also a received notion of the Pythagoreans and Platonics, that there is no chasm in nature, but a chain or scale of beings rising by gentle uninterrupted gradations from the lowest to the highest, each nature being informed and perfected by the participation of a higher. As air becomes igneous, so the purest fire becomes animal, and the animal soul becomes intellectual, which is to be understood, not of the change of one nature into another, but of the connection of different natures, each lower nature being, according to those philosophers, as it were, a receptacle or subject for the next above it to reside and act in.
“It is also the doctrine of Platonic philosophers, that intellect is the very life of living things, the first principle and exemplar of all, from whence, by different degrees, are derived the inferior classes of life; first the rational, then the sensitive, after that the vegetable, but so as in the rational animal there is still somewhat intellectual, again in the sensitive there is somewhat rational, and in the vegetable somewhat sensitive, and lastly in mixed bodies, as metals and minerals, somewhat of vegetation. By which means the whole is thought to be more perfectly connected. Which doctrine implies that all the faculties, instincts, and motions of inferior beings, in their several respective subordinations, are derived from, and depend upon intellect.
“Both Stoics and Platonics held the world to be alive, though sometimes it be mentioned as a sentient animal, sometimes as a plant or vegetable. But in this, notwithstanding what has been surmised by some learned men, there seems to be no atheism. For so long as the world is supposed to be quickened by elementary fire or spirit, which is itself animated by soul, and directed by understanding, it follows that all parts thereof originally depend upon, and may be reduced unto, the same indivisible stem or principle, to wit, a supreme mind; which is the concurrent doctrine of Pythagoreans, Platonics, and Stoics.”
Compare now the Newtonian with this theory, that the heavenly bodies are vitalized by their informing souls, that their orderly motion is the result of this vitality, and that the planets move harmonically round the sun, not as if urged by a centripetal force, but from an animated tendency to the principle and fountain of their light, and from a desire of partaking as largely as possible of his influence and power. In the former theory all the celestial motions are the effect of violence, in the latter they are all natural. The former is attended with insuperable difficulties, the latter, when the principle on which it is founded is admitted, with none. And the former is unscientific and merely hypothetical; but the latter is the progeny of the most accurate science, and is founded on the most genuine and unperverted conceptions of the human mind.
