their repose in soft, influences constantly tending on all sides to an equality, at last brought many bodies to a spherical shape and to a circular motion, until finally in this way a universe was formed: κόσμος ἁρμόττων τὰς δυνάμεις τῆς φύσεως αὐτοῦ οἰκείως πως ; these various adaptations or fittings, after they had once happened to take place, becoming more and more stable by nature (púos), and a certain habit (öğıç), which everything had a tendency to maintain when once assumed.

After this immense region of púois and rúxn came the small province of Tέxvn, or art, which was itself supposed to grow out of (pveolar) and to be long posterior to the two first; according to the atheistic dogma, that mind, of which art or Texvn is the offspring, is the last production of the generative power of the universe. Here we have the doctrine of progress in all its consistency; and why might not a God be the last result or consummation of this ascending scale, instead of being the beginning, as he is in-that a priori view, which commences with the idea of the perfect, and from thence descends to the lower and the imperfect? We see not how, even on this scheme most ingenious as it is, the atheist can expect to find relief from his tormenting theophobia, or escape that object of his greatest dread, a superhuman being, whether he styles him a God or a Dæmon.

If nature, pots and Túxn, have thus, after ages spent in lower productions on our earth, finally worked out the soul of man (or whatever else they may style that peculiar matter in us which wills, and thinks, and feels), why may not these agencies, during the long cycles of eternity, and in the infinitude of space, have given birth to a being excelling us in power as much as we surpass the lowest orders of vegetation? And what security have they as to his moral character, or what grounds for supposing that he would possess any moral character at all. The same progressive

influences which, on our narrow scale, have called into being ichthyosauri, and megatheria, and mammoth monsters, such as sometimes now affright us by their exposed relics, may have given birth, on the immense field of the universe, to Gorgons, Hydras, and Chimeras dire,

to a God or Gods of a more horrid nature than ever crossed the imagination of the Gnostic, or than ever figured in the wildest legends of Thibet or Hindostan. Indeed, we have every reason to believe that this monstrous Hindoo system, which should be styled a theogony rather than a theology, sprang in this very manner from an ancient atheism, which had been the offspring of a still earlier pantheism. It seems evidently to recognise such an older púois as Plato's atheists talked about, and the history of its Gods is only a history of successive generations from this primeval nature, each of a more horrid species than its predecessor.

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We say the atheist has no security against this, unless he takes shelter in that a priori idea of God which comes from the necessities of our own minds, inseparably connecting with it the notion of goodness, and of infinite perfection of every kind. But, then, this is a very different being from that last production of nature, which can never rise above its parent, or possess any other than physical attributes. Should they startle at the idea of such a superhuman being, whose malevolence might be commensurate with his power, and assert that it is improbable or impossible, the declaration proceeds only from an instinctive reverting to those ideas which belong to a directly opposite system, commencing with the moral instead of the natural, and making the necessary idea of God the ground of all truth. We are confined to so minute a portion of the universe, that no a posteriori induction, aside from any such necessary a priori idea, or some special revelation, can ever produce a firm conviction or a confiding trust in the Divine benevolence.

The

Neither has the atheist any security against a Hades or unseen world, filled with the most ghastly apparitions; and it is a fact, as has been remarked by Bayle, who was himself a skeptic, that many of this unhappy class have had most horrid fears of ghosts and hobgoblins. Their great champion Hobbes furnishes a noted example of this. Some might regard it as an inconsistency, and yet their system can allege nothing against. the position that such appearances are not the mere fictions of a diseased imagination, but have a real existence in rerum natura. Who can assign any bounds to the working of φύσις and τύχη ? atheist cannot even be sure that he may not, on his own hypothesis, live again. Eternity is very long, and viewed in reference to it, everything ceases to be improbable, except what is inconsistent with the attributes of an à priori God. But remove this idea, and what hinders us from supposing that, in the endless changes of matter, the same atoms which now form the atheist's body, and give rise to the energies of his soul, may again come into the same combinations, may recreate a brain with the same particles, having the same figure, site, and order, and, of course, producing the same thoughts and sensations, or, in short, renew an existence; in all respects identical, which may recollect all the misery of the past, and can only indulge the same awful anticipations for the hopeless and godless future.

