organs have been arranged without our having the least part in the arrangement. It belongs to the reader to make his reflexions on the above. There are many life, who perishes miserably, would certainly merit the appellation of happy until his death, and we might boldly pronounce that he had been the happiest of men. Socrates might have been the hap-articles on which he can say more than piest of the Greeks, although superstitious, absurd, or iniquitous judges, or all together, juridically poisoned him at the age of seventy years, on the suspicion that he believed in one only God. The philosophical maxim so much agitated, "Nemo ante obitum felix,' therefore, appears absolutely false in every sense; and if it signifies that a happy man may die an unhappy death, it signifies nothing of consequence. The proverb of being "Happy as a king" is still more false. Every body knows how the vulgar deceive themselves. It is demanded, if one condition is happier than another? If man in general is happier than woman? It would be necessary to have tried all conditions, to have been man and woman like Tiresias and Iphis, to decide this question; still more would it be necessary to have lived in all conditions, with a mind equally proper to each; and we must have passed through all the possible state of man and woman to judge of it. It is further demanded, if of two men one is happier than the other? It is very clear that he who has the gout and stone, who loses his fortune, his honour, his wife and children, and who is condemned to be hanged immediately after having been mangled, is less happy in this world in everything, than a young vigorous sultan, or La Fontaine's cobbler. But we wish to know which is the happiest of two men equally healthy, equally rich, and of an equal condition? It is clear, that it is their temper which decides it. The most moderate, the least anxious, and at the same time the most sensible, is the most happy; but unfortunately the most sensible is often the least moderate. It is not our condition, it is the temper of our souls which renders us happy. This disposition of our soul depends on our organs, and our we ought to tell him. In matters of art, it is necessary to instruct him; in affairs of morals, he should be left to think for himself. There are dogs whom we caress, comb, and feed with biscuits, and to whom we give pretty females: there are others which are covered with the mange, which die of hunger; others which we chase and beat, and which a young surgeon slowly dissects, after having driven four great nails into their paws. Has it depended upon these poor dogs to be happy or unhappy? We say a happy thought, a happy feature, a happy repartee, a happy physiognomy, happy climate, &c. These thoughts, these happy traits, which strike like sudden inspirations, and which are called the happy sallies of a man of wit, strike like flashes of light across our eyes, without our seeking it. They are no more in our power than a happy physiognomy; that is to say, a sweet and noble aspect, so independent of us, and so often deceitful. The happy climate is that which nature favours: so are happy imaginations, so is happy genius, or great talent. And who can give himself genius? or who, when he has received some ray of this flame, can preserve it always brilliant? When we speak of a happy rascal, by this word we only comprehend his success. "Felix Sylla"-the fortunate Sylla, an Alexander VI., a Duke of Borgia, have happily pillaged, betrayed, poisoned, ravaged, and assassinated. But being villains, it is very likely that they were very unhappy, even when not in fear of persons resembling themselves. It may happen to an ill-disposed person, badly educated,—a Turk for example, of whom it ought to be said, that he is permitted to doubt the Christian faith to put a silken cord round the necks of his visiers, when they are rich; to strangle, massacre, or throw his brothers into the Black Sea, and to ravage a hundred leagues of country for his glory. It may happen, I say, that this man has no more remorse than his mufti, and is very happy, on all which the reader may duly ponder. There were formerly happy planets, and others unhappy, or unfortunate; unhappily, they no longer exist. Some people would have deprived the public of this useful Dictionary-happily, they have not succeeded. Ungenerous minds, and absurd fanatics, every day endeavour to prejudice the powerful and the ignorant against philosophers. If they were unhappily listened to, we should fall back into the barbarity from which philosophers alone have withdrawn us. HEAVEN (CIEL MATERIEL). THE laws of optics, which are founded upon the nature of things, have ordained that, from this small globe of earth on which we live, we shall always see the material heaven as if we were the centre of it, although we are far from being that Its apparent magnitudes in the vaulted roof are as its apparent elevations; and it is the same with the moon, and with a comet. It is not habit, it is not the intervention of tracts of land, it is not the refraction of the atmosphere which produce this effect. Malebranche and Regis have disputed with each other on this subject; but Robert Smith has calculated. Observe the two stars, which, being at a prodigious distance from each other, and at very different depths, in the immensity of space, are here considered as placed in the circle which the sun appears to traverse. You perceive them distant from each other in the great circle, but approximating to each other in every circle smaller, or within that described by the path of the sun. It is in this manner that you see the material heaven. It is by these invariable laws of optics that you perceive the planets sometimes retrograde and sometimes stationary; there is in fact nothing of the kind. Were you stationed in the sun, we should perceive all the planets and comets moving regularly round it in those elliptic