The Religion of Nature Delineated by William Wollaston (mystery books to read .txt) 📕

of any other person should be one and the same; for then, it must needs be that when I perceived anything, he would perceive it also⁠ ⁠… and he, and I, and all the whole universe would be affected alike.” (Plotinus, Enneads.) Here this author is clear, though at some other times very dark. ↩

Cur quidquam ignoraret animus hominis, si esset Deus? “If the soul of man were a God, how could it be ignorant of anything?” (Cicero, De Natura Deorum.) ↩

The system of Spinoza is so apparently false, and full of impieties and contradictions, that more needs not be said against it, though much might be. What Velleius says in Cicero (De Natura Deorum), is not only true, Si mundus est deus⁠ ⁠… dei membra partim ardentia partim refrigerata dicenda sunt, “that if the world be God⁠ ⁠… then the members of God may be said to be some of them hot, and some of them cold;” but if there is but one substance, one nature, one being, and this being is God, then all the follies, madnesses, wickednesses that are in the world, are in God; then all things done and suffered are both done and suffered by Him; He is both cause and effect; He both wills and nills, affirms and denies, loves and hates the same things at the same time, etc. That such gross Atheism as this should ever be fashionable! Atheism: for certainly when we inquire whether there is a God, we do not inquire whether we ourselves, and all other things which are visible about us, do exist: something different from them must be intended. Therefore to say there is no God different from them, is to say there is no God at all. ↩

What Censorinus charges upon many great men (but upon some of them surely unjustly) is to me unintelligible. He says they believed semper homines fuisse, etc., “mankind always existed, etc.,” and then, Itaque et omnium, quæ in sempiterno isto mundo semper fuerunt, futuraque sunt, aiunt principium fuisse nullum; sed orbem esse quemdam generantium, nascentiumque, in quo uniuscujusque geniti initium simul et finis esse videatur: “They say that there was no beginning of all those things, which have existed in that world which was from eternity, but that there is a certain round of things generated and springing up, which round seems to be both the beginning and the end of everything that is produced.” (De Die Natali.) ↩

So what we call attraction and aversion (centripetal and centrifugal forces) seem to have been called by Empedocles: φιλία ᾗ συγκρίνεται [τὰ στοιχεῖα], καὶ νεῖκος ᾧ διακρίνεται: “a kind of friendship by which they (the elements) are united together, and a sort of discord whereby they are separated from each other.” (Diogenes Laërtius Life of Empedocles, Life of Arist., Cicero, et al.) ↩

So far is that from being true, Nequaquam⁠ ⁠… divinitus esse creatam Naturam mundi, quæ tantâ est prædita culpâ: “That the world could never becreated by a divine Being, there are so many faults in it.” (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura.) Men rashly (impiously) censure what they do not understand. Like that king of Castile who fancied himself able to have contrived a better system of the world, because he knew not what the true system is, but took it to be as ascribed to him by Rabbi Isaac ibn Sid and other astronomers of those times. ↩

Since they have, or may have, great effects upon the several parts of the solar system, one may speak thus without falling into the superstition of the multitude, or meaning what is intended by that, Nunquam cœlo spectatum impune cometen: “A comet is never seen in the heavens but for some punishment”; (in Claudian, De Bello Gothico) or the like. ↩

Finitus, et infinito similis: “Finite, but very near to infinite.” (Pliny the Elder, Natural History.) ↩

Ποικίλη θανματουργία: “Variety of surprising things.” (Plotinus, Enneads.) ↩

If anyone, sitting upon mount Ida, had seen the Greek army coming on in proper order (μετὰ πολλοῦ κόσμου καὶ τάξεως τοῖς πεδίοις προσιοῦσαν: “marching over the fields in rank and file”), he ought most certainly, nowithstanding what Sextus Empiricus says, to have concluded that there was some commander under whose conduct they moved. (Against the Physicists.) ↩

Τίς ὁ ἁρμόζων τὴν μάχαίραν πρὸς τὸ κολεὸν, καὶ τὸ κολεὸν πρὸς τὴν μάχαιραν, κ.τ.λ.: “Who was it that fitted the sword to the scabbard, and the scabbard to the sword?” (Arrian, Discourses of Epictetus.) Even such a thing as this does not come by accident. ↩

Hoc qui existimat fieri potuisse, non intelligo cur non idem putet, si innumerabiles unius et viginti formæ literarum,⁠ ⁠… aliquè conjiciantur, posse ex his in terram excussis annales Ennij, ut deinceps legi possint, effici: quod nescio anne in uno quidem versu possit tantum valere fortuna: “He who thinks that this is possible to be, I don’t see but he may as well think that an infinite number of alphabets,⁠ ⁠… cast anywhere upon the ground at a venture, might come up the annals of Ennius, so as anyone might read them; whereas I question whether chance is capable of producing one verse of them.” (Cicero, De Natura Deorum.) But alas, what are Ennius’s annals to such a work as the world is! ↩

He was πολυγραφώτατος, πάντας ὑπερβαλλόμενος πλήθει βιβλίων: “a great writer, and exceeded all others in the quantity of books.” (Diogenes Laërtius, Life of Epicurus.) But that part