History of Of the ancient philosophy of the Arabians and ChiPhilosophy. nese nothing certain can be said; and the narrow limits of such an abstract as this, do not admit of our mentioning the conjectures of the learned, which contradict each other, and are all equally groundless. 12 Philosophy of the Ar bians and Chinese. 13 Early sci Phoeni cians. There is indeed sufficient evidence that both nations were at a very early period observers of the stars; and that the Chinese had even a theory by which they foretold eclipses (see ASTRONOMY, N° 2, 3.); but there is reason to believe that the Arabians, like other people in their circumstances, were nothing more than judicial astrologers, who possessed not the smallest portion of astronomical science. Pliny makes mention of their magi, whilst later writers tell us, that they were famous for their ingenuity in solving enigmatical questions, and for their skill in the arts of divination: but the authors of Greece are silent concerning their philosophy; and there is not an Arabian book of greater antiquity than the Koran extant (see PHILOLOGY, Section II.). Leaving therefore regions so barren of information, ence of the let us pass to the Phoenicians, whose commercial celebrity has induced many learned men to allow them great credit for early science. If it be true, as seems highly probable, that the ships of this nation had doubled the Cape and almost encompassed the peninsula of Africa long before the era of Solomon (See OPHIR, N° 10.), we cannot doubt that the Phoenicians had made great proficiency in the art of navigation, and in the science of astronomy, at a period of very remote antiquity. Nor were these the only sciences cultivated by that ancient people: the learned Cudworth has, in our opinion, sufficiently proved that Mosehus or Mochus a Phoenician, who, according to Strabo, flou rished before the Trojan war, was the author of the atomic philosophy afterwards adopted by Leucippus, Democritus, and others among the Greeks; and that it was with some of the successors of this sage that Pythagoras, as Jamblichus tells us, conversed at Sidon, and from them received his doctrine of Monads (See PYTHAGORAS). Another proof of the early progress of the Phoenicians in philosophy may be found in the fragments of their historian Sanchoniatho which have been ♦Prep. Ev. preserved by Eusebius*. We are indeed aware that men of great celebrity have called in question the authenticity of those fragments, and even the very existence of such a writer as Sanchoniatho; but for this scepticism we can discover no foundation (See SANCHONIATHO). His history may have been interpolated in some places by the translator Philo-Byblius; but Porphyry, Eusebius, and Theodoret, speak of it as a work of undoubted credit, and affirm that its author flourished before the Trojan war. Now this ancient writer teaches that, according to the wise men of his country, all things arose at first from the necessary agency of an active principle upou a passive chaotic mass which he calls mot. This chaos Cudworth thinks was the same with the ele mentary water of Thales, who was also of Phoenician extraction; but Mosheim justly observes that it was rather dark air, since Pliilo translates it atga Copadn. Be this as it may, nothing can be more evident than that the Phoenicians must have made some progress in what must surely be considered as philosophy, however false, so early as the era of Sanchoniatho; for speculations about the origin of the world never occur to untaught barbarians. Besides Mochus and Sanchoniathe, Cad- History of mus, who introduced letters into Greece, may undoubt- Philosophy. edly he reckoned among the Phoenician philosophers; for though it is not pretended that the alphabet was of his invention, and though it is by no means certain that the Greeks, at the time of his arrival among them, were wholly destitute of alphabetic characters (See PHILOLOGY, No 130.); yet the man who could prevail with illiterate savages to adopt the use of strange characters, must have been a great master of the science of human nature. Several other Phoenician philosophers are mentioned by Strabo; but as they flourished at a later period, and philosophized after the systematic mode of the Greeks, they fall not properly under our notice. We pass on therefore to the philosophy of E gypt. 14 It has been already observed that the Egyptians Egyptian boasted of being the first of nations, and the authors philosophy. of all the science which in separate rays illuminated the rest of the world. But though this claim was undoubtedly ill-founded, their high antiquity and early progress in the arts of civil life cannot be controverted. The Greeks with one voice confess that all their learning and wisdom came from Egypt, either imported immediately by their own