orbits which God assigns. But we are upon the planet of the earth, in a corner of the universe, where it is impossible for us to enjoy the sight of everything. Such are the laws of optics, such is the structure of your eyes, that, in the first place, the material heaven, the clouds, the moon, the sun, which is at so vast a distance from you; the planets, which in their apogee are still at a greater distance from it; all the stars placed at distances yet vastly greater, comets and meteors, Let us not then blame the errors of our everything, must appear to us in that senses, like Malebranche; the steady vaulted roof as consisting of our atmos-laws of nature originating in the immuphere. table will of the Almighty, and adapted HEAVEN. to the structure of our organs, cannot be errors. We can only see the appearances of things, and not things themselves. We are no more deceived when the sun, the work of the divinity,--that star a million times larger than our earth-appears to us quite flat and two feet in width, than when, in a convex mirror, which is the work of our own hands, we see a man only a few inches high. If the Chaldean Magi were the first who employed the understanding, which God bestowed upon them, to measure and arrange in their respective stations the heavenly bodies, other nations more gross and unintelligent made no advance towards imitating them. These childish and savage populations imagined the earth to be flat, supported, I know not how, by its own weight in the air; the sun, moon, and stars to move continually upon a solid vaulted roof called a firmament; and this roof to sustain waters, and have flood-gates at regular distances, through which these waters issued to moisten and fertilise the earth. But how did the sun, the moon, and all the stars, reappear after their sitting? Of this they know nothing at all. The heaven touched the flat earth: and there were no means by which the sun, moon, and stars, could turn under the earth, and go to rise in the east after having set in the west. It is true, that these children of ignorance were right by chance in not entertaining the idea that the sun and fixed stars moved round the earth. But they were far from conceiving that the sun was immoveable, and the earth with its satellite revolving round him in space together with the other planets. Their fables were more distant from the true system of the world than darkness from light. They thought that the sun and stars returned by certain unknown roads after having refreshed themselves for their course at some spot, not precisely ascertained, in the Mediterranean sea. This 603 was the amount of astronomy, even in the time of Homer, who is comparatively recent; for the Chaldeans kept their science to themselves, in order to obtain thereby, greater respect from other nations. Homer says, more than once, that the sun plunges into the ocean (and this ocean, be it observed, is nothing but the Nile :) here, by the freshness of the waters, he repairs during the night the fatigue and exhaustion of the day, after which, he goes to the place of his regular rising by ways unknown to mortals. This idea is very like that of Baron Fœneste, who says, that the cause of our not seeing the sun when he goes back, is that he goes back by night. As, at that time, the nations of Syria and the Greeks were somewhat acquainted with Asia and a small part of Europe, and had no notion of the countries which lie to the north of the Euxine Sea and to the south of the Nile, they laid it down as a certainty that the earth was a full third longer than it was wide; consequently the heaven, which touched the earth and embraced it, was also more long than wide. Hence came down to us degrees of longitude and latitude, names which we have always retained, although with far more correct ideas than those which originally suggested them. The book of Job, composed by an ancient Arab who possessed some knowledge of astronomy, since he speaks of "Where wert the constellations, contains nevertheless the following passage: thou, when I laid the foundation of the earth? Who hath taken the dimensions thereof? On what are its foundations fixed? Who hath laid the corner-stone thereof?" The least informed school-boy, at the present day, would tell him, in answer : The earth has neither corner-stone nor foundation; and, as to its dimensions, we know them perfectly well, as from Magellan to Bougainville, various navigators have sailed rouud it. The same schoolboy would put to silence the pompous declaimer Lactantius, and all those who before and since his time have decided that the earth was fixed upon the water, and that there can be no heaven under the earth; and that, consequently, it is both ridiculous and impious to suppose the existence of antipodes. mosphere; which, as M. de Fontenelle has well observed, in his "Plurality of Worlds," is the down of our ball. The vapours which rise from our seas and land, and which form the clouds, meteors, and thunder, were supposed, in It is curious to observe with what the early ages of the world, to be the redisdain, with what contemptuous pity, sidence of gods. Homer always makes Lactantius looks down upon all the phi-the gods descend in clouds of gold; and losophers, who, from about four hundred ≥ hence painters still represent them seated years before his time, had begun to be on a cloud. How can any one be seated acquainted with the apparent revolutions on water? It was perfectly correct to of the sun and planets, with the round-place the master of the gods more at ease ness of the earth, and the liquid and than the rest: He had an eagle to carry yielding nature of the heaven through him, because the eagle soars higher than which the planets revolved in their orbits, the other birds. &c. He enquires, "by what degrees philosophers attained such excess of folly as to conceive the earth to be a globe, and to surround that globe with heaven." These