termed "God" or "the Universe," had eminently, and in all their
plenitude, that life and intelligence which sublunary beings, each an
infinitely small and temporary portion of itself, possess in a far
inferior degree and infinitely less quantity. It was to them, in some
sort, like the Ocean, whence the springs, brooks, and rivers have risen
by evaporation, and to the bosom whereof they return by a larger or
shorter course, and after a longer or shorter separation from the
immense mass of its waters. The machine of the Universe was, in their
view, like that of man, moved by a Principle of Life which kept it in
eternal activity, and circulated in all its parts. The Universe was a
living and animated being, like man and the other animals; or rather
they were so only because the Universe was essentially so, and for a few
moments communicated to each an infinitely minute portion of its
eternal life, breathed by it into the inert and gross matter of
sublunary bodies. That withdrawn, man or the animal died; and the
Universe alone, living and circulating around the wrecks of their
bodies, by its eternal movement, organized and animated new bodies,
returning to them the eternal fire and subtle substance which vivifies
itself, and which, incorporated in its immense mass, was its universal
soul.
These were the ancient ideas as to this Great GOD, Father of all the
gods, or of the World; of this BEING, Principle of all things, and of
which nothing other than itself is Principle,--the Universal cause that
was termed God. Soul of the Universe, eternal like it, immense like it,
supremely active and potent in its varied operations, penetrating all
parts of this vast body, impressing a regular and symmetrical movement
on the spheres, making the elements instinct with activity and order,
mingling with everything, organizing everything, vivifying and
preserving everything,--this was the UNIVERSE-GOD which the ancients
adored as Supreme Cause and God of Gods.
Anchises, in the Æneid, taught Æneas this doctrine of Pythagoras,
learned by him from his Masters, the Egyptians, in regard to the Soul
and Intelligence of the Universe, from which _our_ souls and
intelligences, as well as our life and that of the animals, emanate,
Heaven, Earth, the Sea, the Moon and the Stars, he said, are moved by a
principle of internal life which perpetuates their existence; a great
intelligent soul, that penetrates every part of the vast body of the
Universe, and, mingling with everything, agitates it by an eternal
movement. It is the source of life in all living things. The force which
animates all, emanates from the eternal fire that burns in Heaven. In
the Georgics, Virgil repeats the same doctrine; and that, at the death
of every animal, the life that animated it, part of the universal life,
returns to its Principle and to the source of life that circulates in
the sphere of the Stars.
Servius makes God the active Cause that organizes the elements into
bodies, the vivifying breath or spirit, that, spreading through matter
or the elements, produces and engenders all things. The elements compose
the substance of our bodies: God composes the souls that vivify these
bodies. From it come the instincts of animals, from it their life, he
says: and when they die, that life returns to and re-enters into the
Universal Soul, and their bodies into Universal Matter.
Timæus of Locria and Plato his Commentator wrote of the Soul of the
World, developing the doctrine of Pythagoras, who thought, says Cicero,
that God is the Universal Soul, resident everywhere in nature, and of
which our Souls are but emanations. "_God is one_," says Pythagoras, as
cited by Justin Martyr: "He is not, as some think, _without_ the world,
but within it, and entire in its entirety. He sees all that _becomes_,
forms all immortal beings, is the author of their powers and
performances, the origin of all things, the Light of Heaven, the
_Father_, the _Intelligence_, the _Soul_ of all beings, the Mover of all
spheres."
God, in the view of Pythagoras, was ONE, a single substance, whose
continuous parts extended through all the Universe, without separation,
difference, or inequality, like the soul in the human body. He denied
the doctrine of the spiritualists, who had severed the Divinity from the
Universe, making Him exist apart from the Universe, which thus became no
more than a material work, on which acted the Abstract Cause, a God,
isolated from it. The Ancient Theology did not so separate God from the
Universe. This Eusebius attests, in saying that but a small number of
wise men, like Moses, had sought for God or the Cause of all, outside of
that ALL; while the Philosophers of Egypt and Phœnicia, real authors of
all the old Cosmogonies, had placed the Supreme Cause _in_ the Universe
itself, and in its parts, so that, in their view, the world and all its
parts are _in_ God.