philosophers, or brought through Phoenicia by the sages of the east; and we knew from higher authority than the historics of Greece, that at a period so remote as the birth of Moses, the wisdom of the Egyptians was proverbially famous. Yet the history of Egyptian learning and philosophy, though men of the first eminence both ancient and modern have be stowed much pains in attempts to elucidate it, still remains involved in clouds of uncertainty. That they had some knowledge of physiology, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, are facts which cannot be questioned; but there is reason to believe that even these sciences were in Egypt pushed no farther than to the uses of life. That they believed in the existence of incorporeal substances is certain; because Herodotus assures us that they were the first assertors of the immortality, pre-existence, and transmigration of human souls, which they could not have been without holding those souls to be at least incorporeal, if not immaterial. The author of Egyptian learning is generally acknowledged to have been Thoth, Theut, or Taaut, called by the Greeks Hermes, and by the Romans Mercury; but of this personage very little is known. Diodorus Siculus says that he was chief minister to Osiris, and that he improved language, invented letters, instituted religious rites, and taught astronomy, music, and other arts. The same thing is affirmed by Sanchoniatho, whose antiquity has been already mentioned; by Manetho an Egyptian priest, who flourished during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus; and by Plato, whose authority, as he resided long in Egypt, and was himself an eminent philosopher, is perhaps more to be depended upon than that of the other two. In the Phi lebus we are told that Thoth was the inventor of letters; and lest we should suppose that by those letters nothing more is meant than picture writing or symbolical hieroglyphics, it is added, that he distinguished between vowels and consonants, determining the number of each. The same philosopher, in his Phædrus, at tributes to Thoth the invention of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and hieroglyphic learning; and subjoins a disputation History of disputation said to have been held between him and ThaPhilosophy mus then king of Egypt, concerning the advantage and disadvantage of his newly invented letters. Thoth boasted that the invention, by aiding memory, would greatly contribute to the progress of science; whilst the inonarch contended, that it would enervate men's natural faculties by making them trust to written characters without exerting the powers of their own minds. All this, if real, must have happened before the era of Moses; and since it is almost certain that alphabetical characters were in use prior to the exod of the Israelites from Egypt (see PHILOLOGY, N° 24, 25.) we may as well allow the invention to Thoth, as give it to an earlier author of unknown name. That arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, were cultivated in Egypt from the most remote antiquity, is affirmed by all the ancients, and made in the highest degree probable by the situation of the country. The first elements of astronomy have certainly been discovered by various nations, whose habits of life led them to the frequent observation of the heavens; and it is observed by Cicero, that the Egyptians and Babylonians, dwelling in open plains where nothing intercepted the view of the heavenly bodies, naturally devoted themselves to the study of that science. The annual overflowing of the Nile, which broke up the boundaries of their land, would lay the Egyptians under the necessity of adopting some method of settling those boundaries anew; and necessity we know to be the parent of invention. Hence their early acquaintance with practical geometry cannot well be doubted. Their custom of embalming their dead, and the perfection to which they carried that art (G), shows infallibly their knowledge of the properties of natural substances, and gives some reason to believe that they were not altogether strangers to anatomy: but if we allow them to have been at this early period anatomists acquainted with the power of drugs, we can hardly refuse them some skill in the art of physic, which they themselves traced up to their gods and demigods, to Serapis, Isis, and her son Horus or Apollo. The art of alchymy has been said to have been known * Erod. xxii. 20. dence that they were possessed of one art which is even History of 15 But though it is thus evident that the rudiments of Not carried almost every useful science were known in Egypt from to high per the remotest antiquity, it does not appear that any offection. them was carried to a great degree of perfection, unless perhaps chemistry alone must be excepted. One would think