LII. It is easily seen how difficult a task it is to choose the facts that are to be the bases of reasonings. An historian's negligence or want of taste may deprive us for ever of some peculiar trait, in order to stun us with the din of a battle. If philosophers are not always historians, it were, at any rate, to be wished that historians were always philosophers.

I know of no one except Tacitus, who has quite come up to my ideas of a philosophic historian. Livy himself, interesting as he is, cannot in this respect bear a comparison with him. Both have well known how to rise above those raw compilers who see no more in facts than facts; but the one has written history as a rhetorician, the other as a philosopher. Tacitus was not ignorant of the language of the passions, nor Livy of that of the intellect; but the latter, endeavouring to please rather than to instruct, conducts you step by step in the track of his heroes, and fills you alternately with horror, admiration, and pity. Tacitus makes use of the dominion of eloquence over the heart, only to show you the connexion of the chain of events, and to instil into your mind the lessons of wisdom. You cross the Alps with Hannibal, but you are present at the council of Tiberius. Livy describes to you the abuse of power, a severity at which nature shudders while she approves, vengeance and love uniting with liberty, and tyranny falling beneath their strokes ;* but the laws of the decemvirs, their character, their defects, their ultimate relations with the genius of the Romans, the party of the decemvirs, and their ambitious designs, are all entirely forgotten by him. You cannot learn from him the manner in which these laws, made for a small, poor, half-civilised republic, overturned it when the power of its institutions had carried it to the highest pitch of grandeur. You would have found this in Tacitus; I think so, not only from the known bent of his genius, but still more from the energetic and diversified picture he has given us of the laws, those products of corruption, liberty, equity, and faction. +

LIII. Do not let us follow the advice of that writer, who, like Fontenelle, unites learning and taste. Without being afraid of the disgraceful appellation of an erudite, I oppose the sentence by which this enlightened but severe judge ordains that at the end of every century all facts should be collected together, a few chosen out of them, and the rest committed to the flames. Let us preserve them all most carefully. A Montesquieu will draw from the most insignificant, relations unknown to the vulgar crowd. Let us imitate the botanists. All plants are not useful in medicine, yet they are continually discovering fresh ones; they hope that genius and successful labours will find in them properties at present unknown.

LIV. Uncertainty is to us a forced and unnatural state. The finite mind cannot fix in that equilibrium on which the school of Pyrrho prided itself. The shining genius is dazzled by his own conjectures, and sacrifices his freedom to his hypotheses. From such a * Livy, lib. iii. cap. 44-60. + Taciti Annales, lib. iii. p. 84, edit. Lipsii. D'Alembert, Mélanges de Philosophie et de Littérature.

U U

disposition do systems originate. Design has been perceived in the actions of a distinguished man, a predominant trait has been found in his character; and then closet speculators have immediately wanted to make all men as systematic beings in practice as they are in theory. They have discovered art in their passions, policy in their weaknesses, dissimulation in their inconstancy; in a word, by dint of paying homage to the intellect of man, they have often done very little honour to his heart. Simpler minds being justly offended at their hypercriticism, and grieved at seeing that extended to all men which should be confined to a Philip or a Cæsar, have run into the other extreme. They have banished art from the moral world, and have replaced it by chance. According to them, weak mortals act only by caprice. An empire is established by the frenzy of a maniac; it is destroyed by the weakness of a woman.

LV. The study of determinate but general causes ought to give equal satisfaction to both. The latter will be pleased at seeing man humiliated, the motives of his actions unknown to himself, himself the sport of external circumstances, and individual freedom giving rise to a general necessity. The former will there again find the concatenation in which they delight, and the speculations that are the food of their minds.

In the hands of a

How vast a field lies open to my reflections! Montesquieu the theory of general causes would form a philosophic history of mankind. He would show us their dominion over the grandeur and fall of empires, borrowing successively the appearance of fortune, prudence, courage, and weakness; acting without the concurrence of particular causes, and sometimes even triumphing over them. Superior to the love of his own systems, the wise man's last passion, he would easily perceive, that notwithstanding the wide extent of these causes, their effects are, nevertheless, limited, and that they are principally seen in those general events, whose slow but sure influence changes the aspect of the world without its being possible to mark the epoch of the change, more especially in manners, religion, and all that is subject to the reign of opinion. Such are a few of the lessons which that philosopher would draw from this subject. For my own part, I shall merely find in it an opportunity for essaying to think. I shall point out some interesting facts, and afterwards endeavour to account for them.

