crees passed for infallible decisions, and sanctified, little by little, much of the superstition, the nonsense, and even the blasphemy which the fathers taught, and all the usurpations of the church. This opinion prevailed, and influenced the minds of men, so powerfully, and so long, that Erasmus, who owns, in one of his letters, that the writings of Oecolampadius, against transubstantiation, seemed sufficient to seduce even the elect, "ut seduci posse videantur etiam electi," declares in another, that nothing hindered him from embracing the doctrine of Oecolampadius, but the consent of the church to the other doctrine, "nisi obstaret consensus ecclesiæ." Thus artificial theology rose on the demolitions, not on the foundations, of Christianity; was incorporated into it, and became a principal part of it. How much it becomes a good Christian to distinguish them in his private thoughts, at least, and how unfit even the greatest, the most moderate, and the least ambitious of the ecclesiastical order are to assist us in making this distinction, I have endeavored to show you by reason, and by example.

It remains, then, that we apply ourselves to the study of the first philosophy without any other guides than the works, and the word of God. In natural religion the clergy are unnecessary, in revealed they are dangerous, guides.

ESSAY THE FIRST.

CONCERNING

THE NATURE, EXTENT, AND REALITY

OF

HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.

SECTION I.

AMONG the many cavils that have been devised against the demonstrated existence of a first, intelligent, self-existent Cause of all things, this has been one; that things known must be anterior to knowledge, and that we may as well assert that the images of objects we see reflected made those objects, as that knowledge or intelligence made them. Hobbes is accused of reasoning on this principle in his Leviathan, and his book De Cive, by the author of the Intellectual System of the Universe, and his argument in the place, where he mentions the notions that reason dictates to us, concerning the divine attributes, is thus stated. "Since knowledge and intelligence are nothing more in us, than a tumult of the mind, excited by the pressure of external objects on our organs, we must not imagine there is any such thing in God, these being things which depend on natural causes." Now I think, this charge a little too hastily brought, and a little too heavily laid. So will any man who reads the context. Hobbes having said that, when we ascribe will to God, we must not conceive it to be in him, what it is in us, but must suppose it to be something analogous which we cannot conceive. He adds, "in like manner when we attribute sight, and other sensations, or knowledge, and intelligence to God, which are in us noVOL. III.-7

thing more than a certain tumult of the mind, excited by the pressure of external objects on our organs, we must not imagine that any thing like this happens to God." I am far from subscribing to many notions which Hobbes has advanced. But still the plain and obvious meaning of this passage, according to my apprehension, is not to deny that the Supreme Being is an intelligent Being, but to distinguish between the Divine and human manner of knowing. If Hobbes did not assert a distinct kind of knowledge, and attribute "the same clearly to God Almighty" upon this occasion, the omission will not serve to fix the brand of atheism upon him. On the contrary, whatever his other opinions were, this opinion may be reconciled to the most orthodox theism. It is more reasonable, and carries along with it a more becoming reverence, than the learned writer who makes the objection shows; when, like other divines, he supposes clearly by his reflections on this passage, and indeed by the whole tenor of his writings, that intelligence and knowledge in God are the same as intelligence and knowledge in man; that the divine differs from the human in degrees, not in kind, and that by consequence if God has not the latter, he has none at all.

Absurd and impertinent vanity! We pronounce our fellow animals to be automates, or we allow them instinct, or we bestow graciously upon them, at the utmost stretch of liberality, an irrational soul, something we know not what, but something that can claim no kindred to the human mind. We scorn to admit them into the same class of intelligence with ourselves, though it be obvious, among other observations easy to be made, and tending to the same purpose, that the first inlets, and the first elements of their knowledge, and of ours, are the same. But of ourselves, we think it not too much to boast that our intelligence is a participation of the divine intelligence; that the mind of man, like that of God, contains in it the ideas of intelligible natures; that it does not rise from particular to general knowledge, but descends from universals to singulars; hovers, as it were, aloft over all the corporeal universe; is independent of the bodies that compose it, or proleptical to them, and in the order of nature before them.