reasonings are upon a par with those he has adduced on the subject of the sibyls. The ancient Greeks, observing that the lords of cities resided in citadels on the top of some mountain, supposed that the gods might also have their citadel, and placed it in Thessaly, on Mount Olympus, whose summit is sometimes hid in clouds; so that their palace was on the same floor with their heaven Our young scholar would address some such language as this to all these Afterwards, the stars and planets, consequential doctors: "You are to which appear fixed to the blue vault of learn, that there are no such things as our atmosphere, became the abodes of solid heavens placed one over another, as gods; seven of them had each a planet, you have been told; that there are no and the rest found a lodging where they real circles in which the stars move on a could. The general council of gods was pretended firmament; that the sun is the held in a spacious hall which lay beyond { centre of our planetary world; and that the milky way; for it was but reasonable the earth and the planets move round it that the gods should have a hall in the in space, in orbits not circular but ellip-3 air, as men had town-halls and courts of tic. You must learn that there is, in assembly upon earth. fact, neither above nor below, but that When the Titans, a species of animal the planets and the comets tend all to-between gods and men, declared their wards the sun, their common centre, just and necessary war against these same and that the sun tends towards them, gods in order to recover a part of their according to an eternal law of gravitation.” patrimony, by the father's side, as they Lactantius and his gabbling associates were the sons of heaven and earth; would be perfectly astonished, when the they contented themselves with piling true system of the world was thus un- two or three mountains upon one anofolded to them. ther, thinking, that would be quite enough to make them masters of heaven, and of the castle of Olympus. HEAVEN OF THE ANCIENTS. WERE a silkworm to denominate the small quantity of downy substance surrounding its ball, heaven, it would reason just as correctly as all the ancients, when they applied that term to the at Neve foret terris securior arduas æther, Nor heaven itself was more secure than earth: It is, however, more than six hundred leagues from these stars to Mount Olympus, and from some stars infinitely farther. ven the soul of Sarpedon had fled, or where that of Hercules resided, Homer would have been a good deal embarrassed, and would have answered by some har Virgil (Eclogue v. 57.) does not hesi-monious verses. tate to say Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis. Dryden. But where then could Daphnis possibly place himself? At the opera, and in more serious productions, the gods are introduced descending in the midst of tempests, clouds, and thunder; that is, God is brought forward in the midst of the vapours of our petty globe. These notions are so suitable to our weak minds, that they appear to us grand and sublime. This philosophy of children and old women was of prodigious antiquity; it is believed, however, that the Chaldeans entertained nearly as correct ideas as ourselves on the subject of what is called heaven. They placed the sun in the midst of our planetary system, nearly at the same distance from our globe as our calculation computes it; and they supposed the earth and some planets to revolve round that star; this we learn from Aristarchus of Samos. It is nearly the system of the world since established by Copernicus: but the philosophers kept the secret to themselves, in order to obtain greater respect both from kings and people, or rather perhaps, to avoid the danger of persecution. The language of error is so familiar to mankind, that we still apply the name of heaven to our vapours, and the space between the earth and moon. We use the expression of ascending to heaven, just as we say the sun turns round, although we well know that it does not. We are, probably, the heaven of the inhabitants of the moon; and every planet places its heaven in that planet nearest to itself. Had Homer been asked, to what hea What assurance could there be, that the etherial soul of Hercules would be more at its ease in the planet Venus or in Saturn, than upon our own globe? Could its mansion be in the sun? In that flaming and consuming furnace, it would appear difficult for it to endure its station. In short, what was it that the ancients meant by heaven? They knew nothing about it; they were always exclaiming, "Heaven and earth," thus placing completely different things in most absurd connection. It would be just as judicious to exclaim, and connect in the same manner, infinity and an atom. Properly speaking, there is no heaven. There is a prodigious number of globes revolving in the immensity of space, and our globe revolves like the rest. The ancients thought, that to go to heaven was to ascend; but there is no ascent from one globe to another. The heavenly bodies are sometimes above our horizon, and sometimes below it. Thus, let us suppose that Venus, after visiting Paphos, should return to her own planet, when that planet had set; the goddess would not in that case ascend, in reference to our horizon; she would descend, and the proper expression would be then, descended to heaven. But the ancients did not discriminate with such nicety; on every subject of natural philosophy, {their notions were vague, uncertain and contradictory. Volumes have been composed in order to ascertain and point out, what they thought upon many questions of this description. Six words would have been sufficient "they did not think at all." We must always except a small number of sages; but they appeared at too late a period, and but rarely disclosed their thoughts; and when they did so, the charlatans in power took care to send them to heaven by the shortest way. |