 100.

[393] Rev. A. Edersheim, History of the Jewish Nation after the

Destruction of Jerusalem, 1856, p. 462, citing the Avoda Sara, a

treatise directed against idolatry! Other Rabbinical views cited by

Dr. Edersheim as being in comparison "sublime" are no great improvement

on the above--e.g., the conception of deity as "the prototype of

the high priest, and the king of kings,"--"who created everything

for his own glory." With all this in view, Dr. Edersheim thought

it showed "spiritual decadence" in Philo Judæus to speak of Persian

magi and Indian gymnosophists in the same laudatory tone as he used

of the Essenes, and to attend "heathenish theatrical representations"

(p. 372).

[394] See Ps. xc, 2; Prov. viii, 22, 26.

[395] This is seen persisting in the lore of the Neo-Platonist writer

Sallustius Philosophus (4th c.), De Diis et Mundo, c. 7, though quite

unscientifically held.

[396] Cp. Tiele, Outlines, pp. 205, 207, 212.

[397] Cp. E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 533.

[398] Cp. K. O. Müller, Literature of Ancient Greece, ed. 1847, p. 77.

[399] Duncker, Gesch. des Alterth. 2 Aufl. iii, 209-10, 252-54,

319 sq.; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterth. ii, 181, 365, 369, 377, 380,

535 (see also ii, 100, 102, 105, 106, 115 note, etc.); W. Christ,

Gesch. der griech. Lit. 3te Aufl. p. 12; Gruppe, Die griech. Culte

und Mythen, 1887, p. 165 sq.

[400] E. Curtius, Griech. Gesch. i, 28, 29, 35, 40, 41, 101, 203,

etc.; Meyer, ii, 369.

[401] See the able and learned essay of S. Reinach, Le Mirage

Orientate, reprinted from L'Anthropologie, 1893. I do not find that

its arguments affect any of the positions here taken up. See pp. 40-41.

[402] Meyer, ii. 369; Benn, The Philosophy of Greece, 1898, p. 42.

[403] Cp. Bury, History of Greece, ed. 1906, pp. vi, 10, 27, 32-34,

40, etc.; Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete, 1907, ch. ix; Maisch,

Manual of Greek Antiquities, Eng. tr. §§ 8, 9, 10, 60; H. R. Hall,

The Oldest Civilization of Greece, 1901, pp. 31, 32.

[404] Cp. K. O. Müller, Hist. of the Doric Race, Eng. tr. 1830, i,

8-10; Busolt, Griech. Gesch. 1885, i, 33; Grote, Hist. of Greece,

10-vol. ed. 1888, iii, 3-5, 35-44; Duncker, iii, 136, n.; E. Meyer,

Gesch. des Alterthums, i, 299-310 (§§ 250-58); E. Curtius, i, 29;

Schömann, Griech. Alterthümer, as cited, i, 2-3, 89; Burrows, ch. ix.

[405] Cp. Meyer, ii, 97; and his art. "Baal" in Roscher's

Ausführl. Lex. Mythol. i, 2867.

[406] The fallacy of this tradition, as commonly put, was well shown

by Renouvier long ago--Manuel de philosophie ancienne, 1844, i,

3-13. Cp. Ritter, as cited below.

[407] Cp. on one side, Ritter, Hist. of Anc. Philos. Eng. tr. i,

151; Renan, Études d'hist. religieuse, pp. 47-48; Zeller, Hist. of

Greek Philos. Eng. tr. 1881, i, 43-49; and on the other, Ueberweg,

Hist. of Philos. Eng. tr. i, 31, and the weighty criticism of Lange,

Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 126-27 (Eng. tr. i, 9, note 5).

[408] Cp. Curtius, i, 125; Bury, introd. and ch. i.

[409] Cp. Bury, as cited.

[410] As to the primary mixture of "Pelasgians" and Hellenes,

cp. Busolt, i, 27-32; Curtius, i, 27; Schömann, i, 3-4; Thirlwall,

Hist. of Greece, ed. 1839, i, 51-52, 116. K. O. Müller (Doric Race,

Eng. tr. i, 10) and Thirlwall, who follows him (i, 45-47), decide

that the Thracians cannot have been very different from the Hellenes

in dialect, else they could not have influenced the latter as they

did. This position is clearly untenable, whatever may have been

the ethnological facts. It would entirely negate the possibility of

reaction between Greeks, Kelts, Egyptians, Semites, Romans, Persians,

and Hindus.