The World or Universe was thus compared to man: the Principle of Life
that moves it, to that which moves man; the Soul of the World to that of
man. Therefore Pythagoras called man a _microcosm_, or little world, as
possessing in miniature all the qualities found on a great scale in the
Universe; by his reason and intelligence partaking of the Divine Nature:
and by his faculty of changing aliments into other substances, of
growing, and reproducing himself, partaking of elementary Nature. Thus
he made the Universe a great intelligent Being, like man--an immense
Deity, having in itself, what man has in himself, movement, life, and
intelligence, and besides, a perpetuity of existence, which man has not;
and, as having in itself perpetuity of movement and life, therefore the
Supreme Cause of all.
Everywhere extended, this Universal Soul does not, in the view of
Pythagoras, act everywhere equally nor in the same manner. The highest
portion of the Universe, being as it were its head, seemed to him its
principal seat, and there was the guiding power of the rest of the
world. In the seven concentric spheres is resident an eternal order,
fruit of the intelligence, the Universal Soul that moves, by a constant
and regular progression, the immortal bodies that form the harmonious
system of the heavens.
Manilius says: "I sing the invisible and potent Soul of Nature; that
Divine Substance which, everywhere inherent in Heaven, Earth, and the
Waters of the Ocean, forms the bond that holds together and makes one
all the parts of the vast body of the Universe. It, balancing all
Forces, and harmoniously arranging the varied relations of the many
members of the world, maintains in it the life and regular movement that
agitate it, as a result of the action of the living breath or single
spirit that dwells in all its parts, circulates in all the channels of
universal nature, flashes with rapidity to all its points, and gives to
animated bodies the configurations appropriate to the organization of
each.... This eternal Law, this Divine Force, that maintains the harmony
of the world, makes use of the Celestial Signs to organize and guide the
animated creatures that breathe upon the earth; and gives to each of
them the character and habits most appropriate. By the action of this
Force Heaven rules the condition of the Earth and of its fields
cultivated by the husbandman: it gives us or takes from us vegetation
and harvests: it makes the great ocean overpass its limits at the flow,
and retire within them again at the ebbing, of the tide."
Thus it is no longer by means of a poetic fiction only that the heavens
and the earth become animated and personified, and are deemed living
existences, from which other existences proceed. For now they live, with
their own life, a life eternal like their bodies, each gifted with a
life and perhaps a soul, like those of man, a portion of the universal
life and universal soul; and the other bodies that they form, and which
they contain in their bosoms, live only through them and with their
life, as the embryo lives in the bosom of its mother, in consequence and
by means of the life communicated to it, and which the mother ever
maintains by the active power of her own life. Such is the universal
life of the world, reproduced in all the beings which its superior
portion creates in its inferior portion, that is as it were the _matrix_
of the world, or of the beings that the heavens engender in its bosom.
"The soul of the world," says Macrobius, "is nature itself" [as the
soul of man is man himself], "always acting through the celestial
spheres which it moves, and which but follow the irresistible impulse it
impresses on them. The heavens, the sun, great seat of generative power,
the signs, the stars, and the planets act only with the activity of the
soul of the Universe. From that soul, through them, come all the
variations and changes of sublunary nature, of which the heavens and
celestial bodies are but the secondary causes. The zodiac, with its
signs, is an existence, immortal and divine, organized by the universal
soul, and producing, or gathering in itself, all the varied emanations
of the different powers that make up the nature of the Divinity."
