Effect of philosophical criticism.

Secession

of literary

44

Effect of Philosophical Criticism.

At

the western basin; one of their colonies built Marseilles.
length Coleus of Samos passed through the frowning gateway
of Hercules into the circumfluent sea, the Atlantic Ocean.
No little interest attaches to the first colonial cities; they
dotted the shores from Sinope to Saguntum, and were at once
trading-depôts and foci of wealth. In the earliest times the
merchant was his own captain, and sold his commodities by
auction at the place to which he came. The primitive and
profitable commerce of the Mediterranean was peculiar,-it
was for slaves, mineral products, and articles of manufacture;
for, running coincident with parallels of latitude, its agri-
cultural products were not very varied, and the wants of its
populations the same. But tin was brought from the Cassi-
terides, amber from the Baltic, and dyed goods and worked
metals from Syria. Wherever these trades centred, the germs
of taste and intelligence were developed; thus the Etruscans,
in whose hands was the amber-trade across Germany, have left
many relics of their love of art. Though a mysterious, they
were hardly a gloomy race, as a great modern author has sup-
posed, if we may judge from those beautiful remains.

Added to the effect of geographical discovery was the de-
velopement of philosophical criticism. It is observed that soon
after the first Olympiad the Greek intellect very rapidly expan-
ded. Whenever man reaches a certain point in his mental pro-
gress, he will not be satisfied with less than an application of
existing rules to ancient events. Experience has taught him
that the course of the world to-day is the same as it was yester-
day; he unhesitatingly believes that this will also hold good for
to-morrow. He will not bear to contemplate any break in the
mechanism of history; he will not be satisfied with a mere
uninquiring faith, but insists upon having the same voucher for
an old fact that he requires for one that is new. Before the
face of History, Mythology cannot stand.

The operation of this principle is seen in all directions men from throughout Greek literature after the date that has been menthe public tioned, and this the more strikingly as the time is later. The national intellect became more and more ashamed of the fables it had believed in its infancy. Of the legends, some are allego

faith;

rized, some are modified, some are repudiated. The great tragedians accept the myths in the aggregate, but decline them in particulars; some of the poets transform or allegorize them, some use them ornamentally, as graceful decorations. It is evident that between the educated and the vulgar classes a divergence is taking place, and that the best men of the times see the necessity of either totally abandoning these cherished fictions to the lower orders, or of gradually replacing them with something more suitable. Such a frittering away of sacred things was, however, very far from meeting with public approbation in Athens-itself, although so many people in that city had reached that state of mental developement in which it was impossible for them to continue to accept the national faith. They tried to force themselves to believe that there must be something true in that which had been believed by so many great and pious men of old, which had approved itself by lasting so many centuries, and of which it was by the common people asserted that absolute demonstration could be given. But it was in vain; intellect had outgrown faith. They had come into that condition to which all men are liable -aware of the fallacy of their opinions, yet angry that another should remind them thereof. When the social state no longer permitted them to take the life of a philosophical offender, they found means to put upon him such an invisible pressure as to present him the choice of orthodoxy or beggary. Thus they disapproved of Euripides permitting his characters to indulge in any sceptical reflections, and discountenanced the impiety so obvious in the Prometheus Bound of Eschylus. It was by appealing to this sentiment that Aristophanes added no little to the excitement against Socrates. Those who are doubting themselves are often loudest in public denunciations of a similar state in others.

If thus the poets, submitting to common sense, had so And of philosophers. rapidly fallen away from the national belief, the philosophers pursued the same course. It soon became the universal impression that there was an intrinsic opposition between philosophy and religion, and herein public opinion was not mistaken; the fact that polytheism furnished a religious explana

Antago

tion for every natural event made it essentially antagonistic to science. It was the uncontrollable advancement of knowledge that overthrew Greek religion. Socrates himself never hesitated to denounce physics for that tendency, and the Athenians extended his principles to his own pursuits, their strong commonsense telling them that the philosophical cultivation of ethics must be equally bad. He was not loyal to science, but sought to support his own views by exciting a theological odium against his competitors,—a crime that educated men ought never to forgive. In the tragedy that ensued, the Athenians. only paid him in his own coin. The immoralities imputed to the gods were doubtless strongly calculated to draw the attention of reflecting men; but the essential nature of the pursuit in which the Ionian and Italian schools were engaged, bore directly on the doctrine of a providential government of the world. It not only turned into a fiction the time-honoured dogma of the omnipresence of the Olympian divinities—it even struck at their very existence, by leaving them nothing to do. For those personifications it introduced impersonal nature or the elements. Instead of uniting scientific interpretations to ancient traditions, it modified and moulded the old traditions to suit the apparent requirements of science. We shall subsequently see what was the necessary issue of this, that the Divinity became excluded from the world he had made, the supernatural merged in natural agency; Zeus was superseded by the air, Poseidon by the water; and while some of the philosophers received in silence the popular legends, as was the case with Socrates, or, like Plato, regarded it as a patriotic duty to accept the public faith, others, like Xenophanes, denounced the whole as an ancient blunder, converted by time into a national imposture.