that no science could have been more indispensably requisite to them than geometry. And yet though Pythagoras is said to have spent 22 years in Egypt studying that science and astronomy, he himself discovered (H) the famous 47th Prop. of Euclid's first book after his return to Samos. This, though a very useful, is yet a simple theorem; and since it was not reached by the Egyptian geometry, we cannot suppose that those people had then advanced far in such speculations. The same conclusion must be drawn with respect to astronomy; for Thales is said to have been the first that calculated an eclipse of the sun; and we nowhere read that the Egyptians pretended to dispute that honour with him. To this it may be replied, that Pythagoras was Their in Egypt undoubtedly taught the true constitution of knowledge the solar system, and what is more extraordinary, the system. doctrine of comets in particular, and of their revolutions, like the other planets, round the sun (1). We grant that he was taught all this; but it was not scientifically, but dogmatically, as facts which the priests had received by tradition from their early ancestors, and of which they had never questioned the truth nor enquired into the reasons. Of this we need no better proof than that the Pythagorean system of the sun was totally neglected by the Greeks as soon as they began to frame hypotheses and to speculate in philosophy (K). But 16 of the solar (G) It is true that the dissection of some mummies has lessened the high opinion long entertained of the skill of the ancient Egyptians in the art of embalming; yet it must be granted that their knowledge of antiseptic drugs was great, since it is now certainly known, even from these dissections, that by means of such drugs they contrived to preserve rags of cloth from corruption for upwards of 3000 years. (H) This discovery he claimed; and his claim was admitted by the Greek writers without having been directly controverted since. An excellent mathematician, however, has shown that the equality between the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle, and the sum of the squares on the other two sides, was known to the astronomers of India at a period long prior to that of Pythagoras. Notwithstanding this, it is certainly possible that the sage of Samos may have made the discovery himself, though we think the contrary much more probable; for we agree with the able writer already mentioned, that Pythagoras, who is generally believed to have conversed with Indian brahmans as well as Egyptian priests, may have derived from them "some of the solid as well as the visionary speculations with which he delighted to instruct or amuse his disciples." See Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. ii. Memoir xiii. Physic Class. (1) This is recorded by Aristotle and Plutarch; and thus expressed by Ammianus Marcellinus.—“ Stellas quasdam, ceteris similes, quarum ortus orbitusque, quibus sint temporibus præstituti humanis mentibus ignorari, lib. xxv. cap. 10. (K) Fixas in supremis mundi partibus immotas persistere, et planetas his inferiores circa solem revolvi, terram pariter moveri cursu annuo, diurno vero circa axem propriam, et solem ceu focum universi in omnium centro quies cere, History of fire. They conceived that the universe undergoes a pe- History of 17 "Of preceptive doctrine the Egyptians had two Their mokinds, the one sacred, the other vulgar. The former, ral science. which respected the ceremonies of religion and the du- Enfield's ties of the priests, was doubtless written in the sacred History of Philosophy. books of Hermes, but was too carefully concealed to pass down to posterity. The latter consisted of maxims and rules of virtue, prudence, or policy. Diodorus Siculus relates many particulars concerning the laws, customs, and manners of the Egyptians; whence it appears that superstition mingled with and corrupted their notions of morals. It is in vain to look for accurate principles of ethics among an ignorant and superstitious people. And that the ancient Egyptians merited this character is sufficiently evident from this single circumstance, that they suffered themselves to be deceived by impostors, particularly by the professors of the fanciful art of astrology; concerning whom Sextus Empiricus justly remarks, that they have done much mischief in the world, by enslaving men to superstition, which will not suffer them to follow the dictates of right reason." See EGYPT, MYSTERIES, MYTHOLOGY, &c. 18 From Egypt and Phoenicia philosophy passed into Grecian Greece; where it was long taught without system, as philosophy. in the countries from which it was derived. Phoroneus, Cecrops, Cadmus, and Orpheus, "were among the earliest instructors of the Greeks; and they inculcated Egyptian and Phoenician doctrines in detached