lime which the imagination of man can attain. He cannot have raised his opinions of the powers of the human mind upon experience, who supposes that the discovery of such a Being, even if attainable at all by reason, can be any thing but the final result of long abstraction, the profound acquisition of an improved and philosophic mind.

Now, the pastoral life, even that peaceable state of it which the Israelites seem to have enjoyed, though it is considerably raised above that lowest condition of human society which subsists on the produce of the chase, is nevertheless entirely unsuited to the arts which adorn civilized communities, and to the sciences which it is the business of philosophy to cultivate and improve. It is in towns, which are almost unknown to shepherds; not under the tent, or in the plain, that the collision of various intellects has been universally observed to strike out the most useful discoveries. Their unsettled mode of life admits of no sedentary employment; nor of that frequent recurrence of the mind to the same object, which leads to the results of

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philosophic meditation. Every part of the population, from the highest to the lowest, contributes its share towards the general "activity; so that no opportunities are afforded to learned leisure, no support is given to the unproductive labourer in philosophy or literature. If genius is fostered at all in such a community, it is not the genius of the philosopher, but of the poet. In uncivilized states, the demand is not so much for instruction as for amusement; and it naturally follows, that the tone of the writers is taken from the temper of the community. Those will be held in the highest esteem, who can celebrate the warlike exploits of their countrymen in animated and heroic song, or paint a strong delineation of their manners in satire, or on the stage*.

If we apply these general remarks to what we actually know of those countries which have only made the first advances

* Est in Originibus (Catonis) solitos esse in epulis canere convivas ad tibicinem de clarorum hominum virtutibus. Cic. Tusc. Qu. 1. 1. Homer, and the bards, are familiar instances. This is illustrated at large by Lowth on the Hebrew Poetry, Lect. iv.

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towards civilization, they will not be contradicted, but strengthened by farther inquiry. We shall find, that to the Arabians, before the age of Mahomet, though “their penetration was sharp, their fancy luxuriant, their wit strong and sententious, the arts of grammar, of metre, and of rhetoric, were unknown*." Their morality was delivered in unconnected sentences; their philosophy was illustrated by fable. “But the genius and merit of a rising poet was celebrated by the applause of his own, and the kindred tribes." In that country too, with whose progress in refinement we have the most intimate acquaintance, we know that Homer flourished four centuries before the first historian whose works have been preserved, and not much less remote even from the first prose writers whose names have been recorded t. The philosophy of those who have been distinguished as the seven wise men, and who lived in the intermediate period, was never collected, like

* Gibbon, ix. 241,

†The first who published a prose oration was Phereeydes, a contemporary of Cyrus. See Lowth, Lect. iv. Hecatæus and Cadmus, the Milesian historians, belonged to nearly the same period,

that of their successors, into a system of physics or morals, but consisted, for the most part, of sage or quaint observations on human life, which perhaps owe their preservation as much to the concise terseness of the Greek language, as to their intrinsic merit or originality. The style of Herodotus*, as well as that of the Old Testament, gives in many instances a curious example of that intermediate step in the history of language, before their respective styles have been separately assigned to poetry and prose. And although the manners of the two nations among whom these works were produced, must have been in some respects essentially different, we shall certainly err in favour of the Israelites, if we compare their degree of civilization in the time of Moses, with that of the Greeks in the age of Hero dotus.

Yet it was in a state of society like this, and to a people which, before their residence in Egypt, had been certainly pasto

A literal translation of some of the stories in He, rodotus, of that of Adrastus, for example, would greatly resemble many of the narratives in Genesis,

ral, that Moses declared as a fact, what at a much later period the wisest philosophers did not venture to affirm; what Aristotle, as we have seen, endeavoured to demonstrate, and Xenophon and Cicero to render probable by analogy. In the natural progress of science, the last result of long induction, or a series of demonstrations, is a simple proposition *. That proposition, having borne the test of repeated trials and examinations, is added, as it were, to the capital stock of general knowledge: but, in arriving at this state, the simplest truths, such as the aberration of light, or the electricity of the clouds, have cost their first discoverers the half of a philosophic life. To this rule there is no exception. In moral and in natural philosophy, the proofs must equally precede the deduction. But on what authority does Moses, overstepping the necessity of proof, declare, in simple and positive terms, the

* "De l'aveu de presque tous les philosophes, les plus sublimes verités, une fois simplifiées et reduites à leurs moindres termes, se convertissent en faits, et dès-lors ne presentent plus à l'esprit que cette proposition : le blanc est blanc, le noir est noir," Helvetius sur l'Homme, chap. xxiii,