Imatges de pàgina
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the errors of the senses and imagination; but when he attempted to develop the grand system, that all is in God, all his readers declared the commentary to be more obscure than the text. In short, having plunged into this abyss, his head became bewildered; he held conversations with the Word; he was made acquainted with what the Word had done in other planets; he became, in truth, absolutely mad; a circumstance well calculated to excite apprehensions in our own minds, apt as we some of us are to attempt soaring, upon our weak and puny pinions, very far beyond our reach.

In order to comprehend the notion of Malebranche, such as he held it while he retained his faculties, we must admit nothing that we do not clearly conceive, and reject what we do not understand. Attempting to explain an obscurity by obscurities, is to act like an idiot.

I feel decidedly, that my first ideas and my sensations have come to me without any co-operation or volition on my part. I clearly see that I cannot give myself a single idea. I cannot give myself anything. I have received everything. The objects which surround me cannot, of themselves, give me either idea or sensation; for how is it possible for a little particle of matter to possess the faculty of producing a thought?

I am therefore irresistibly led to conclude that the Eternal Being, who bestows everything, gives me my ideas, in whatever manner this may be done.

But what is an idea, what is a sensation, a volition, &c.? It is myself perceiving, myself feeling, myself willing.

We see, in short, that what is called an idea is no more a real being, than there is a real being called motion, although there are bodies moved.

In the same manner, there is not any particular being called meinory, imagination, judgment; but we ourselves remember, imagine, and judge.

The truth of all this, it must be allowed, is sufficiently plain and trite; but it is necessary to repeat and inculcate such

truth, as the opposite errors are more trite still.

Laws of Nature.

How, let us now ask, would the Eternal Being, who formed all, produce all those various modes or qualities which we perceive in organized bodies?

Did he introduce two beings in a grain of wheat, one of which should produce germination in the other? Did he introduce two beings in the composition of a stag, one of which should produce swiftness in the other? Certainly not. All that we know on the subject is, that the grain is endowed with the faculty of vegetating, and the stag with that of speed.

There is evidently a grand mathema{tical principle directing all nature, and effecting everything produced. The flying of birds, the swimming of fishes, the walking or running of quadrupeds, are visible effects of known laws of motion. "Mens agitat molem."

Can the sensations and ideas of those animals, then, be anything more than the admirable effects or inathematical laws more refined and less obvious?

Organization of the Senses and Ideas.

It is by these general and comprehensive laws that every animal is impelled to seek its appropriate food. We are naturally, therefore, led to conjecture that there is a law by which it has the idea of this food, and without which it would not go in search of it.

The eternal intelligence has made all the actions of an animal depend upon a certain principle: the eternal intelligence, therefore, has made the sensations which cause those actions depend on the same principle.

Would the author of nature have disposed and adjusted those admirable instruments, the senses, with so divine a skill; would he have exhibited such astonishing adaptation between the eyes and light; between the atmosphere and the ears, had it, after all, been necessary to call in the assistance of other agency

to complete his work? Nature always would either be alike or different. If acts by the shortest ways. Protracted they are different, they destroy one anprocesses indicate want of skill; multi-other; if they are alike, it is the same as plicity of springs, and complexity of cooperation, are the result of weakness. { We cannot but believe, therefore, that one main spring regulates the whole system.

The Great Being does Everything.

if there were only one. The unity of design, visible through the grand whole in all its infinite variety, announces one single principle, and that principle must act upon all being, or it ceases to be a universal opinion.

If it acts upon all being, it acts upon

therefore, a single remnant, a single mode, a single idea, which is not the immediate effect of a universal cause perpetually present.

The matter of the universe, therefore, belongs to God, as much as the ideas, and the ideas as much as the matter.

Not merely are we unable to give our-all the modes of all being. There is not, selves sensations, we cannot even imagine any beyond those which we have actually experienced. Let all the academies of Europe propose a premium for him who shall imagine a new sense; no one will ever gain that premium. We can do nothing, then, of our mere selves, whether there be an invisible and intangible being inclosed in our brain or diffused throughout our body, or whether there be not; and it must be admitted, upon every system, that the author of nature has given us all that we possess,―organs, sensations, and the ideas which proceed from them.

As we are thus secured under his forming hand, Malebranche, notwithstanding all his errors, had reason to say philosophically, that we are in God and that we see all in God; as St. Paul used the same language in a theological sense, and Aratus and Cato in a moral one. What then are we to understand by the words seeing all in God?

They are either words destitute of meaning, or they mean, that God gives us all our ideas.

To say that anything is out of him, would be saying that there is something out of the vast whole. God being the universal principle of all things, all, therefore, exists in him, and by him.

The system includes that of "physical premotion," but in the same manner as an immense wheel includes a small one that endeavours to fly off from it. The principle which we have just been unfolding is too vast to admit of any particular and detailed view.