maxims, and enforced them, not by strength of argument, but by the authority of tradition. Their cosmogonies were wholly Phoenician or Egyptian, disguised under Grecian names; and they taught a future state of rewards and punishments. The planets and the moon Orpheus conceived to be habitable worlds, and the stars to be fiery bodies like the sun but he taught that they are all animated by divinities; an opinion which prevailed both in Egypt and the east and it does not appear that he gave any other proof of his doctrines than a confident assertion that they were derived from some god. See ORPHEUS. Hitherto cere, antiquissima fuit philosophantium sententia. Ab Ægyptiis autem astrorum antiquissimis observationibus pro- (L) Some authors, deeply skilled in the Hebrew language, bave thought that the true system of the sun and pla Hi story of Hitherto we have seen philosophy in its state of inPhilosophy. fancy and childhood, consisting only of a collection of sententious maxims and traditionary opinions; but among the Greeks, an ingenious and penetrating people, it soon assumed the form of profound speculation and systematic reasoning. Two eminent philosophers arose nearly at the same period, who may be considered as the parents not only of Grecian science, but of almost all the science which was cultivated in Europe prior to the era of the great Lord Bacon: These were Thales and Pythagoras; of whom the former founded the Ionic school and the latter the Italic; from which two sprung the various sects into which the Greek philosophers were afterwards divided. A bare enumeration of these sects is all that our limits will admit of; and we shall give it in the perspicuous language and just arrangement of Dr Enfield, referring our readers for a fuller account than we can give of their respective merits to his abridged translation of Brucker's history. 19 The Ionic school. 20 school. Of the IONIC SCHOOL were, 1. The Ionic sect proper, whose founder Thales had as his successors Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Diogenes Apolloniates, and Archelaus. 2. The Socratic school, founded by Socrates, the principal of whose disciples were Xenophon, Æschines, Simon, Cebes, Aristippus, Phædo, Euclid, Plato, Antisthenes, Critias, and Alcibiades. 3. The Cyrenaic sect, of which Aristippus was the author; his followers were, his daughter Arete, Hegisias, Anicerris, Theodorus, and Bion. 4. The Megaric or Eristic sect, formed by Euclid of Megara; to whom succeeded Eubulides, Diodorus, and Stilpo, famous for their logical subtlety. 5. The Eliac or Eretriac school, raised by Phædo of Elis, who, though he closely adhered to the doctrine of Socrates, gave name to his school. His successors were Plistanus and Menedemus ; the latter of whom, being a native of Eretria, transferred the school and name to his own country. 6. The Academic sect, of which Plato was the founder. After his death, many of his disciples deviating from his doctrine, the school was divided into the old, new, and middle academies. 7. The Peripatetic sect, founded by Aristotle, whose successors in the Lyceum were Theophrastus, Strato, Lycon, Aristo, Critolaus, and Diodorus. Among the Peripatetics, besides those who occupied the chair, were also Dicæarchus, Eudemus, and Demetrius Phalereus. 8. The Cynic sect, of which the author was Antisthenes, whom Diogenes, Onesicritus, Crates, Metrocles, Menippus, and Menedemus, succeeded. In the list of Cynic philosophers must also be reckoned Hipparchia, the wife of Crates. 9. The Stoic sect, of which Zeno was the founder. His successors in the porch were Persæus, Aristo of Chios, Herillus, Sphærus, Cleanthus, Chrysippus, Zeno of Tarsus, Diogenes the Babylonian, Antipater, Panætius, and Posidonius. Of the ITALIC SCHOOL were, 1. The Italic sect The Italic proper: it was founded by Pythagoras, a disciple of Pherecydes. The followers of Pythagoras were Aristæus, Mnesarchus, Alemæon, Ecphantus, Hippo, Empedocles, Epicharmus, Ocellus, Timæus, Archytas, Hippasus, Philolaus, and Eudoxus. 2. The Eleatic sect, of which Xenophanes was the author: his successors, Parmenides, Melissus, Zeno, belonged to the metaphysical class of this sect; Leucippus, Democritus, Protagoras, Diagoras, and Anaxarchus, to the physical. 3. The Heraclitean sect, which was founded by Heraclitus, and soon afterwards expired: Zeno and History of Hippocrates philosophised after the manner of Heracli- Philosophy, tus, and other philosophers borrowed freely from his system. 4. The Epicurean sect, a branch of the Eleatic, had Epicurus for its author; among whose followers were Metrodorus, Polyænus, Hermachus, Polystratus, Basilides, and Protarchus. 