Such wild notions as these, or the magic of such unmeaning sounds, and articulated air, which the warm imaginations of Asia and Africa first produced, have been echoed down to the present age, and have been propagated with so much success even in our northern and cold climates, that the heads of many reverend persons have been turned by a præternatural fermentation of the brain, or a philosophical delirium. None has been so more, I think, since the days of the latter Platonists, and the reign of the schoolmen who may be called properly the latter

peripatetics, than that of the divine I have just now quoted.He read too much to think enough, he admired too much to think freely, and it is impossible to forbear wishing that he had taken due notice of a passage in Tully's offices, "Ne ut quidam Græca verba inculcantes jure optimo rideamur." Greek phraseology was in fashion among the Romans, as well as Greek philosophy, in Tully's days, and it is reasonable to believe that many things passed then under a Greek varnish, that would not have passed so well in mere Latin; just as we may observe, that many things have passed by the help of Greek and Latin among us, that would not have passed so well in mere English. Tully reformed this pedantry indeed, but he did it rather with a view to enrich his language, than to determine his ideas, and he lost little or no advantage by the reformation: that advantage I mean which men take, who affect to know more than they do know, from which affectation the academicians, as much as they disclaimed knowledge, were not free. He invented Latin to answer Greek words; and readers, like writers, being apt to imagine that every new word denotes something new, this expedient served well enough to help out a system, or to get rid of troublesome objections. Thus vain phraseology has been always called in to the assistance of vain philosophy, and a learned mist has been raised in order to surprise, and impose, or to escape.These are some part of the arguties verbales, against which Montagne declaims: and, to speak in his style, they may serve to enrich a man's tongue, but they will leave his understanding as poor as they found it, and much more perplexed.

I return to the subject immediately before me, and I say that, since there must have been something from eternity, because there is something now, the eternal Being must be an intelligent Being, because there is intelligence now, (for no man will venture to assert that non-entity can produce entity, or non-intelligence intelligence,) and such a Being must exist necessarily, whether things have been always as they are, or whether they have been made in time; because it is no more possible to conceive an infinite than a finite progression of effects without a cause. Thus the existence of a God is demonstrated, and cavil against demonstration is impertinent. It is so impertinent, that he who refuses to submit to this demonstration, among others of the same kind, has but one short step more to make in order to arrive at the highest pitch of absurdity: for surely there is but one remove between a denial of the existence of God, and a denial of our own existence; because, if we have an intuitive knowledge of the latter, we have the same intuitive knowledge of all those ideas that connect the latter with the former in demonstrating a posteriori.

Now if the existence of such a Being can be demonstrated, the atheist and the divine are both defeated. The atheist, because the intelligence of this first Cause of all things must have preceded all existence, except his own, with which it is co-eternal. The divine, because an essential difference is established, in consequence of this demonstration, between God's manner of knowing, and that which he has been pleased to bestow on his creatures. Human knowledge is not only posterior to the human system, but the very first elements of it are ideas which we perceive impressed by outward objects on our minds: and it will avail little to urge that our minds must be still independent of outward objects, since we not only know what is, but can frame ideas of what may be, though it is not; because every man who pleases may perceive, that all the ideas he frames of what is not are framed by the combinations he makes of his ideas of what is, and in no other manner, nor by any other means whatsoever. Thus then, if we could be supposed to know that there is an ideal world in the divine intellect, according to which this sensible world was made, yet still the difference between the human and divine manner of knowing would admit of no comparison.

But it was too presumptuous in Plato to assert that the Supreme Being had need of a plan, like some human architect, to conduct the great design, when he raised the fabric of the universe: and it is still more presumptuous to assert not only that the divine intellect is furnished with ideas, like the human, and that God reasons and acts by the help of them, but that your ideas and mine are God's ideas, and that the modifications (for that is the fashionable term) of our minds are the modifications of God's mind. We talk indeed of the eternal ideas of the divine mind, and allude to our manner of knowing, that we may understand ourselves and be understood by others the better, just as we are forced very often to employ corporeal images when we speak of the operations of our own minds. But these expressions, so much abused by those who are in the delirium of metaphysical theology, have no intention to be understood in a literal sense among men who preserve their reason. If they had, they should never be employed by me, since I should think them profane as well as presumptuous.

I should think them silly too, and mere cant; for as one difference between God's manner of knowing and ours arises from what we are able to demonstrate concerning God, so there arises another from what we may know if we shut our ears to the din of hard words, and turn our attention inwards concerning man, and concerning these very ideas. Our knowledge is so dependent on our own system, that a great part of it would not be knowledge perhaps, but error, in any other. They who held, as I learn