Chapter 6

A QUOTATION FROM BISHOP BERKELEY, AND A HIT AT THE SMALL CRITICS.

Plusieurs blameront l'entassement de passages que l'on vient de voir; j'ai prévu leurs dédains, leurs dégoûts, et leurs censures magistrales; et n'ai pas voulu y avoir égard.

BAYLE.

Here I shall inform the small critic, what it is, “a thousand pounds to one penny,” as the nursery song says, or as the newspaper reporters of the Ring have it, Lombard Street to a China Orange,—no small critic already knows, whether he be diurnal, hebdomadal, monthly or trimestral,—that a notion of progressive Life is mentioned in Bishop Berkeley's Minute Philosopher, not as derived from any old system of philosophy or religion, but as the original speculation of one who belonged to a club of Freethinkers. Another member of that worshipful society explains the system of his acquaintance, thus:

“He made a threefold partition of the human species into Birds, Beasts and Fishes, being of opinion that the Road of Life lies upwards in a perpetual ascent, through the scale of Being: in such sort, that the souls of insects after death make their second appearance in the shape of perfect animals, Birds, Beasts or Fishes; which upon their death are preferred into human bodies, and in the next stage into Beings of a higher and more perfect kind. This man we considered at first as a sort of heretic, because his scheme seemed not to consist with our fundamental tenet, the Mortality of the Soul: but he justified the notion to be innocent, inasmuch as it included nothing of reward or punishment, and was not proved by any argument which supposed, or implied either incorporeal spirit, or Providence, being only inferred, by way of analogy, from what he had observed in human affairs, the Court, the Church, and the Army, wherein the tendency is always upwards, from lower posts to higher. According to this system, the Fishes are those men who swim in pleasure, such aspetits maitres,bons vivans, and honest fellows. The Beasts are dry, drudging, covetous, rapacious folk, and all those addicted to care and business like oxen, and other dry land animals, which spend their lives in labour and fatigue. The Birds are airy, notional men, Enthusiasts, Projectors, Philosophers, and such like; in each species every individual retaining a tincture of his former state, which constitutes what is called genius.”

The quiet reader who sometimes lifts his eyes from the page (and closes them perhaps) to meditate upon what he has been reading, will perhaps ask himself wherefore I consider it to be as certain that no small critic should have read the Minute Philosopher, as that children can not be drowned while “sliding on dry ground?”—My reason for so thinking is, that small critics never read any thing so good. Like town ducks they dabble in the gutter, but never purify themselves in clear streams, nor take to the deep waters.

SOMETHING IN HONOUR OF BISHOP WATSON.—CUDWORTH.—JACKSON OF OXFORD AND NEWCASTLE.—A BAXTERIAN SCRUPLE.

S'il y a des lecteurs qui se soucient peu de cela, on les prie de se souvenir qu'un auteur n'est pas obligé à ne rien dire que ce qui est de leur goût.

BAYLE.

Had my ever-by-me-to-be-lamented friend, and from this time forth, I trust, ever-by-the-public-to-be-honoured-philosopher, been a Welshman; or had he lived to become acquainted with the treasures of Welsh lore which Edward Williams, William Owen, and Edward Davies, the Curate of Olveston, have brought to light; he would have believed in the Bardic system as heartily as the Glamorganshire and Merionethshire Bards themselves, and have fitted it, without any apprehension of heresy, to his own religious creed. And although he would have perceived with the Curate of Olveston (worthy of the best Welsh Bishoprick for his labours; O George the Third, why did no one tell thee that he was so, when he dedicated to thee his Celtic Researches?)—although (I say) he would have perceived that certain of the Druidical rites were derived from an accursed origin,—a fact authenticated by their abominations, and rendered certain by the historical proof that the Celtic language affords in both those dialects wherein any genuine remains have been preserved,—that knowledge would still have left him at liberty to adopt such other parts of the system as harmonized with his own speculations, and were not incompatible with the Christian faith. How he would have reconciled them shall be explained when I have taken this opportunity of relating something of the late Right Reverend Father in God, Richard Watson, Lord Bishop of Llandaff, which is more to his honour than anything that he has related of himself. He gave the Curate of Olveston, upon George Hardinge's recommendation, a Welsh Rectory, which though no splendid preferment, placed that patient, and learned, and able and meritoriouspoorman, in a respectable station, and conferred upon him (as he gratefully acknowledged) the comfort of independence.