5. The Pyrrhonic or Sceptic sect, the parent of which was Pyrrho: his doctrine was taught by Timon the Phliasian; and after some interval was continued by Ptolemy a Cyrenean, and at Alexandria by Ænesidemus. Of the peculiar doctrines of these sects, the reader will in this work find a short account either in the lives of their respective founders, or under the names of the sects themselves. We shall only observe at present, that though many of them were undoubtedly absurd, and many wicked, it would yet perhaps be going too far to say with some, that the philosophy of Greece became impious under Diagoras, vicious under Epicurus, HYPOCRITICAL UNDER ZENO, impudent under Diogenes, covetous under Demochares, voluptuous under Metrodorus, fantastical under Crates, scurrilous under Menippus, licentious under Pyrrho, and quarrelsome under Cleanthes. Of the truth of this heavy charge every reader must judge for himself. We are strongly inclined to think, that there were virtues and vices peculiar to each sect; "and that the sects themselves had Pauw's an affinity more or less direct with the different tempe- Philosophi raments of man; whence the choice of sectators oftentation, &c. depended on physical influence, or a peculiar disposition of their organs. Nothing appears more natural than that those men who were born with great force of mind and strong nerves should discover a predilection for stoicism; while mortals, endowed by nature with more delicacy of fibres and keener sensibility, fled for refuge to the myrtles of Epicurus. People whose temperaments partook of no extremes, were always inclined either for the Lyceum or the Academy. Such as possessed solidity of understanding ranged themselves with Aristotle; and those who had only genius, or even pretensions to that endowment, went to augment the crowd of Platonists." cal Disser 21 Arist. Phy sic. lib. i. All the systematical philosophers, however, pursued Grecian their inquiries into nature by nearly the same method. mode of Of their philosophy, as well as of ours, the universe, philosophi with all that it contains, was the vast object; but the zing. individuals things which compose the universe are infinite in number and ever changing; and therefore, according to an established maxim of theirs, incapable of being the subjects of human science. To reduce Bocth, is this infinitude, and to fix those fleeting beings, they Pradic established certain definite arrangements or classes, to some of which every thing past, present, or to come, might be referred; and having ascertained, as they thought, all that could be affirmed or denied of these classes, they proved, by a very short process of syllogistic reasoning, that what is true of the class must be true of every individual comprehended under it. The most celebrated of these arrangements is that which is known by the name of categories; which Mr Harris thinks at least as old as the era of Pythagoras, and to the forming of which mankind would, in his opinion, be necessarily led by the following considerations: Every subject of human thought is either substance of The cate attribute; but substance and attribute may each of them gories. History of be modified under, the different characters of universal Philosophy. or particular. Hence there arises a quadruple arrangement of things into substance universal and substance particular; into attribute universal and attribute particular; to some one of which four not only our words and ideas, but every individual of that immense multitude of things which compose the universe, may be deduced. This arrangement, however, the learned author thinks too limited; and he is of opinion, that, by attending to the substances with which they were surrounded, the Grecian schools must soon have distinguished between the attributes essential to all substances and those which are only circumstantial; between the attributes proper to natural substances or bodies, and those which are peculiar to intelligible substances or minds. He likewise thinks, that the time and place of the existence of substances not present, must soon have attracted their attention; and that in considering the place of this or that substance, they could hardly avoid thinking of its position or situation. He is of opinion, that the superinduction of one substance upon another would inevitably suggest the idea of clothing or habit, and that the variety of co-existing substances and attributes would discover to them another attribute, viz. that of relation. Instead therefore of confining themselves to the simple division of substance and attribute, they di vided attribute itself into nine distinct sorts, some essential and others circumstantial; and thus by setting substance at their head, made ten comprehensive universal genera, called, with reference to their Greek name, categories, and with reference to their Latin name predicaments. These categories are, SUBSTANCE, QUALITY, QUANTITY, RELATION, ACTION, PASSION, WHEN, WHERE, POSITION, and HABIT; which, according to the systematic philosophy of the Greeks, comprehend every human science and every subject of human thought. History, natural and civil, springs, says Mr Harris, out of SUBSTANCE; mathematics out of QUANTITY; optics out of QUALITY and QUANTITY; medicine out of the same; astronomy out of QUANTITY and MOTION; music and mechanics out of the same; painting out of QUALITY and SITE; ethics out of RELATION; chronology out of WHEN; geography out of WHERE ; electricity, magnetism, and attraction, out of ACTION and PASSION; and so in other instances. 