[411] Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, 1912, p. 59.

[412] Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. ii, 583.

[413] The question is discussed at some length in the author's

Evolution of States, 1912.

[414] Lit. of Anc. Greece, pp. 41-47. The discussion of the Homeric

problem is, of course, alien to the present inquiry.

[415] Introd. to Scientif. Mythol. Eng. tr. pp. 180, 181,

291. Cp. Curtius, i, 126.

[416] Cp. Curtius, i, 107, as to the absence in Homer of any

distinction between Greeks and barbarians; and Grote, 10-vol. ed. 1888,

iii, 37-38, as to the same feature in Archilochos.

[417] Duncker, Gesch. des Alt., as cited, iii. 209-10; pp. 257,

319 sq. Cp. K. O. Müller, as last cited, pp. 181, 193; Curtius, i,

43-49, 53, 54, 107, 365, 373, 377, etc.; Grote, iii, 39-41; and Meyer,

ii, 104.

[418] Duncker, iii, 214; Curtius, i, 155, 121; Grote, iii, 279-80.

[419] Busolt, Griech. Gesch. 1885, i, 171-72. Cp. pp. 32-34; and

Curtius, i, 42.

[420] On the general question cp. Gruppe, Die griechischen Culte und

Mythen, pp. 151 ff., 157, 158 ff., 656 ff., 672 ff.

[421] Preller, Griech. Mythol. 2 Aufl. i, 260; Tiele, Outlines, p. 211;

R. Brown, Jr., Semit. Influ. in Hellenic Mythol. 1898, p. 130; Murray,

Hist. of Anc. Greek Lit. p. 35; H. R. Hall, Oldest Civilization of

Greece, 1901, p. 290.

[422] See Tiele, Outlines, pp. 210, 212. Cp., again, Curtius,

Griech. Gesch. i, 95, as to the probability that the "twelve Gods"

were adjusted to the confederations of twelve cities; and again p. 126.

[423] "Even the title 'king' (Anax) seems to have been borrowed by the

Greek from Phrygian.... It is expressly recorded that tyrannos is a

Lydian word. Basileus ('king') resists all attempts to explain it as a

purely Greek formation, and the termination assimilates it to certain

Phrygian words." (Prof. Ramsay, in Encyc. Brit. art. Phrygia). In

this connection note the number of names containing Anax (Anaximenes,

Anaximandros, Anaxagoras, etc.) among the Ionian Greeks.

[424] iv, 561 sq.

[425] It is now agreed that this is merely a guess. The document,

further, has been redacted and interpolated.

[426] Prehist. Antiq. of the Aryan Peoples, Eng. tr. p. 423. Wilamowitz

holds that the verses Od. xi, 566-631, are interpolations made later

than 600 B.C.

[427] Tiele, Outlines, p. 209; Preller, p. 263.

[428] Meyer says on the contrary (Gesch. des Alt. ii, 103, Anm.) that

"Kronos is certainly a Greek figure"; but he cannot be supposed to

dispute that the Greek Kronos cult is grafted on a Semitic one.

[429] Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 54, 181. Cp. Cox, Mythol. of the

Aryan Nations, p. 260, note. It has not, however, been noted in the

discussions on Semelê that Semlje is the Slavic name for the Earth

as Goddess. Ranke, History of Servia, Eng. tr. p. 43.

[430] Iliad, xiv, 201, 302.

[431] Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 367 sq.; Ancient Empires,

p. 158. Note p. 387 in the Lectures as to the Assyrian influence,

and p. 391 as to the Homeric notion in particular. Cp. W. Christ,

Gesch. der griech. Literatur, § 68.

[432] It is unnecessary to examine here the view of Herodotos that

many of the Greek cults were borrowed from Egypt. Herodotos reasoned

from analogies, with no exact historical knowledge. But cp. Renouvier,

Manuel, i, 67, as to probable Egyptian influence.

[433] Cp. Meyer, ii, §§ 453-60, as to the eastern initiative of

Orphic theology.

[434] It is noteworthy that the traditional doctrine associated with

the name of Orpheus included a similar materialistic theory of the

beginning of things. Athenagoras, Apol. c. 19. Cp. Renouvier, Manuel

de philos. anc. i, 69-72; and Meyer, ii, 743.