My friend had been led by Cudworth to this reasonable conclusion that there was a theology of divine tradition, or revelation, or a divine cabala, amongst the Hebrews first, and from them afterward communicated to the Egyptians and other nations. He had learnt also from that greater theologian Jackson of Corpus (whom the Laureate Southey (himself to be commended for so doing,) loses no opportunity of commending)1that divine communion was not confined to the Israelites before their distinction from other nations and that “idolatry and superstition could not have increased so much in the old world, unless there had been evident documents of a divine power in ages precedent;” for “strange fables and lying wonders receive being from notable and admirable decayed truths, as baser creatures do life from the dissolution of more noble bodies.” These were the deliberate opinions of men not more distinguished among their contemporaries and eminent above their successors, for the extent of their erudition than remarkable for capacity of mind and sobriety of judgment. And with these the history of the Druidical system entirely accords. It arose “from the gradual or accidental corruption of the patriarchal religion, by the abuse of certain commemorative honours which were paid to the ancestors of the human race, and by the admixture of Sabæan idolatry;” and on the religion thus corrupted some Canaanite abominations were engrafted by the Phœnicians. But as in other apostacies, a portion of original truth was retained in it.

1Since Southey's death, Jackson's Works, to the much satisfaction of all sound theologians, have been reprinted at the Clarendon Press. I once heard Mr. Parker the Bookseller—the Uncle of the present Mr. Parker—say, that he recollected the sheets of the Folio Edition being used as wrappers in the shops! Alexander's dust as a bung to a beer-barrel, quotha!

Indeed just as remains of the antediluvian world are found everywhere in the bowels of the earth, so are traces not of scriptural history alone, but of primæval truths to be discovered in the tradition of savages, their wild fables, and their bewildered belief; as well as in the elaborate systems of heathen mythology and the principles of what may deserve to be called divine philosophy. The farther our researches are extended the more of these collateral proofs are collected, and consequently the stronger their collective force becomes. Research and reflection lead also to conclusions as congenial to the truly christian heart as they may seem startling to that which is christian in every thing except in charity. Impostors acting only for their own purposes have enunciated holy truths, which in many of their followers have brought forth fruits of holiness. True miracles have been worked in false religions. Nor ought it to be doubted that prayers which have been directed to false Gods in erring, but innocent, because unavoidable misbelief, have been heard and accepted by that most merciful Father, whose eye is over all his creatures, and who hateth nothing that he hath made.—Here be it remarked that Baxter has protested against this fine expression in that paper of exceptions against the Common Prayer which he prepared for the Savoy Meeting, and which his colleagues were prudent enough to set aside, lest it should give offence, they said, but probably because the more moderate of them were ashamed of its frivolous and captious cavillings; the Collect in which it occurs, he said, hath no reason for appropriation to the first day of Lent, and this part of it is unhandsomely said, being true only in a formal sensequâ talis, for “he hateth all the works of iniquity.” Thus did he make iniquity the work of God, a blasphemy from which he would have revolted with just abhorrence if it had been advanced by another person: but dissent had become in him a cachexy of the intellect.

SPECULATIONS CONNECTED WITH THE DOCTOR'S THEORY.—DOUBTS AND DIFFICULTIES.

Voilà bien des mysteres, dira-t-on; j'en conviens; aussi le sujet le mérite-t-il bien. Au reste, il est certain que ces mysteres ne cachent rien de mauvais.

GOMGAM.