This doctrine, that gave to the heavens and the spheres living souls,
each a portion of the universal soul, was of extreme antiquity. It was
held by the old Sabræns. It was taught by Timæsus, Plato, Speusippus,
Iamblichus, Macrobius, Marcus Aurelius, and Pythagoras. When once men
had assigned a soul to the Universe, containing in itself the plenitude
of the animal life of particular beings, and even of the stars, they
soon supposed that soul to be essentially intelligent, and the source of
intelligence of all intelligent beings. Then the Universe became to them
not only animated but intelligent, and of that intelligence the
different parts of nature partook. Each soul was the vehicle, and, as it
were, the envelope of the intelligence that attached itself to it, and
could repose nowhere else. Without a soul there could be no
intelligence; and as there was a universal soul, source of all souls,
the universal soul was gifted with a universal intelligence, source of
all particular intelligences. So the soul of the world contained in
itself the intelligence of the world. All the agents of nature into
which the universal soul entered, received also a portion of its
intelligence, and the Universe, in its totality and in its parts, was
filled with intelligences, that might be regarded as so many emanations
from the sovereign and universal intelligence. Wherever the divine soul
acted as a cause, there also was intelligence; and thus Heaven, the
stars, the elements, and all parts of the Universe, became the seats of
so many divine intelligences. Every minutest portion of the great soul
became a partial intelligence, and the more it was disengaged from gross
matter, the more active and intelligent it was. And all the old adorers
of nature, the theologians, astrologers, and poets, and the most
distinguished philosophers, supposed that the stars were so many
animated and intelligent beings, or eternal bodies, active causes of
effects here below, whom a principle of life animated, and whom an
intelligence directed, which was but an emanation from, and a portion
of, the universal life and intelligence of the world.
The Universe itself was regarded as a supremely intelligent being. Such
was the doctrine of Timæus of Locria. The soul of man was part of the
intelligent soul of the Universe, and therefore itself intelligent. His
opinion was that of many other philosophers. Cleanthes, a disciple of
ZENO, regarded the Universe as God, or as the unproduced and universal
cause of all effects produced. He ascribed a soul and intelligence to
universal nature, and to this intelligent soul, in his view, divinity
belonged. From it the intelligence of man was an emanation, and shared
its divinity. Chrysippus, the most subtle of the Stoics, placed in the
universal reason that forms the soul and intelligence of nature, that
divine force or essence of the Divinity which he assigned to the world
moved by the universal soul that pervades its every part.
An interlocutor in Cicero's work, _De Natura Deorum_, formally argues
that the Universe is necessarily intelligent and wise, because man, an
infinitely small portion of it, is so. Cicero makes the same argument in
his oration for Milo. The physicists came to the same conclusion as the
philosophers. They supposed that movement essentially belonged to the
soul, and the direction of regular and ordered movements to the
intelligence. And, as both movement and order exist in the Universe,
therefore, they held, there must be in it a soul and an intelligence
that rule it, and are not to be distinguished from itself; because the
idea of the Universe is but the aggregate of all the particular ideas of
all things that exist.
The argument was, that the Heavens, and the Stars which make part of
them, are _animated_, because they possess a portion of the Universal
Soul: they are _intelligent_ beings, because that Universal Soul, part
whereof they possess, is supremely intelligent; and they share
_Divinity_ with Universal Nature, because Divinity resides in the
Universal Soul and Intelligence which move and rule the world, and of
each of which they hold a share. By this process of logic, the
interlocutor in Cicero assigned Divinity to the Stars, as animated
beings gifted with sensibility and intelligence, and composed of the
noblest and purest portions of the ethereal substance, unmixed with
matter of an alien nature, and essentially containing light and heat.
Hence he concluded them to be so many gods, of an intelligence superior
to that of other existences, corresponding to the lofty height in which
they moved with such perfect regularity and admirable harmony, with a
movement spontaneous and free. Hence he made them "Gods," active,
eternal, and intelligent "Causes"; and peopled the realm of Heaven with
a host of Eternal Intelligences, celestial Genii or Angels, sharing the
universal Divinity, and associated with it in the administration of the
Universe, and the dominion exercised over sublunary nature and man.
_We_ make the motive-force of the planets to be a mechanical law, which
we explain by the combination of two forces, the centripetal and
centrifugal, whose _origin_ we cannot demonstrate, but whose _force_ we
can calculate. The ancients regarded them as moved by an intelligent
force that had its origin in the first and universal Intelligence. Is it
so certain, after all, that we are any nearer the truth than they were;
or that we know what our "centripetal and centrifugal forces" _mean_;
for what _is_ a _force?_ With us, the entire Deity acts upon and moves
each planet, as He does the sap that circulates in the little blade of
grass, and in the particles of blood in the tiny veins of the invisible
rotifer. With the Ancients, the Deity of each Star was but a portion of
the Universal God, the Soul of Nature. Each Star and Planet, with them,
was moved of _itself_, and directed by _its own_ special intelligence.