[435] Cp. Meyer, ii, 726. As to the oriental elements in Hesiod see

further Gruppe, Die griechischen Culte und Mythen, 1887, pp. 577,

587, 589, 593.

[436] Cp. however, Bury (Hist. of Greece, pp. 6, 65), who assumes that

the Greeks brought the hexameter with them to Hellas. Contrast Murray,

Four Stages, p. 61.

[437] Mahaffy, History of Classical Greek Literature, 1880, i, 15.

[438] Id. p. 16. Cp. W. Christ, as cited, p. 79.

[439] Mahaffy, pp. 16-17.

[440] Od. xviii, 352.

[441] Od. vi, 240; Il. v, 185.

[442] Od. xxii, 39.

[443] In Od. xiv, 18, antitheoi means not "opposed to the Gods,"

but "God-like," in the ordinary Homeric sense of noble-looking

or richly attired, as men in the presence of the Gods. Cp. vi,

241. Yet a Scholiast on a former passage took it in the sense

of God-opposing. Clarke's ed. in loc. Liddell and Scott give no

use of atheos, in the sense of denying the Gods, before Plato

(Apol. 26 C. etc.), or in the sense of ungodly before Pindar

(P. iv, 288) and Æschylus (Eumen. 151). For Sophocles it has the

force of "God-forsaken"--Oedip. Tyr. 254 (245), 661 (640), 1360

(1326). Cp. Electra, 1181 (1162). But already before Plato we find the

terms apistos and atheos, "faithless" or "infidel" and "atheist,"

used as terms of moral aspersion, quite in the Christian manner

(Euripides, Helena, 1147), where there is no question of incredulity.

[444] Cp. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, 2nd ed. i, 14-15. and

cit. there from Professor Jebb.

[445] Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, ii, 724-27; Grote, as cited,

i, 279-81.

[446] Meyer, ii, 724, 727.

[447] The tradition is confused. Stesichoros is said first to have

aspersed Helen, whereupon she, as Goddess, struck him with blindness:

thereafter he published a retractation, in which he declared that she

had never been at Troy, an eidolon or phantasm taking her name; and

on this his sight was restored. We can but divine through the legend

the probable reality, the documents being lost. See Grote, as cited,

for the details. For the eulogies of Stesichoros by ancient writers,

see Girard, Sentiment religieux en Grèce, 1869, pp. 175-79.

[448] Cp. Meyer (1901), iii. § 244.

[449] Ol. i, 42-57, 80-85.

[450] Ol. ix, 54-61.

[451] He dedicated statues to Zeus, Apollo, and Hermes. Pausanias,

ix, 16, 17.

[452] Herodot. ii. 53.

[453] A ruler of Libyan stock, and so led by old Libyan connections to

make friends with Greeks. He reigned over fifty years, and the Greek

connection grew very close. Curtius, i, 344-45. Cp. Grote, i, 144-55.

[454] Grote, 10-vol. ed. 1888, i, 307, 326, 329, 413. Cp. i, 27-30;

ii, 52; iii, 39-41, etc.

[455] K. O. Müller, Introd. to Mythology, p. 192.

[456] "Then one [of the Persians] who before had in nowise believed

in [or, recognized the existence of] the Gods, offered prayer and

supplication, doing obeisance to Earth and Heaven" (Persae, 497-99).

[457] Agamemnon, 370-372. This is commonly supposed to be a reference

to Diagoras the Melian (below, p. 159).

[458] Agam. 170-72 (160-62).

[459] So Whittaker, Priests, Philosophers, and Prophets, 1911,

pp. 42-43.

[460] So Buckley, in Bohn trans. of Æschylus, p. 100. He characterizes

as a "skeptical formula" the phrase "Zeus, whoever he may be"; but

goes on to show that such formulas were grounded on the Semitic notion

that the true name of God was concealed from man.

[461] Grote, ed. 1888, vii, 8-21. See the whole exposition of the

exceptionally interesting 67th chapter.