But although the conformity of the Bardic system to his own notions of progressive existence would have appeared to the Doctor

—confirmation strongAs proof of holy writ,—

he would have assented to that system no farther than such preceding conformity extended. Holding it only as the result of his own speculations,—as hypothesis,—a mere fancy,—a toy of the mind,—a plaything for the intellect in its lighter moments, and sometimes in its graver ones the subject of a dream,—he valued it accordingly. And yet the more he sported with it, and the farther he pursued it in his reveries, the more plausible it appeared, and the better did it seem to explain some of the physical phenomena, and some of the else seemingly inexplicable varieties of human nature. It was Henry More's opinion that the Pre-existence of the Soul, which is so explicit and frequent a doctrine of the Platonists, “was a tenet for which there are many plausible reasons, and against which there is nothing considerable to be alleged; being a key, he said, for some main mysteries of Providence which no other can so handsomely unlock.” More however, the Doctor thought might be advanced against that tenet, than against his own scheme, for to that no valid objection could be opposed. But the metempsychosis in a descending scale as a scheme of punishment would have been regarded by him as one of those corruptions which the Bards derived from the vain philosophy or false religions of the Levant.

Not that this part of their scheme was without a certain plausibility on the surface which might recommend it to inconsiderate minds. He himself would have thought that no Judge ever pronounced a more just decision than the three Infernal Lord Chancellors of the dead would do, if they condemned his townsman the pettyfogger to skulk upon earth again as a pole-cat, creep into holes as an earwig, and be flattened again between the thumbnails of a London chambermaid, or exposed to the fatal lotion of Mr. Tiffin, bug-destroyer to his Majesty. It was fitting he thought that every keen sportsman, for once at least should take the part of the inferior creature in those amusements of the field which he had followed so joyously, and that he should be winged in the shape of a partridge, run down in the form of a hare by the hounds, and Actæonized in a stag: that the winner of a Welsh main should be the cock of one, and die of the wounds received in the last fight; that the merciless postmaster should become a posthorse at his own inn; and that they who have devised, or practised, or knowingly permitted any wanton cruelty for the sake of pampering their appetites, should in the next stage of their existence, feel in their own person the effect of those devices, which in their human state they had only tasted. And not being addicted himself to “the most honest, ingenuous, quiet, and harmless art of angling,” (forgive him Sir Humphrey Davy! forgive him Chantrey! forgive him, thou best of all publishers, John Major, who mightest writeNe plus ultraupon thy edition of any book which thou delightest to honour) he allowed that even Izaak Walton of blessed memory could not have shown cause for mitigation of the sentence, if Rhadamanthus and his colleagues in the Court below, had condemned him to be spitted upon the hook of some dear lover and ornament of the art, in the shape of “a black snail with his belly slit to shew the white;” or of a perch which of fish, he tells us, is the longest lived on a hook; or sewed him metempsycho-sized into a frog, to the arming iron, with a fine needle and silk, with only one stitch, using him in so doing, according to his own minute directions, as if he loved him, that is, harming him as little as he possibly might, that he might live the longer.

This would be fitting he thought, and there would have been enough of purgatory in it to satisfy the sense of vindictive justice, if any scheme of purgatory had been reconcilable with his scriptural belief. Bishop Hall has a passage in his Choice Helps for a Pious spirit, which might be taken in the sense of this opinion, though certainly no such meaning was intended by the writer. “Man,” he says, “as he consists of a double nature, flesh and spirit, so is he placed in a middle rank, betwixt an angel, which is a spirit, and a beast, which is flesh: partaking of the qualities and performing the acts of both. He is angelical in his understanding, in his sensual affections bestial; and to whether of these he most incline and comforteth himself, that part wins more of the other, and gives a denomination to him; so as he that was before half angel, half beast, if he be drowned in sensuality, hath lost the angel and is become a beast; if he be wholly taken up with heavenly meditations, he hath quit the beast, and is improved angelical. It is hard to hold an equal temper, either he must degenerate into a beast, or be advanced to an angel.”

Had the Doctor held this opinion according to the letter, and believed that those who brutalized their nature in the stage of humanity, were degraded to the condition of brutes after death, he could even have persuaded himself that intelligible indications of such a transmigration might be discovered in the eyes of a dog when he looks to some hard master for mercy, or to some kind one for notice, and as it were for a recognition of the feelings and thoughts which had no other means of expression. But he could not have endured to think it possible that the spaniel who stood beside him in mute supplication, with half-erected ears, looking for a morsel of food, might be a friend or relation; and that in making a troublesome or a thievish cur slink away with his tail between his legs, he might be hurting the feelings of an old acquaintance.