LVI. We are acquainted with paganism, that merry but absurd system, which peopled the universe with fantastic beings, whose superior power only made them more unjust and foolish than ourselves. What were the nature and origin of these gods? Were they princes, founders of nations, or great men, the inventors of the arts? Were they, who during their lives had been called the benefactors of the earth, placed in the skies by ingenious curiosity, blind admiration, or interested flattery? Or must we in these divinities recognise as many separate parts of the universe, on which the ignorance of the earlier ages of mankind conferred life and intelligence? This question is worthy of our attention; it is curious but difficult. Almost our only knowledge of the mythology of Paganism is

drawn from the poets * or from the ecclesiastical fathers; both of whom are very much addicted to fictions.† The enemies of a religion are never well acquainted with it because they detest it, and often detest it because they are not acquainted with it. They eagerly take up the most atrocious calumnies against it; impute to their adversaries dogmas that they abhor, and consequences of which they have never dreamt. The followers of a religion, on the other hand, full of that faith which esteems it a crime to doubt, sacrifice in its defence their reason and even their virtue. Forging prophecies, counterfeiting miracles, palliating what they cannot defend, and boldly denying what they cannot allegorise, are means which no devotee was ever ashamed to employ. Let us recollect the Christians and the Jews. Ask their enemies respecting them, and you will be told they were magicians and idolators; they, whose religion was as pure as their morals were strict. Never has a Mussulman hesitated on the doctrine of the unity of God.§ Yet how often have our good ancestors accused them of worshipping the stars!|| In the very bosom of these religions have arisen a hundred different sects, who, accusing each other of having corrupted their common doctrines, have inspired the multitude with fury and the wise with moderation. Yet these were civilised nations, and books recognised as emanating from the Deity settled the principles of their belief; but how shall we discover these principles amid a confused mass of fables dictated by an isolated, contradictory, and mutilated tradition to a few savage tribes in Greece?

LVII. Reason here affords us but little aid. It is absurd to dedicate temples to those whose sepulchres were before the eyes. But what is there too absurd for mankind? Are we not acquainted with some very enlightened nations who appeal to the testimony of the senses for the proofs of a religion, whose principal dogma contradicts that testimony? Yet if the gods of paganism had been men, the reciprocal worship paid them by the various sects of worshippers would not have been very rational, and an irrational toleration is not an error common among the vulgar.

LVIII. Croesus sent to consult the oracle at Delphi ;** Alexander traversed the burning sands of Libya, to ask Jupiter Ammon if he were not his son. ++ But would not this Grecian Jupiter, this king of Crete, when once he had become the Lord of Thunder, have crushed that Libyan Ammon, that new Salmoneus, who endeavoured to wrest it from him? When two rivals dispute the dominion of the * We must, however, make a distinction in favour of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and the tragic poets, who lived while tradition was in a purer state.

On this particular see Dr. Middleton's Free Enquiry, and the History of Manichæism by M. de Beausobre: two fine monuments of an enlightened age.

Taciti Historia, lib. v.; Fleury, Ecclesiastical History, tom. i. p. 369, and tom. ii. ́ p. 5; and the Apologies of Justin Martyr and Tertullian, which are there quoted. § Herbelot, Bibliotheca Orientalis, article Allah, p. 100; and Sale's Koran, Preliminary Discourse, p. 71.

Relandus de Religione Mahometanâ, part ii. cap. 6 & 7.

See Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses, tom, i. p. 270-276.

**Herodotus, lib. i.

++ Diodorus Siculus, lib. xvii; Quintus Curtius, lib. iv. cap. 7; Arrian, lib. iii,

universe, how can both be at once recognised as supreme? But if both the one and the other were nothing more than the ether, the heavens, the same deity, the Greek and the African might have designated them by those symbols which were most accordant with their manners, and by the names with which their languages furnished them to express their attributes. But away with reasonings; facts are what we must interrogate, and let us listen to their answer.

LIX. The Greeks were unfortunately situated among forests, n d though so proud, yet had received all their accomplishments from foreigners. The Phoenicians taught them the use of letters; for their arts, their laws, and all that raises man above the brute, they were indebted to the Egyptians, from whom also they acquired their religion, and in its adoption paid the tribute due from ignorance to learning. Prejudice made no more than a decorous resistance, and surrendered without difficulty after hearing the oracle of Dodona give its decision for the new faith.* Such is the relation given by Herodotus, who was well acquainted both with Greece and Egypt, and whose time, being situated between the stupidity of ignorance and the refinements of philosophy renders him a very competent witness.

LX. Already a great part of the Grecian legends have disappeared; the birth of Apollo in Delos, the burial of Jupiter in Crete. If these gods really did dwell, at a former period, on the earth, Egypt, and not Greece, was their native country. But if the priests of Memphis understood their religion as well as the Abbé Banier,† Egypt had never given birth to their deities. Across the obscurity of their metaphysics shone a few rays of reason, sufficient to make them apprehend that a man could never become God, nor God ever be transformed into a mere man. Mysterious both in their doctrines and in their worship, these interpreters of celestial wisdom disguised beneath a pompous diction the truths of nature, which in their own majestic simplicity would have been despised by a stupid people. The Greeks mistook this religion in many respects, they altered it by strange admixtures, but the basis still remained, and this Egyptian foundation was consequently allegoric.§

LXI. The worship of heroes, so well distinguished from that of the gods in the earlier ages of Greece, clearly demonstrates to us that the gods were not heroes. The ancients believed that great

* Herodotus, lib. ii.