[462] Cp. Meyer, ii, 431; K. O. Müller, Introd. to Mythol. pp. 189-92;

Duncker, p. 340; Curtius, i, 384; Thirlwall, i, 200-203; Burckhardt,

Griech. Culturgesch. 1898, ii. 19. As to the ancient beginnings of a

priestly organization, see Curtius, i, 92-94, 97. As to the effects of

its absence, see Heeren, Polit. Hist. of Anc. Greece, Eng. tr. 1829,

pp. 59-63; Burckhardt, as cited, ii, 31-32; Meyer, as last cited;

Zeller, Philos. der Griechen, 3te Aufl. i, 44 sq. Lange's criticism

of Zeller's statement (Gesch. des Materialismus, 3te Aufl. i, 124-26,

note 2) practically concedes the proposition. The influence of a

few powerful priestly families is not denied. The point is that they

remained isolated.

[463] Cp. K. O. MÜller, Introd. to Mythol. p. 195; Curtius, i, 387,

389, 392; Duncker, iii, 519-21, 563; Thirlwall, i, 204; Barthélemy

St. Hilaire, préf. to tr. of Metaphys. of Aristotle, p. 14. Professor

Gilbert Murray, noting that Homer and Hesiod treated the Gods as

elements of romance, or as facts to be catalogued, asks: "Where is

the literature of religion: the literature which treated the Gods as

Gods? It must," he adds, "have existed"; and he holds that we "can

see that the religious writings were both early and multitudinous"

(Hist. of Anc. Greek Lit. p. 62; cp. Meyer and Mahaffy as cited

above, pp. 125-26. "Writings" is not here to be taken literally;

the early hymns were unwritten). The priestly hymns and oracles

and mystery-rituals in question were never collected; but perhaps

we may form some idea of their nature from the "Homeridian" and

Orphic hymns to the Gods, and those of the Alexandrian antiquary

Callimachus. It is further to be inferred that they enter into the

Hesiodic Theogony. (Decharme, p. 3, citing Bergk.)

[464] Meyer, ii, 426; Curtius, i, 390-91, 417; Thirlwall, i, 204;

Grote, i, 48-49.

[465] Meyer, ii, 410-14.

[466] Cp. Curtius, i, 392-400, 416; Duncker, iii, 529.

[467] Curtius, i, 112; Meyer, ii, 366.

[468] Curtius, i, 201, 204, 205, 381; Grote, iii, 5; Lange, Gesch. des

Materialismus, 3te Aufl. i, 23 (Eng. tr. i, 23).

[469] Herodotos, i, 170; Diogenes Laërtius, Thales, ch. i.

[470] On the essentially anti-religious rationalism of the whole

Ionian movement, cp. Meyer, ii, 753-57.

[471] The First Philosophers of Greece, by A. Fairbanks, 1898, pp. 2,

3, 6. This compilation usefully supplies a revised text of the ancient

philosophic fragments, with a translation of these and of the passages

on the early thinkers by the later, and by the epitomists. A good

conspectus of the remains of the early Greek thinkers is supplied

also in Grote's Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates, ch. i;

and a valuable critical analysis of the sources in Prof. J. Burnet's

Early Greek Philosophy.

[472] Cp. Lange, Gesch. des Mat. i, 126 (Eng. tr. i, 8, n.). Mr. Benn

(The Greek Philosophers, i, 8) and Prof. Decharme (p. 39) seem to read

this as a profession of belief in deities in the ordinary sense. But

cp. R. W. Mackay, The Progress of the Intellect, 1850, i, 338. Burnet

(ch. i, § 11) doubts the authenticity of this saying, but thinks it

"extremely probable that Thales did say that the magnet and amber

had souls."

[473] Mackay, as cited, p. 331.

[474] Fairbanks, p. 4.

[475] Diogenes Laërtius, Thales, ch. 9.

[476] Fairbanks, pp. 3, 7.

[477] Herodotos, i, 74.

[478] Cp. Burnet, Early Greek Philos. 2nd. ed. introd. § 3. To Thales

is ascribed by the Greeks the "discovery" of the constellation Ursus

Major. Diog. ch. 2. As it was called "Phoenike" by the Greeks, his

knowledge would be of Phoenician derivation. Cp. Humboldt, Kosmos,

Bohn tr. iii, 160.

[479] Diog. Laërt. ch. 3. On this cp. Burnet, introd. § 6.

[480] Herod. i, 170. Cp. Diog. Laërt. ch. 3.

[481] Diog. Laërt. ch. 9.

[482] Cp. Burnet, p. 57.