Physical premotion occupies the great supreme with all the changing vagaries which take place in the head of an individual Jansenist or Molinist; we, on the contrary, occupy the Being of beings only with the grand and general laws of the universe. Physical premotion makes five propositions a matter of attention and What is the meaning of receiving an occupation to God, which interest only idea? We do not create it when we some lay-sister, the sweeper of a conreceive it; it is not, therefore, so unphi-vent; while we attribute to him employlosophical as has been thought, to say it ment of the most simple and important is God who produces the ideas in my description, the arrangement of the head, as it is he who produces motion in whole system of the universe. my whole body, Everything, is an operation of God upon his creatures.

How is Everything an Action of God? There is in nature only one universal, eternal, and active principle. There cannot be two such principles; for they

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Physical premotion is founded upon that subtle and truly Grecian principle, that if a thinking being can give himself an idea, he would augment his existence; but we do not, for our parts, know what is meant by augmenting our being. We comprehend nothing about

the matter. We say that a thinking being might give himself new modes without adding to his existence; just in the same manner as when we dance, our sliding steps and crossings and attitudes give us no new existence; and to suppose they do so, would appcar completely absurd. We agree only so far in the system of physical premotion, that we are convinced we give ourselves nothing.

Both the system of premotion and our own are abused, as depriving men of their liberty. God forbid we should advocate such deprivation. To do away this imputation, it is only necessary to understand the meaning of the word liberty. We shall speak of it in its proper place; and in the mean time the world will go on as it has gone on hitherto, without the Thomists or their opponents, or all the disputants in the world, having any power to change it. { In the same manner, we shall always have ideas, without precisely knowing {

what an idea is.

IDENTITY.

waters pass away in perpetual change and flow. It is the same river as to its bed, its banks, its source, its mouth, everything, in short, that is not itself; but changing every moment its water, which constitutes its very being, it has no identity; there is no sameness belonging to the river.

Were there another Xerxes like him who lashed the Hellespont for disobedience, and ordered for it a pair of handcuffs; and were the son of this Xerxes to be drowned in the Euphrates, and the father desirous of punishing that river for the death of his son, the Euphrates might very reasonably say in its vindication: Blame the waves that were rolling on at the time your son was bathing; those waves belong not to me, and form no part of me; they have past on to the Persian gulph; a part is mixed with the salt water of that sea, and another part, exhaled in vapour, has been impelled by a south-east wind to Gaul, and been incorporated with endives and lettuces, which the Gauls have since used in their salads; seize the culprit where you can find him.

It is the same with a tree, a branch of which broken by the wind might have fractured the skull of your great grandfather. It is no longer the same tree; all its parts have given way to others. The branch which killed your great grandfather is no part of this tree; it exists no longer.

THIS Scientific term signifies no more than "the same thing." It might be correctly translated by "sameness." This subject is of considerably more interest than may be imagined. All agree, that the guilty person only ought to be punished the individual perpetrator, and no other. But a man fifty years of age is not in reality the same individual as the man of twenty; he retains no longer It has been asked, then, how a man, any of the parts which then formed his who has totally lost his memory before body; and if he has lost the memory of his death, and whose members have been past events, it is certain that there is no-changed into other substances, can be thing left to unite his actual existence to an existence which to him is lost.

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punished for his faults or rewarded for his virtues when he is no longer himself? I have read in a well known book the following question and reply:

I am the same person only by the consciousness of what I have been combined with that of what I am; I have "Question. How can I be either reno consciousness of my past being but warded or punished when I shall no through memory; memory alone, there- longer exist; when there will be nothing fore, establishes the identity, the same-remaining of that which constituted my ness of my person. person? It is only by means of memory that I am always myself; after my death, a miracle will be necessary to restore it

We may, in truth, be naturally and aptly resembled to a river, all whose

to me, to enable me to re-enter upon my lost existence.

ceased is condemned or absolved. God, therefore, can punish him only because he cherished and accomplished evil desires; but if, when after death he presents himself before the tribunal of God, he no longer entertains any such desire;

"Answer. That is just as much as to say, that if a prince had put to death his whole family, in order to reign himself, and if he had tyrannized over his subjects with the most wanton cruelty, heif for a period of twenty years he has would be exempted from punishment on totally forgotten that he did entertain pleading before God, I am not the of such-if he is no longer in any respect fender; I have lost my memory; you the same person,-what is it that God are under a mistake; I am no longer thewill punish in him? same person-Do you think this sophism would pass with God?"

This answer is a highly commendable one; but it does not completely solve the difficulty.

These are questions which appear beyond the compass of the human understanding, and there seems to exist a necessity, in these intricacies and labyrinths, of recurring to faith alone, which is always our last asylum.

It would be necessary, for this purpose, in the first place, to know whether un- Lucretius had partly felt these difficulderstanding and sensation are a faculty ties, when in his third book (verses 890given by God to man, or a created sub-91) he describes a man trembling at the stance; a question which philosophy is too weak and uncertain to decide.