And this opinion of Achilles Tatius, Diodorus, Chrysippus, Aristotle,
Plato, Heraclides of Pontus, Theophrastus, Simplicius, Macrobius, and
Proclus, that in each Star there is an immortal Soul and
Intelligence,--part of the Universal Soul and Intelligence of the
Whole,--this opinion of Orpheus, Plotinus, and the Stoics, was in
reality, that of many Christian philosophers. For Origen held the same
opinion; and Augustin held that every visible thing in the world was
superintended by an Angelic Power: and Cosma the Monk, believed that
every Star was under the guidance of an Angel; and the author of the
Octateuch, written in the time of the Emperor Justin, says that they are
moved by the impulse communicated to them by Angels stationed above the
firmament. Whether the stars were animated beings, was a question that
Christian antiquity did not decide. Many of the Christian doctors
believed they were. Saint Augustin hesitates, Saint Jerome doubts, if
Solomon did not assign souls to the Stars. Saint Ambrose does not doubt
they _have_ souls; and Pamphilus says that many of the Church believe
they are reasonable beings, while many think otherwise, but that neither
one nor the other opinion is heretical.
Thus the Ancient Thought, earnest and sincere, wrought out the idea of a
Soul _inherent_ in the Universe and in its several parts. The next step
was to _separate_ that Soul from the Universe, and give to it an
external and independent existence and personality; still omnipresent,
in every inch of space and in every particle of matter, and yet not a
part of Nature, but its Cause and its Creator. This is the middle ground
between the two doctrines, of Pantheism (or that all is God, and God is
_in_ all and is all), on the one side, and Atheism (or that all is
nature, and there is no other God), on the other; which doctrines, after
all, when reduced to their simplest terms, seem to be the same.
We complacently congratulate ourselves on our recognition of a
_personal_ God, as being the conception most suited to human sympathies,
and exempt from the mystifications of Pantheism. But the Divinity
remains still a mystery, notwithstanding all the devices which
symbolism, either from the organic or inorganic creation, can supply;
and personification is itself a symbol, liable to misapprehension as
much as, if not more so than, any other, since it is apt to degenerate
into a mere reflection of our own infirmities; and hence _any_
affirmative idea or conception that we can, in our own minds, picture of
the Deity, must needs be infinitely inadequate.
The spirit of the Vedas (or sacred Indian Books, of great antiquity), as
understood by their earliest as well as most recent expositors, is
decidedly a pantheistic monotheism--one God, and He all in all; the many
divinities, numerous as the prayers addressed to them, being resolvable
into the titles and attributes of a few, and ultimately into THE ONE.
The machinery of personification was understood to have been
unconsciously assumed as a mere expedient to supply the deficiencies of
language; and the Mimansa justly considered itself as only interpreting
the true meaning of the Mantras, when it proclaimed that, in the
beginning, "Nothing was but Mind, the Creative Thought of Him which
existed alone from the beginning, and breathed without afflation." The
idea suggested in the Mantras is dogmatically asserted and developed in
the Upanischadas. The Vedanta philosophy, assuming the mystery of the
"ONE IN MANY" as the fundamental article of faith, maintained not only
the Divine Unity, but the identity of matter and spirit. The unity which
it advocates is that of mind. Mind is the Universal Element, the One
God, the Great Soul, Mahaatma. He is the material as well as efficient
cause, and the world is a texture of which he is both the web and the
weaver. He is the Macrocosmos, the universal organism called Pooroosha,
of which Fire, Air, and Sun are only the chief members. His head is
light, his eyes the sun and moon, his breath the wind, his voice the
opened Vedas. All proceeds from Brahm, like the web from the spider and
the grass from the earth.