[483] Fairbanks, pp. 9-10. Mr. Benn (Greek Philosophers, i, 9)

decides that the early philosophers, while realizing that ex nihilo

nihil fit, had not grasped the complementary truth that nothing can be

annihilated. But even if the teaching ascribed to Anaximandros be set

aside as contradictory (since he spoke of generation and destruction

within the infinite), we have the statement of Diogenes Laërtius

(bk. ix, ch. 9, § 57) that Diogenes of Apollonia, pupil of Anaximenes,

gave the full Lucretian formula.

[484] Diogenes Laërtius, however (ii, 2), makes him agree with Thales.

[485] Fairbanks, pp. 9-16. Diogenes makes him the inventor of

the gnomon and of the first map and globe, as well as a maker of

clocks. Cp. Grote, i, 330, note.

[486] See below, p. 158, as to Demokritos' statement concerning the

Eastern currency of scientific views which, when put by Anaxagoras,

scandalized the Greeks.

[487] Fairbanks, pp. 17-22.

[488] See Windelband, Hist. of Anc. Philos. Eng. tr. 1900, p. 25,

citing Diels and Wilamowitz-Möllendorf. Cp. Burnet, introd. § 14.

[489] It will be observed that Mr. Cornford's book, though somewhat

loosely speculative is very freshly suggestive. It is well worth

study, alongside of the work of Prof. Burnet, by those interested in

the scientific presentation of the evolution of thought.

[490] Diog. Laërt. ix, 19; Fairbanks, p. 76.

[491] Herodotos, i, 163-67; Grote, iii, 421; Meyer, ii, § 438.

[492] Cp. Guillaume Bréton, Essai sur la poésie philosophique

en Grèce, 1882, pp. 23-25. The life period of Xenophanes is

still uncertain. Meyer (ii, § 466) and Windelband (Hist. of

Anc. Philos. Eng. tr. p. 47) still adhere to the chronology which puts

him in the century 570-470, making him a young man at the foundation

of Elea.

[493] Cousin, developed by G. Bréton, work cited, p. 31 sq., traces

Xenophanes's doctrine of the unity of things to the school of

Pythagoras. It clearly had antecedents. But Xenophanes is recorded

to have argued against Pythagoras as well as Thales and Epimenides

(Diog. Laërt. ix, 2, §§ 18, 20).

[494] Metaphysics, i, 5; cp. Fairbanks, pp. 79-80.

[495] One of several so entitled in that age. Cp. Burnet, introd. § 7.

[496] Metaph., as cited; Plato, Soph. 242 D.

[497] Long fragment in Athenæus, xi, 7; Burnet, p. 130.

[498] Burnet, p. 141.

[499] Cp. Burnet, p. 131.

[500] Fairbanks, p. 67, Fr. 5, 6; Clem. Alex. Stromata, bk. v,

Wilson's tr. ii, 285-86. Cp. bk. vii, c. 4.

[501] Fairbanks, Fr. 7.

[502] Cicero, De divinatione, i, 3, 5; Aetius, De placitis reliquiæ,

in Fairbanks, p. 85.

[503] Aristotle, Rhetoric, ii, 23, § 27. A similar saying is attributed

to Herakleitos, on slight authority (Fairbanks, p. 54).

[504] Cicero, Academica, ii, 39; Lactantius, Div. Inst. iii,

23. Anaxagoras and Demokritos held the same view. Diog. Laërt, bk. ii,

ch. iii, iv (§ 8); Pseudo-Plutarch, De placitis philosoph. ii, 25.

[505] Cp. Mackay, Progress of the Intellect, i, 340.

[506] Diog. Laërt. in life of Pyrrho, bk. ix, ch. xi, 8 (§ 72). The

passage, however, is uncertain. See Fairbanks, p. 70.

[507] Fairbanks. Fr. 1. Fairbanks translates with Zeller: "The whole

[of God]." Grote: "The whole Kosmos, or the whole God." It should

be noted that the original in Sextus Empiricus (Adv. Math. ix, 144)

is given without the name of Xenophanes, and the ascription is modern.

[508] Grote, as last cited, p. 18.

[509] Fairbanks, Fr. 19. In Athenæus, x, 413.

[510] Polybius, iv, 40; Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos,

viii, 126; Fairbanks, pp. 25, 27; Frag. 4, 14. Cp. 92, 111, 113.