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§ In these researches I am under great obligations to the learned Freret of the Academie des Belles Lettres. He has opened up a road which previously appeared shut in on every side. Yet I think his reasonings of more value when relating to facts than when enquiring about doctrines. Prepossessed with a feeling of esteem for this scholar, I eagerly devoured his answer to the Newtonian Chronology; but dare I speak it? It did not answer my expectations. What novelty is there in it if you take from it the principles of a new theology and chronology, which were already in our possession (in the Mém. de l'Acad. des Belles Lettres, tom. v. xviii. xx. xxiii.), a few defective and inconclusive genealogies, some minute researches on the chronology of Sparta, an ancient system of astronomy which I cannot very well understand, and the elegant preface by M. de Bougainville, which I always reperuse with renewed delight? Histoire de l'Académie des Belles Lettres, tom. xvi. p. 28, &c.

men were admitted after death to the feasts of the gods, and enjoyed their felicity but not their power. They assembled around their benefactors' tombs; their songs of praise celebrated their memories, and gave rise to a salutary emulation of their virtues. Their shades evoked from the infernal regions experienced pleasure in tasting the offerings of devotion. It is true that that devotion became imperceptibly transformed into a religious worship, but this was not until a much later period, when these heroes were identified with those ancient divinities whose name they bore or whose character they imitated. In Homer's time they were still preserved distinct. He does not account Hercules one of the gods; he believes Esculapius to have been merely an eminent physician; and Castor and Pollux are, according to him, deceased warriors buried at Sparta §.

LXII. Superstition had, however, overstepped these boundaries, the heroes had been transformed into gods, and the worship paid to the gods had drawn them from among the ranks of men; when a bold philosopher undertook to prove that they had been such. Ephemerus the Messenian advanced this paradox. || But far from appealing to the authentic monuments of Greece and Egypt, which ought to have preserved the memories of these famous men, he loses himself in the immensity of the ocean. An Utopia despised by all the ancients, an island of Panchaia, rich, fertile, superstitious, and known only to himself, offers him, in a splendid temple of Jupiter, a golden column on which Mercury had engraved the exploits and the apotheoses of the heroes of his race. These fables were too gross even for the Greeks themselves. They only obtained for their author universal contempt and the appellation of an atheist.

See Mémoires de Littérature, tom. xii. p. 5, &c., and Ezekiel Spanheim in Callimachum.

+ Homer's Odyssey, lib. xi.

Homer's Iliad, lib. iv. ver. 194.

§ Odyssey, lib. v. ver. 241.

Lactantius, Institutiones, lib. i. cap. 11, p. 62. “Antiquus auctor Ephemerus, qui fuit è civitate Messanâ, res gestas Jovis et cæterorum qui Dii putantur, collegit; historiamque contexit ex titulis et inscriptionibus sacris, quæ in antiquissimis templis habebantur, maximèque in fano Jovis Triphylii, ubi auream columnam positam esse ab ipso Jove, titulus indicabat, in quâ columnâ gesta sua perscripsit ut monumentum esset posteris rerum suarum." This relation of Lactantius differs a little from that of Diodorus.

¶ Diodorus Siculus, lib. v. cap. 29, 30, and lib. vi. M. Fourmont, sen. has a dissertation on Ephemerus, which contains some very bold conjectures, and some very laughable transpositions. It ill becomes a young man to despise anything, but I cannot refute this treatise in a serious manner. He who does not see that the Panchaia described in Diodorus Siculus was situated to the south of Gedrosia, and a little to the west of the peninsula of India, may with M. Fourmont believe that the Arabian Gulf is in the middle of Arabia Felix, that the country of Phank on the continent is the island of Panchaia, that the desert of Paran is the pleasantest place in the world, and that the city of Pieria in Syria is the capital of a small province in the vicinity of Medina.

**Callimachus apud Plutarchum, tom. ii. p. 880; Eratosthenes et Polybius apud Strabonis Geographiam, lib. ii. p. 102, 103; et lib. vii. p 299, editio Casauboni.

Gerard Vossius (de Historiis Græcis, lib. i. cap. 11) makes it appear that not only did the pagans give him this name, but also Theophilus of Antioch among the Christians and Josephus among the Jews; which renders it probable that while Ephemerus attacked the gods of Greece, he did not adopt any others in their place.