And indeed on the whole it would have disturbed his sense of order, to think that while some inferior creatures were innocently and unconsciously ascending in the scale of existence through their appointed gradations, others were being degraded to a condition below humanity for their sins committed in the human state. Punishment such degradation could not be deemed, unless the soul so punished retained its consciousness; and such consciousness would make it a different being from those who were externally of its fellow kind, and thus would the harmony of nature be destroyed: and to introduce discord there were to bring back Chaos. Bad enough as he saw is the inequality which prevails among mankind, though without it men would soon be all upon the dead level of animal and ferine life: But what is it to that which would appear in the lower world, if in the same species some individuals were guided only by their own proper instincts, and others endued with the consciousness of a human and reasonable mind.

The consequences also of such a doctrine where it was believed could not but lead to pitiable follies, and melancholy superstitions. Has humanity ever been put to a viler use than by the Banians at Surat, who support a hospital for vermin in that city, and regale the souls of their friends who are undergoing penance in the shape of fleas, or in loathsome pedicular form, by hiring beggars to go in among them, and afford them pasture for the night!

Even from his own system consequences followed which he could not reconcile to his wishes. Fond as he was of animals, it would have been a delight to him if he could have believed with the certainty of faith that he should have with him in Heaven all that he had loved on earth. But if they were only so many vehicles of the living spirit during its ascent to humanity,—only the egg, the caterpillar and the aurelia from which the human but immortal Psyche was to come forth at last, then must their uses be at an end in this earthly state: and Paradise he was sometimes tempted to think would want something if there were no beautiful insects to hover about its flowers, no birds to warble in its groves or glide upon its waters,—would not be the Paradise he longed for unless the lion were there to lie down with the lamb, and the antelope reclined its gentle head upon the leopard's breast. Fitting and desirable and necessary he considered the extinction of all noxious kinds, all which were connected with corruption, and might strictly be said to be of the earth earthly. But in his Paradise he would fain have whatever had been in Eden, before Paradise was lost, except the serpent.

“I can hardly,” says an English officer who was encamped in India near a lake overstocked with fish, “I can hardly censure the taste of the Indians who banish from a consecrated pond, the net of the fisher, the angler's hook and the fowler's gun. Shoals of large fish giving life to the clear water of a large lake covered with flocks of aquatic birds, afford to the sight a gratification which would be ill exchanged for the momentary indulgence of appetite.” My excellent friend would heartily have agreed with this Englishman: but in the waters of Paradise he would have thought, neither did the fish prey upon each other, nor the birds upon them, death not being necessary there as the means of providing aliment for life.

That there are waters in the Regions of the Blessed, Bede it is said, assures us for this reason, that they are necessary there to temper the heat of the Sun. And Cornelius à Lapide has found out a most admirable use for them above the firmament,—which is to make rivers and fountains and waterworks for the recreation of the souls in bliss, whose seat is in the Empyrean Heaven.

“If an herd of kine,” says Fuller, “should meet together to fancy and define happiness,—(that is to imagine a Paradise for themselves,)—they would place it to consist in fine pastures, sweet grass, clear water, shadowy groves, constant summer; but if any winter, then warm shelter and dainty hay, with company after their kind, counting these low things the highest happiness, because their conceit can reach no higher. Little better do the heathen poets describe Heaven, paving it with pearl and roofing it with stars, filling it with Gods and Goddesses, and allowing them to drink, (as if without it, no poet's Paradise) nectar and ambrosia.”

BIRDS OF PARADISE.—THE ZIZ.—STORY OF THE ABBOT OF ST. SALVADOR DE VILLAR.—HOLY COLETTE'S NONDESCRIPT PET.—THE ANIMALCULAR WORLD.—GIORDANO BRUNO.

And so I came to Fancy's meadows, strow'dWith many a flower;Fain would I here have made abode,But I was quickened by my hour.HERBERT.

Hindoos and Mahommedans have stocked their heavens not only with mythological monsters but with beautiful birds of celestial kind. They who have read Thalaba will remember the

Green warbler of the bowers of Paradise:

and they who will read the history of the Nella-Rajah,—which whosoever reads or relates, shall (according to the author) enjoy all manner of happiness and planetary bliss,—that is to say, all the good fortune that can be bestowed by the nine great luminaries which influence human events,—they who read that amusing story will find that in the world of Daivers, or Genii, there are milk white birds called Aunnays, remarkable for the gracefulness of their walk, wonderfully endowed with knowledge and speech, incapable of deceit, and having power to look into the thoughts of men.