[511] Diog. Laërt. ix, i, 2.

[512] Fairbanks, Fr. 134.

[513] Id. Frag. 36, 67.

[514] Id. Frag. 43, 44, 46, 62.

[515] Diog. Laërt. last cited. This saying is by some ascribed to the

later Herakleides (see Fairbanks, Fr. 119 and note); but it does not

seem to be in his vein, which is wholly pro-Homeric.

[516] Clem. Alex. Protrept. ch. 2, Wilson's tr. p. 41. The passage is

obscure, but Mr. Fairbanks's translation (Fr. 127) is excessively so.

[517] Clemens, as cited, p.32; Fairbanks, Fr. 124, 125,

130. Cp. Burnet, p. 139.

[518] Fairbanks, Fr. 21.

[519] Cp. Burnet, pp. 175-90.

[520] Theaetetus, 180 D. See good estimates of Parmenides in Benn's

Greek Philosophers, i, 17-19, and Philosophy of Greece in Relation to

the Character of its People, pp. 83-95; in J. A. Symonds's Studies of

the Greek Poets, 3rd ed. 1893, vol. i, ch. 6; and in Zeller, i, 580 sq.

[521] Plutarch, Perikles, ch. 26.

[522] Mr. Benn finally gives very high praise to Melissos

(Philos. of Greece, pp. 91-92); as does Prof. Burnet (Early

Gr. Philos. p. 378). He held strongly by the Ionian conception of

the eternity of matter. Fairbanks, p. 125.

[523] Diog. Laërt. bk. ix, ch. iv, 3 (§ 24).

[524] Diog. Laërt. ix, 3 (§ 21).

[525] As to this see Windelband, Hist. Anc. Philos. pp. 91-92.

[526] Cp. Mackay, Progress of the Intellect, i. 340.

[527] "The difference between the Ionians and Eleatæ was this:

the former endeavoured to trace an idea among phenomena by aid

of observation; the latter evaded the difficulty by dogmatically

asserting the objective existence of an idea" (Mackay, as last cited).

[528] Cp. Mackay, i, 352-53, as to the survival of veneration of the

heavenly bodies in the various schools.

[529] Grote, i, 350.

[530] Meyer, ii, 9, 759 (§§ 5, 465).

[531] Id. §§ 6, 466.

[532] Jevons, Hist. of Greek Lit. 1886, p. 210.

[533] Compare Meyer, ii, § 502, as to the close resemblances between

Pythagoreanism and Orphicism.

[534] Meyer, i, 186; ii, 635.

[535] Fairbanks, pp. 145, 151, 155, etc.

[536] Id. p. 143.

[537] Id. p. 154.

[538] Prof. Burnet insists (introd. p. 30) that "the" Greeks must

be reckoned good observers because their later sculptors were so. As

well say that artists make the best men of science.

[539] Metaph. i, 5; Fairbanks, p. 136. "It is quite safe to attribute

the substance of the First Book of Euclid to Pythagoras." Burnet,

Early Greek Philos. 2nd ed. p. 117.

[540] Diog. Laërt. Philolaos (bk. viii, ch. 7).

[541] L. U. K. Hist. of Astron. p. 20; A. Berry's Short Hist. of

Astron. 1898, p. 25; Narrien's Histor. Acc. of the Orig. and Prog. of

Astron. 1850, p. 163.

[542] See Benn, Greek Philosophers, i, 11.

[543] Diog. Laërt. in life of Philolaos; Cicero, Academica, ii,

39. Cicero, following Theophrastus, is explicit as to the teaching

of Hiketas.

[544] Hippolytos, Ref. of all Heresies, i, 13. Cp. Renouvier, Manuel

de la philos. anc. i, 201, 205, 238-39.

[545] Pseudo-Plutarch, De Placitis Philosoph. iii, 13, 14.

[546] Ueberweg, i, 49. Cp. Tertullian (Apol. ch. 11), who says

Pythagoras taught that the world was uncreated; and the contrary

statement of Aetius (in Fairbanks, pp. 146-47).

[547] Berry, Short Hist. of Astron. pp. 22, 25. The question is ably

handled by Renouvier, Manuel, i, 199-205.

[548] Diog. Laërt., viii, i, 8.