It is necessary in the next place to know whether, if the soul be a substance and has lost all knowledge of the evil it has committed, and be, moreover, as perfect a stranger to what it has done with its own body, as to all the other bodies of our universe-whether, in these circumstances, it can or should, according to our manner of reasoning, answer in another universe for actions of which it has not the slightest knowledge; whether, in fact, a miracle would not be necessary to impart to this soul the recollection it no longer possesses, to render it consciously present to the crimes which have become obliviated and annihilated in its mind, and make it the same person that it was on earth; or whether God will judge it nearly in the same way in which the presidents of human tribunals proceed, condemning a criminal, although he may have completely forgotten the crimes he has actually committed. He remembers them no longer; but they are remembered for him: he is punished for the sake of the example. But God cannot punish a man after his death with a view to his being an example to the living. No living man knows whether the de

idea of what will happen to him when he will no longer be the same man :

Nec radicitus e vitâ se tollit et evit ; Sed facit esse sui quiddam super inecus ipse. But Lucretius is not the oracle to be addressed, in order to obtain any discoveries of the future.

The celebrated Toland, who wrote his own epitaph, concluded it with these words: "Idem futurus Tolandus nunquam." He will never again be the same Toland.

However, it may be presumed, that God would have well known how to find and restore him, had such been his good pleasure; and, it is to be presumed, also, that the being who necessarily exists, is necessarily good.

IDOL-IDOLATER-IDOLATRY.

SECTION I.

IDOL is derived from the Greek word eidos,' figure; eidolos,' the representation of a figure, and 'latreuein,' to serve, revere, or adore.

It does not appear, that there was ever any people on earth who took the name of idolaters. This word is an offence, an insulting term like that of 'gavache,' which the Spaniards formerly gave to the

Neither the latest nor the most remote times of Paganism offer a single fact which can lead to the conclusion that they adored idols. Homer speaks only of the gods who inhabited the high Olympus. The palladium, although fallen from heaven, was only a sacred token of the protection of Pallas: it was herself that was venerated in the palladium. It was our ampoule, or holy oil.

French; and that of 'maranes,' which to images that he addresses them. These the French gave to the Spaniards in re-images were not immortal. turn. If we had demanded of the senate of the Areopagus of Athens, or at the court of the kings of Persia-" Are you idolaters?" they would scarcely have understood the question. None would have answered: "We adore images and idols." This word, idolater, idolatry, is found neither in Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, nor any other author of the religion of the gentiles. There was never any edict, any law, which commanded that But the Romans and Greeks knelt beidols should be adored; that they should fore their statues, gave them crowns, inbe treated as gods, and regarded as gods. cense, and flowers, and carried them in 3 When the Roman and Carthaginian triumph in the public places. The Cacaptains made a treaty, they called all tholics have sanctified these customs, and their gods to witness. "It is in their yet are not called idolaters. presence," said they, "that we swear peace." Yet the statues of these gods, whose number was very great, were not in the tents of the generals. They re-hair, and it quickly rained buckets full, garded, or pretended to regard, the gods as present at the actions of men as witnesses and judges. And assuredly it was not the image which constituted the divinity.

The women in times of drought carried the statues of the gods after having fasted. They walked bare-footed with dishevelled

says Petronius :-"Et statim urceatim pluebat." Has not this custom been consecrated; illegitimate indeed among the Gentiles, but legitimate among the Catholics? In how many towns are not images carried to obtain the blessings of

Turk, or a learned Chinese, were a witness of these ceremonies, he would, through ignorance, accuse the Italians of putting their trust in the figures which they thus promenade in possession?

SECTION II.

Examination of the Ancient Idolatry.

In what view, therefore, did they see the statues of their false gods in the tem-heaven through their intercession? If a ples! With the same view, if we may so express ourselves, that the Catholics see the images, the object of their veneration. The error was not in adoring a piece of wood or marble, but in adoring a false divinity, represented by this wood and marble. The difference between them and the Catholics is, not that they had images, and the Catholics have none : the difference is, that their images represented the fantastic beings of a false religion, and that the Christian images represent real beings in a true religion. The Greeks had the statue of Hercules, and we have that of St. Christopher; they had Esculapius and his goat, we have St. Roch and his dog; they had Mars and his lance, and we have St. Antony of Padua and St. James of Compostella.

When the consul Pliny addresses prayers to the immortal gods in the exordium of the panegyric of Trajan, it is not

From the time of Charles I., the Catholic religion was declared idolatrous in England. All the Presbyterians are persuaded that the Catholics adore bread, which they eat, and figures, which are the work of their sculptors and painters. With that which one part of Europe reproaches the Catholics, they themselves reproach the Gentiles.

We are surprised at the prodigious number of declamations uttered in all times against the idolatry of the Romans and Greeks; and we are afterwards still

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