These creatures of imagination are conceived in better taste than the Rabbis have displayed in the invention of their great bird Ziz, whose head when he stands in the deep sea reaches up to Heaven; whose wings when they are extended darken the sun; and one of whose eggs happening to fall crushed three hundred cedars and breaking in the fall, drowned sixty cities in its yolk. That fowl is reserved for the dinner of the Jews in heaven, at which Leviathan is to be the fish, and Behemoth the roast meat. There will be cut and come again at all of them; and the carvers of whatever rank in the hierarchy they may be, will have no sinecure office that day.

The monks have given us a prettier tale;—praise be to him who composed,—but the lyar's portion to those who made it pass for truth. There was an Abbot of S. Salvador de Villar who lived in times when piety flourished, and Saints on earth enjoyed a visible communion with Heaven. This holy man used in the intervals of his liturgical duties to recreate himself by walking in a pine forest near his monastery, employing his thoughts the while in divine meditations. One day when thus engaged during his customary walk, a bird in size and appearance resembling a black bird alighted before him on one of the trees, and began so sweet a song, that in the delight of listening the good Abbot lost all sense of time and place, and of all earthly things, remaining motionless and in extasy. He returned not to the Convent at his accustomed hour, and the Monks supposed that he had withdrawn to some secret solitude; and would resume his office when his intended devotion there should have been compleated. So long a time elapsed without his reappearance that it was necessary to appoint a substitute for himpro tempore;his disappearance and the forms observed upon this occasion being duly registered. Seventy years past by, during all which time no one who entered the pine forest ever lighted upon the Abbot, nor did he think of any thing but the bird before him, nor hear any thing but the song which filled his soul with contentment, nor eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor feel either want or weariness or exhaustion. The bird at length ceased to sing and took flight: and the Abbot then as if he had remained there only a few minutes returned to the monastery. He marvelled as he approached at certain alterations about the place, and still more when upon entering the house, he knew none of the brethren whom he saw, nor did any one appear to know him. The matter was soon explained, his name being well known, and the manner of his disappearance matter of tradition there as well as of record: miracles were not so uncommon then as to render any proof of identity necessary, and they proposed to reinstate him in his office. But the holy man was sensible that after so great a favour had been vouchsafed him, he was not to remain a sojourner upon earth: so he exhorted them to live in peace with one another, and in the fear of God, and in the strict observance of their rule, and to let him end his days in quietness; and in a few days, even as he expected, it came to pass, and he fell asleep in the Lord.

The dishonest monks who for the honour of their Convent and the lucre of gain palmed this lay (for such in its origin it was) upon their neighbours as a true legend, added to it, that the holy Abbot was interred in the cloisters; that so long as the brethren continued in the observance of their rule, and the place of his interment was devoutly visited, the earth about it proved a certain cure for many maladies, but that in process of time both church and cloisters became so dilapidated through decay of devotion, that cattle strayed into them, till the monks and the people of the vicinity were awakened to a sense of their sin and of their duty, by observing that every animal which trod upon the Abbot's grave, fell and broke its leg.1The relics therefore were translated with due solemnity, and deposited in a new monument, on which the story of the miracle,in perpetuam rei memoriam, was represented in bas-relief.

1Superstition is confined to no country, but is spread, more or less, over all. The classical reader will call to mind what Herodotus tells happened in the territory of Agyllæi.Clio. c. 167, ἐγίνετο διάστροφα καὶ ἔμπηρα καὶ ἀπόπληκτα, ὁμοίως πρόβατα καὶ ὑποζύγια καὶ ἄνθρωποι.

The Welsh have a tradition concerning the Birds of Rhianon,—a female personage who hath a principal part in carrying on the spells in Gwlad yr Hud or the Enchanted Land of Pembrokeshire. Whoso happened to hear the singing of her birds, stood seven years listening, though he supposed the while that only an hour or two had elapsed. Owen Pughe could have told us more of these Birds.