As I shall have in a detailed manner occasion to speak of nism of sci- Greek philosophy, it is unnecessary to enter into the parpolytheism, ticulars here. For the present purpose it is enough to under

ence and

stand that it was radically opposed to the national faith in all countries and at all times, from its origin with Thales down to the latest critic of the Alexandrian school.

As it was with philosophers, so it was with historians; the

historians.

rise of true history brought the same result as the rise of true Secession of philosophy. In this instance there was added a special circumstance, which gave to the movement no little force. Whatever might be the feigned facts of the Grecian foretime, they were altogether outdone in antiquity and wonder by the actual history of Egypt. What was a pious man like Herodotus to think, when he found that, at the very period he had supposed a superhuman state of things in his native country, the ordinary passage of affairs was taking place on the banks of the Nile? And so, indeed, it had been for untold ages. To every one engaged in recording recent events, it must have been obvious that a chronology applied where the actors are superhuman is altogether without basis, and that it is a delusion to transfer the motives and thoughts of men to those who are not men. Under such circumstances there is a strong inducement to decline traditions altogether; for no philosophical mind will ever be satisfied with different tests for the present and the past, but will insist that actions and their sequences were the same in the foretime as now.

disbelief of

Thus for many ages stood affairs. One after another, his- Universal torians, philosophers, critics, poets, had given up the national the learned. faith, and lived under a pressure perpetually laid upon them by the public, adopting generally, as their most convenient course, an outward compliance with the religious requirements of the state. Herodotus cannot reconcile the inconsistencies of the Trojan War with his knowledge of human actions; Thucydides does not dare to express his disbelief of it; Eratosthenes sees contradictions between the voyage of Odysseus and the truths of geography; Anaxagoras is condemned to death for impiety, and only through the exertions of the chief of the state is his sentence mercifully commuted to banishment. Plato, seeing things from a very general point of view, thinks it expedient, upon the whole, to prohibit the cultivation of the higher branches of physics. Euripides tries to free himself from the imputation of heresy as best he may. Eschylus is condemned to be stoned to death for blasphemy, and is only saved by his brother Aminias raising his mutilated arm-he had lost his hand in the battle of Salamis. Socrates stands his trial, and has to drink hemlock. Even great states

Attempts at a reformation.

Inveterate

gar.

men like Pericles had become entangled in the obnoxious opinions. No one has anything to say in explanation of the marvellous disappearance of demigods and heroes, why miracles are ended, or why human actions alone are now to be seen in the world. An ignorant public demands the instant punishment of every suspected man. In their estimation, to distrust the traditions of the past is to be guilty of treason to the present. But all this confusion and dissent did not arise without an attempt among well-meaning men at a reformation. Some, and they were perhaps the most advanced intellectually, wished that the priests should abstain from working any more miracles; that relics should be as little used as was consistent with the psychical demands of the vulgar, and should be gradually abandoned; that philosophy should no longer be outraged with the blasphemous anthropomorphisms of the Olympian deities. Some, less advanced, were disposed to reconcile all difficulties by regarding the myths as allegorical; some wished to transform them so as to bring them in harmony with the existing social state; some would give them altogether new interpretations. With one, though the fact of a Trojan war is not to be denied, it was only the eidolon of Helen whom Paris carried away; with another, expressions, perhaps once intended to represent actual events, are dwindled into mere forms of speech. Unwilling to reject the attributes of the Olympian divinities, their human passions and actions, another asserts that they must once have all existed as men. While one denounces the impudent atheists who find fault with the myths of the Iliad, ignorant of its allegorical meaning, another resolves all its heroes into the elements; and still another, hoping to reconcile to the improved moral sense of the times the indecencies and wickedness of the gods, imputes them all to demons; an idea which found much favour at first, but became singularly fatal to polytheism in the end.

In apparent inconsistency with this declining state of belief of the vul- in the higher classes, the multitude, without concern, indulged in the most surprising superstitions. With them it was an age of relics, of weeping statues, and winking pictures. The tools with which the Trojan horse was made might still be seen at Metapontum; the sceptre of Pelops was still preserved at