Plato seems to have already had in mind a class of semitheists or semi-atheists, such as we have been considering, who might believe in a kind of Deity younger than Nature, and yet possessed of vast power and intelligence. After alluding to the common opinion that astronomers must be atheists, because they are so in the habit of resolving all the phenomena of the Heavens into necessities (áváykais) and natural laws, he mentions a class who acknowledged the existence of mind in the motions of the celestial bodies,

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but who strangely regarded this mind as itself the result, and not the author of Nature: Λέγουσί τινες ὡς νοῦς εἴη ὁ διακεκοσμηκὼς πάνθ' ὅσα κατ' οὐρανόν· οἱ δὲ αὐτοὶ πάλιν ἁμαρτάνοντες ψυχῆς φύσεως, ὅτι πρεσβύτερον εἴη σωμάτων, διανοηθέντες δὲ ὡς νεώτερον, ἅπανθ ̓ ὡς εἰπεῖν ἔπος ἀνέτρεψαν πάλιν, ἑαυτοὺς δὲ πολὺ μᾶλλον, κ. τ. λ. "Some

say that it is Nous, or Mind, that orders all things in the Heavens. But, then, these same persons, erring as to the nature of soul, in that it is older than bodies (or matter), and supposing it to be younger, they again, as we may say, upset all things, and especially themselves. For all these things appear to them to be full merely of earth, and stones, and other inanimate bodies, dividing among themselves (or to which they assign) the causes of the universe. This is what has produced so many atheistic impieties, and so many difficulties in the treatment of these matters. Hence, also, have come those abusive charges, which the poets have made against philosophers, comparing their declarations and dogmas to the confused yelping of dogs." De Legibus, xii., 967, A. There is one important inference to be drawn from this passage. Plato evidently maintains that no one can be a consistent theist who does not hold that spirit is older than matter. The position that matter is eternal would be in direct opposition to this, and therefore he could not himself have maintained that doctrine, whatever appearance of it there may be in some obscure passages in the Timæus. See this more fully examined, Note L., on the ancient dogma, De nihilo nihil fit. On this subject of Túxn and púoɩs, compare Aristotle, Physic. Ausc., lib. ii., ch. 4.

XIV.

Atheistical Doctrine that Law and Religion were not by Nature, but by Art.

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οὐ φύσει, τέχνῃ δέ.

Οὕτω δέ καὶ τὴν νομοθεσίαν πᾶσαν, This is simply mentioned as one of the inferences from their doctrine, namely," that legislation or law was not by nature, but by art." It was, however, just the inference that Plato deemed of the most dangerous consequence, and against which he directs all the strength of his reasoning, both here and in many other parts of his dialogues. Compare the Gorgias, and especially that long argument of Callicles (482, C.), in which he advances this same doctrine, namely, that law, and right (rò díkacov), and religion are not by nature, but by human appointment, which is equivalent to what the atheist here is supposed to/ mean by Téxνn, as something junior and posterior to nature: ὡς τὰ πολλὰ δὲ ταῦτα ἐναντία ἀλλήλοις ἐστίν, ἥ τε φύσις καὶ ὁ νόμος, κ. τ. λ. Gorgias, 483, Α.

It is a doctrine which in all ages has had its advocates, and in modern times has been specially revived by Hobbes and his followers. It is this inference that gives atheism all its interest. As a speculative tenet for the intellect merely, it would have no charms even for the darkest mind. If this creed be true, then not only religion, but also all morality, and all right views of law, are without any foundation either in God, or in any nature of things proceeding from him, or in any nature at all implying a moral sanction and which necessarily suggests the idea of something older, and higher, and stronger than itself. They are all, in that case, the offspring of Texvn, or Art. only a human origin; since, in this creed, Art is the result of the junior production, Mind; or, in the language which Plato ascribes to the atheist, ύστέραν ἐκ τούτων γενομένην ΘΝΗΤΗΝ ἐκ ΘΝΗΤΩΝ. They can, therefore, have only

That is, they have