Some Romish legends speak of birds which were of no species known on earth and who by the place and manner of their appearances were concluded to have come from Paradise, or to have been celestial spirits in that form. Holy Colette of portentous sanctity, the Reformeress of the Poor Clares, and from whom a short-lived variety of the Franciscans were called Colettines, was favoured, according to her biographers, with frequent visits by a four-footed pet, which was no mortal creature. It was small, resembling a squirrel in agility, and an ermine in the snowy whiteness of its skin, but not in other respects like either; and it had this advantage over all earthly pets, that it was sweetly and singularly fragrant. It would play about the saint, and invite her attention by its gambols. Colette felt a peculiar and mysterious kind of pleasure when it showed itself; and for awhile not supposing that there was anything supernatural in its appearance, endeavoured to catch it, for she delighted in having lambs and innocent birds to fondle: but though the Nuns closed the door, and used every art and effort to entice or catch it, the little nondescript always either eluded them, or vanished; and it never tasted of any food which they set before it. This miracle being unique in its kind is related with becoming admiration by the chroniclers of the Seraphic Order; as it well may, for, for a monastic writer to invent a new miracle of any kind evinces no ordinary power of invention.

If this story be true, and true it must be unless holy Colette's reverend Roman Catholic biographers are liars, its truth cannot be admittedsans tirer à consequence;and it would follow as a corollary not to be disputed, that there are animals in the world of Angels. And on the whole it accorded with the general bearing of the Doctor's notions (notions rather than opinions he liked to call them where they were merely speculative) to suppose that there may be as much difference between the zoology of that world, and of this, as is found in the zoology and botany of widely distant regions here, according to different circumstances of climate: and rather to imagine that there were celestial birds, beasts, fishes, and insects, exempt from evil, and each happy in its kind to the full measure of its capacity for happiness, than to hold the immortality of brutes. Cudworth's authority had some weight with him on this subject, where the Platonical divine says that as “human souls could not possibly be generated out of matter, but were sometime or other created by the Almighty out of nothing preexisting, either in generations, or before them,” so if it be admitted that brute animals are “not mere machines, orautomata(as some seem inclinable to believe), but conscious and thinking beings; then from the same principle of reason, it will likewise follow, that their souls cannot be generated out of matter neither, and therefore must be derived from the fountain of all life, and created out of nothing by Him: who, since he can as easily annihilate as create, and does all for the best, no man need at all to trouble himself about their permanency, or immortality.”

Now though the Doctor would have been pleased to think, with the rude Indian, that when he was in a state of existence wherein no evil could enter

His faithful dog should bear him company,

he felt the force of this reasoning; and he perceived also that something analogous to the annihilation there intended, might be discerned in his own hypothesis. For in what may be called the visible creation he found nothing resembling that animalcular world which the microscope has placed within reach of our senses; nothing like those monstrous and prodigious forms which Leeuwenhoeck, it must be believed, has faithfully delineated.—Bishop has a beautiful epigram upon the themeκαλὰ πέφανται

When thro a chink,2a darkened roomAdmits the solar beam,Down the long light that breaks the gloom,Millions of atoms stream.In sparkling agitation bright,Alternate dies they bear;Too small for any sense but sight,Or any sight, butthere.Nature reveals not all her storeTo human search, or skill;And when she deigns to shew us moreShe shows us Beauty still.

But the microscopic world affords us exceptions to this great moral truth. The forms which are there discovered might well be called

Abominable, inutterable, and worseThan fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceived,Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimæras dire.

Such verily they would be, if they were in magnitude equal to the common animals by which we are surrounded. But Nature has left all these seemingly misformed creatures in the lowest stage of existence,—the circle of inchoation; neither are any of the hideous forms of insects repeated in the higher grades of animal life; the sea indeed contains creatures marvellously uncouth and ugly,beaucoup plus de monstres, sans comparaison, que la terre,and the Sieur de Brocourt, who was as curious in collecting the opinions of men as our philosopher, though no man could make more dissimilar uses of their knowledge, explains ità cause de la facilité de la generation qui est en elle, dont se procreent si diverses figures, à raison de la grande chaleur qui se trouve en la mer, l'humeur y estant gras, et l'aliment abondant; toute generation se faisant par chaleur et humidité, qui produisent toutes choses.With such reasoning our Doctor was little satisfied; it was enough to know that as the sea produces monsters, so the sea covers them, and that fish are evidently lower in the scale of being than the creatures of earth and air. It is the system of Nature then that whatever is unseemly should be left in the earliest and lowest stages; that life as it ascends should cast off all deformity, as the butterfly leaves itsexuviæwhen its perfect form is developed; and finally that whatever is imperfect should be thrown off, and nothing survive in immortality but what is beautiful as well as good.

