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

of his physics is here meant, in which he treated of the origin of the world, or rather of infinite worlds, which makes his thought the grosser still. For infinite worlds require infinite chances infinitely repeated. ↩

Series implexa causarum: “A series of causes connected with each other.” (Seneca, De Beneficiis.) ↩

Seneca says himself that, in this series, God is prima omnium causa, ex quâ cæteræ pendent, “the first of all the causes, and upon him the rest depend.” (De Beneficiis.) Indeed, it is many times difficult to find out what the ancients meant by “fate.” Sometimes it seems to follow the motions of the heavenly bodies and their aspects. Of this kind of fate is that passage in Suetonius to be understood, where he says that Tiberius was addictus mathematicæ, persuasionisque plenus cuncta fato agi: “given to mathematics, and fully persuaded that all things were governed by fate.” (Lives of the Caesars.) Sometimes it is confounded with “fortune.” So in Lucian we find τὴν τύχην πράξουσαν τὰ μεμοιραμένα, καὶ ἃ ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἑκάστῳ ἐπεκλώσθη: “fortune doing the things which are determined by fate and destined to everyone from the beginning.” (The Parliament of the Gods.) And sometimes it is the same with God: as when the Stoics say, ἕν τε εἶναι θεὸν καὶ νοῦν καὶ εἱμαρμένην καὶ Δία: “God, and mind, and fate, and Jupiter, are all the same.” (In Diogenes Laërtius’s Life of Zeno and the like elsewhere.) ↩

As when Strato of Lampsacus, according to Cicero, docet omnia esse effecta naturâ: “teaches that all things are the effects of nature.” (Academica.) ↩

Vis et natura justitiæ: “The force and nature of justice.” (Cicero, Academica.) ↩

Almost as if it stood for nata, or res natæ; “all things that are produced.” (So fœtura seems to be put sometimes for fœtus: “the child in the womb.”) Sunt, qui omnia naturæ nomine appellent;⁠ ⁠… corpora, et inane, quæque his accidant: “Some persons use the word ‘nature’ for everything;⁠ ⁠… bodies and space, and all the properties of these.” (Cicero, De Natura Deorum.) ↩

Natura, inquit, hæc mihi præstat. Non intelligis te, cùm hoc dicis, mutare nomen Deo? Quid enim aliud est Natura, quàm Deus, et divina ratio, etc.: “Nature, says he, gives me these things. Do you not see, when you say this, that you only put another name for God? For what else is nature, but God, and the divine reason, etc.” (Seneca, De Beneficiis.) When it is said, Necesse est mundum ipsum natura administrari, “that the world must necessarily be governed by nature” (in Cicero, De Natura Deorum), what sense are those words capable of, if by “nature” be not really meant God? For it must be something different from the world, and something able to govern it. ↩

Alii naturam censent esse vim quandam sine ratione, cientem motus in corporibus necessarios, etc.: “Some think nature to be a certain power or force without reason, producing the necessary motions in bodies, etc.” says Balbus in Cicero (De Natura Deorum). What can this vis (“power”) be: vis by itself, without the mention of any subject in which it inheres, or of any cause from whence it proceeds? A soul of the world, plastic nature, hylarchic principle, שכל פועל, “an understanding principle,” and the like, are more intelligible than that. ↩

דע כאין באת ולאן אתה הולך’ וכו: “Search out from whence you came, and whither you are going.” (Mishnah, Abot III, 1.) ↩

For I cannot think that anybody will now stand by that way of introducing men first into the world, which is mentioned by Diodorus Siculus but asserted by Lucretius (De Rerum Natura). Ubi quæque loci regio opportuna dabatur, Crescebant uteri terræ radicibus apti, etc.: “Where the country was proper for it, there grew wombs out of the earth, fixed to it by their roots, etc.” ↩

What by Tertullian in one place is called animæ ex Adam tradux, “a soul derived from Adam,” in another is velut surculus quidam ex matrice Adam in propaginem deducta, “as it were, a shoot derived from the womb of Adam, that the race might be continued,” and equally unintelligible. Nor does he explain himself better, when he confesses there to be duas species seminis, corporalem et anamalem (al. corporis semen et animæ), “two sorts of seed: corporeal and animal (or a seed of the soul, and another of the body),” or more fully, semen animale ex animæ distillatione, sicut et virus illud, corporale semen, ex carnis defæcatione, “an animal seed flowing from the soul, as the bodily seed does from the body.” (De Anima.) ↩

According to the fore-cited author, the soul is derived from the father only, et genitalibus fœminæ foveis commendata, “delivered to the womb of the mother,” and all souls from that of Adam. Definimus animam, Dei flatu natam, ex una redundantem: “We, says he, define the soul to spring from the breath of God, and all souls to proceed from one;” and in another place, ex uno homine tota hæc animarum redundantia agitur: “all the souls that are, come originally from one man.” But this does not well consist with his principal argument for traduction, that children take after their parents. For besides what will here be said by and by, if there is