23 cables. To these categories, considered as a mere arrangement of science, we are not inclined to make many objections. The arrangement is certainly not complete : but this is a matter of comparatively small importance; for a complete arrangement of science cannot, we beand predi- lieve, he formed. The greatest objection to the categories arises from the use that was made of them by almost every philosopher of the Grecian schools; for those sages having reduced the objects of all human science to ten general heads or general terms, instead of setting themselves to inquire by a painful induction into the nature and properties of the real objects before them, employed their time in conceiving what could be predicated of substance in general, of this or that quality, quantity, relation, &c. in the abstract: and they History of soon found, that of such general conceptions as the ca- Philosophy tegories there are but five predicables or classes of predi cates in nature. The first class is that in which the predicate is the genus of the subject; the second, that in which it is the species of the subject; the third, is when the predicate is the specific difference of the subject; the fourth, when it is a property of the subject; and the fifth, when it is something accidental to the subject (see LOGIC, Part II. chap. ii. and iii.). Having proceeded thus far in their system, they had nothing to do with individuals but to arrange them under their proper categories, which was commonly done in a very arbitrary manner; and then, with the formality of a syllogism, to predicate of each the predicable of the genus or species to which it belonged. But by this method of proceeding, it is obvious that no progress whatever could be made in physical, metaphysical, or ethical science; for if the individual truly belongs to the category under which it is arranged, we add nothing to are no inour stock of knowledge by affirming or denying of struments it what we had before affirmed or denied of the whole of science. genus: and if it belong not to the category under which we arrange it, our syllogising will only give the appearance of proof to what must, from the nature of things, be an absolute falsehood. It is only by experiments made on various substances apparently of the same kind that they can be certainly known to belong to the same category; and, when this is done, all syllogistic reasoning from the genus to the species, and from the species to the individual, is but solemn trifling, as every proposition in this retrograde course takes for granted the thing to be proved, 24 25 seminated Yet this mode of philosophizing spread from Greece This phi almost over the whole world. It was carried by Alex-losophy disander into Asia, by his successors into Egypt, and it through found its way to Rome after Greece became a province the whole of the empire. It was adopted by the Jews, by the world. fathers of the Christian church, by the Mahommedan Arabs during the caliphate, and continued to be cultivated by the schoolmen through all Europe, till its futility was exposed by Lord Bacon (M). The professors of this philosophy often displayed great acuteness; but their systems were built on mere hypotheses, and supported by syllogistic wrangling. Now and then indeed a superior genius, such as Alhazen and our countryman Roger Bacon, broke through the trammels of the schools, and, regardless of the authority of the Stagyrite and his categories, made real discoveries in physical science by experiments judiciously conducted on individual substances (see BACON, Roger; and OPTICS, N° 6.); but the science in repute still continued to be that of Generals. It was indeed a combination of ahsurd metaphysics with more absurd theology; and that which is properly called physics, had in Europe no place in a liberal education from the end of the eighth century to the end of the fourteenth. Towards the beginning of this period of darkness, the whole circle of instruction, or the (M) Scientiæ, quas habemus, fere à Græcis fluxerunt. Quæ enim scriptores Romani, aut Arabes, aut recentiores addiderunt, non multa aut magni momenti sunt: et qualiacunque sint, fundata sunt super basin eorum quæ inventa sunt à Græcis. Bacon. |