[549] The whole question is carefully sifted by Grote, iv,

76-94. Prof. Burnet (Early Greek Philos. 2nd ed. pp. 96-98) sums up

that the Pythagorean Order was an attempt to overrule or supersede

the State.

[550] Cp. Burnet, p. 97, note 3. Prof. Burnet speaks of the Pythagorean

Order as a "new religion" appealing to the people rather than the

aristocrats, who were apt to be "freethinking." But on the next page he

pictures the "plain man" as resenting precisely the religious neology

of the movement. The evidence for the adhesion of aristocrats seems

pretty strong.

[551] Fairbanks, p. 143.

[552] Grote, Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates, ed. 1885,

iv, 163.

[553] Diog. Laërt. bk. viii, ch. i, 19 (§ 21).

[554] Ennius, Fragmenta, ed. Hesselius, 1707, pp. 1, 4-7; Horace,

Epist. ii, 1, 52; Persius, Sat. vi.

[555] Grote, History, iv, 97.

[556] Scholiast on Iliad, xx, 67; Tatian, Adv. Græcos, c. 48 (31);

W. Christ, Gesch. der griech. Literatur, 3te Aufl. p. 63; Grote,

ch. xvi (i, 374).

[557] See above, p. 145.

[558] K. O. Müller, Dorians, Eng. tr. ii, 365-68; Mommsen, Hist. of

Rome, Eng. tr. ed. 1894, iii, 113.

[559] Grote. i, 338, note.

[560] Cicero, De natura Deorum, i, 22.

[561] Philolaos, as we saw, is said to have been prosecuted, but is

not said to have been condemned.

[562] Fairbanks, pp. 245, 255, 261; Diog. Laërt. bk. ii, ch. iii, 4

(§ 8).

[563] Fairbanks, pp. 230-45. Cp. Grote, Plato, i, 54, and Ueberweg,

i, 66, as to nature of the Nous of Anaxagoras.

[564] Grote, i, 374; Hesychius, s.v. Agamemnona;

cp. Diog. Laërt. bk. ii, ch. iii, 7 (§ 11); Tatian, Adv. Græcos,

c. 37 (21).

[565] Plutarch, Perikles, ch. 6.

[566] Id. chs. 5, 8.

[567] Id. c. 16. The old man is said to have uttered the reproach:

"Perikles, those who want to use a lamp supply it with oil."

[568] Plutarch, Perikles, ch. 4.

[569] Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iv, 277.

[570] Plutarch, Perikles, ch. 32.

[571] Diog. Laërt. bk. ix, ch. ix (§ 57), citing the Defence of

Sokrates by Demetrius Phalereus.

[572] Id. bk. ii, ch. iii, 9 (§ 12), citing Sotion. Another writer of

philosophers' lives, Hermippus (same cit.), said he had been thrown

into prison; and yet a third, Hieronymus, said he was released out

of pity because of his emaciated appearance when produced in court

by Perikles.

[573] Diog. Laërt. last cit. 10 (§ 14).

[574] Id. 8 (§ 11).

[575] Drews, Gesch. des Monismus im Altertum, p. 205.

[576] Even in the early progressive period "the same time which

set up rationalism developed a deep religious influence in the

masses." (Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. ii, 728. Cp. iii, 425; also Grote,

vii, 30; and Benn, Philosophy of Greece, 1898, pp. 69-70.)

[577] Plutarch, Perikles, ch. 32.

[578] Cp. Grote, v, 24; Curtius, ii, 208-209.

[579] Plutarch, as cited. Plutarch also states, however, that the

only occasion on which Perikles gave way to emotion in public was

that of the death of his favourite son.

[580] Holm (Griechische Geschichte, ii, 335) decides that Perikles

sought to Ionise his fellow Athenians; and Dr. Burnet, coinciding

(Early Greek Philosophy, 1892, p. 277), suggests that he and Aspasia

brought Anaxagoras to Athens with that aim.

[581] Perikles, ch. 8.

[582] "Der Kleinasiatische Rationalist Herodot" is the exaggerated

estimate of A. Bauer, in Ilberg's Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische

Altertum, ix (1902), 235, following Eduard Meyer (iv, § 448), who,

however (§ 447), points to the lack of scientific thought or training

in Herodotos as in Thukydides. Ignorance of Nature remained a Greek

characteristic.