Yet it is only the impossibility of expressing in language the
origination of matter from spirit, which gives to Hindū philosophy the
appearance of materialism. Formless Himself, the Deity is present in all
forms. His glory is displayed in the Universe as the image of the sun in
water, which is, yet is not, the luminary itself. All maternal agency
and appearance, the subjective world, are to a great extent phantasms,
the notional representations of ignorance. They occupy, however, a
middle ground between reality and non-reality; they are unreal, because
nothing exists but Brahm; yet in some degree real, inasmuch as they
constitute an outward manifestation of him. They are a self-induced
hypostasis of the Deity, under which He _presents to Himself_ the whole
of animate and inanimate Nature, the actuality of the moment, the
diversified _appearances_ which successively invest the one Pantheistic
Spirit.
The great aim of reason is to generalize; to discover unity in
multiplicity, order in apparent confusion; to separate from the
accidental and the transitory, the stable and universal. In the
contemplation of Nature, and the vague, but almost intuitive perception
of a general uniformity of plan among endless varieties of operation and
form, arise those solemn and reverential feelings, which, if accompanied
by intellectual activity, may eventually ripen into philosophy.
Consciousness of self and of personal identity is co-existent with our
existence. We cannot conceive of mental existence without it. It is not
the work of reflection nor of logic, nor the result of observation,
experiment, and experience. It is a gift from God, like instinct; and
that consciousness of a thinking soul which is really the person that
we are, and other than our body, is the best and most solid proof of the
soul's existence. We have the same consciousness of a Power on which we
are dependent; which we can _define_ and form an idea or picture of, as
little as we can of the soul, and yet which we _feel_, and therefore
know, exists. True and correct ideas of that Power, of the Absolute
Existence from which all proceeds, we cannot trace; if by true and
correct we mean _adequate_ ideas; for of such we are not, with our
limited faculties, capable. And ideas of His nature, so far correct as
we are capable of entertaining, can only be attained either by direct
inspiration or by the investigations of philosophy.
The idea of the universal preceded the recognition of any system for its
explanation. It was _felt_ rather than understood; and it was long
before the grand conception on which all philosophy rests received
through deliberate investigation that analytical development which might
properly entitle it to the name. The sentiment, when first observed by
the self-conscious mind, was, says Plato, "a Divine gift, communicated
to mankind by some Prometheus, or by those ancients who lived nearer to
the gods than our degenerate selves." The mind deduced from its first
experiences the notion of a general Cause or Antecedent, to which it
shortly gave a name and personified it. This was the statement of a
theorem, obscure in proportion to its generality. _It explained all
things but itself_. It was _a true_ cause, but an _incomprehensible_
one. Ages had to pass before the nature of the theorem could be rightly
appreciated, and before men, acknowledging the First Cause to be an
object of faith rather than science, were contented to confine their
researches to those nearer relations of existence and succession, which
are really within the reach of their faculties. At first, and for a long
time, the intellect deserted the real for a hastily-formed ideal world,
and the imagination usurped the place of reason, in attempting to put a
construction on the most general and inadequate of conceptions, by
transmuting its symbols into realities, and by substantializing it under
a thousand arbitrary forms.
In poetry, the idea of Divine unity became, as in Nature, obscured by a
multifarious symbolism; and the notionalities of transcendental
philosophy reposed on views of nature scarcely more profound than those
of the earliest symbolists. Yet the idea of unity was rather obscured
than extinguished; and Xenophanes appeared as an enemy of Homer, only
because he more emphatically insisted on the monotheistic element,
which, in poetry, has been comparatively overlooked. The first
philosophy reasserted the unity which poetry had lost; but being unequal
to investigate its nature, it again resigned it to the world of
approximate sensations, and became bewildered in materialism,
considering the conceptional whole or First Element as some refinement
of matter, unchangeable in its essence, though subject to mutations of
quality and form in an eternal succession of seeming decay and
regeneration; comparing it to water, air, or fire, as each endeavored to
refine on the doctrine of his predecessor, or was influenced by a
different class of theological traditions.