perhaps, for sublimity not to be equalled in the history of the different philosophical systems of the world, the only doctrine which seemed, in the opinion of the ancients, to be capable of reconciling the existence of evil with the goodness of God.
10. A little time ago I said, that the first philosophers could not account for the existence of moral evil without the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. I am induced to make another observation upon this subject before I leave it. In the modern Christian system, this difficulty has been overcome, as most theological difficulties usually are, among devotees, by a story. In this case by a story of a serpent and a fruit tree, of which I shall not here give my opinion, except that, like most of the remainder of Genesis, it was anciently held to have an allegorical meaning, and, secondly, that I cannot do Moses the injustice of supposing that he, like the modern priests, could have meant it, at least by the higher classes of his followers, to be believed literally.
Moral evil is a relative term; its correlative is moral good. Without evil there is no good; without good there is no evil. There is no such thing known to us as good or evil per se. Here I must come to Mr. Locke’s fine principle, so often quoted by me in my former book, the truth of which has been universally acknowledged, and to which, in their reasoning, all men seem to agree in forgetting to pay attention,—that we know nothing except through the medium of our senses, which is experience. We have no experience of moral good or of moral evil except as relative and correlative to one another; therefore, we are with respect to them as we are with respect to God. Though guided by experience we confidently believe their existence in this qualified form, yet of their nature, independent of one another, we can know nothing. God having created man subject to one, he could not, without changing his nature, exclude the other. All this the ancients seem to have known; and, in order to account for and remove several difficulties, they availed themselves of the metempsychosis, a renewal of worlds, and the final absorption of the soul or the thinking principle into the Divine substance, from which it was supposed to have emanated, and where it was supposed to enjoy that absolute and uncorrelative beatitude, of which man can form no idea. This doctrine is very sublime, and is such as we may reasonably expect from the school where Pythagoras studied;[1] but I do not mean to say that it removes all difficulties, or is itself free from difficulty. But absolute perfection can be expected only by priests who can call to their aid apples of knowledge. Philosophers must content themselves with something less. Of the great variety of sects or religions in the world there is not one, if the priests of each may be believed, in which any serious difficulties of this kind are found.
11. Modern divines, a very sensitive race, have been much shocked with the doctrine of the ancients, that nothing could be created from nothing, ex nihilo nihil fit. This is a subject well deserving consideration. The question arises how did the ancients acquire the knowledge of the truth of this proposition. Had they any positive experience that matter was not made from nothing? I think they had not. Then how could they have any knowledge on the subject? As they had received no knowledge through the medium of the senses, that is from experience, it was rash and unphilosophical to come to any conclusion.
The ancients may have reasoned from analogy. They may have said, Our experience teaches that every thing which we perceive has pre-existed before the moment we perceive it, therefore it is fair to conclude that it must always have existed. A most hasty conclusion. All that
- ↑ Carmel, close to the residence of Melchizedek, where was the temple of Iao, without image. See Jamblicus, chap. iii., Taylor’s translation. When I formed the table of additional errata to my Celtic Druids, I had forgotten where I found the fact here named relating to the residence of Pythagoras, which caused the expression of the doubt which may be seen there respecting it.