2The Reader may not be displeased to read the following beautiful passage from Jeremy Taylor.

“If God is glorified in the sun and moon, in the rare fabric of the honeycombs, in the discipline of bees, in the economy of pismires, in the little houses of birds, in the curiosity of an eye, God being pleased to delight in those little images and reflexes of himself from those pretty mirrors, which,like a crevice in the wall, through a narrow perspective, transmit the species of a vast excellency:much rather shall God be pleased to behold himself in the glasses of our obedience, in the emissions of our will and understanding; these being rational and apt instruments to express him, far better than the natural, as being near communications of himself.”—Invalidity of a late or Death-bed Repentance,Vol. v. p. 464.

He was not acquainted with the speculation, or conception (as the Philotheistic philosopher himself called it) of Giordano Bruno, thatdeformium animalium formæ, formosæ sunt in cœlo. Nor would he have assented to some of the other opinions which that pious and high minded victim of papal intolerance, connected with it. Thatmetallorum in se non lucentium formæ, lucent in planetis suis, he might have supposed, if he had believed in the relationship between metals and planets. And if Bruno's remark applied to the Planets only, as so many other worlds, and did not regard the future state of the creatures of this our globe, the Doctor might then have agreed to his assertion thatnon enim homo, nec animalia, nec metalla ut hic sunt, illic existunt. But the Philotheist of Nola, in the remaining part of this his twelfthConceptus Idearumsoared above the Doctor's pitch:Quod nempe hic discurrit, he says,illic actu viget, discursione superiori. Virtutes enim quæ versus materiam explicantur: versus actum primum uniuntur, et complicantur. Unde patet quod dicunt Platonici, ideam quamlibet rerum etiam non viventium, vitam esse et intelligentiam quandam. Item et in Primâ Mente unam esse rerum omnium ideam. Illuminando igitur, vivificando, et uniendo est quod te superioribus agentibus conformans, in conceptionem et retentionem specierum efferaris.Here the Philosopher of Doncaster would have found himself in the dark, but whether because “blinded by excess of light,” or because the subject is within the confines of uttermost darkness, is not for me his biographer to determine.

FURTHER DIFFICULTIES.—QUESTION CONCERNING INFERIOR APPARITIONS.—BLAKE THE PAINTER, AND THE GHOST OF A FLEA.

In amplissimá causâ, quasi magno mari, pluribus ventis sumus vecti.

PLINY.

There was another argument against the immortality of brutes, to which it may be, he allowed the more weight, because it was of his own excogitating. Often as he had heard of apparitions in animal forms, all such tales were of some spirit or hobgoblin which had assumed that appearance; as, for instance thatsimulacrum admodum monstruosum, that portentous figure in which Pope Gregory the ninth after his death was met roaming about the woods by a holy hermit: it was in the form of a wild beast with the head of an ass, the body of a bear, and the tail of a cat. Well might the good hermit fortify himself with making the sign of the cross when he beheld this monster: he approved himself a courageous man by speaking to the apparition which certainly was not “in such a questionable shape” as to invite discourse: and we are beholden to him for having transmitted to posterity the bestial Pope's confession, that because he had lived an unreasonable and lawless life, it was the will of God and of St. Peter whose chair he had defiled by all kinds of abominations, that he should thus wander about in a form of ferine monstrosity.

He had read of such apparitions, and been sufficiently afraid of meeting a barguest1in his boyish days; but in no instance had he ever heard of the ghost of an animal. Yet if the immaterial part of such creatures survived in a separate state of consciousness why should not their spirits sometimes have been seen as well as those of our departed fellow creatures? No cock or hen ghost ever haunted its own barn door; no child was ever alarmed by the spirit of its pet lamb; no dog or cat ever came like a shadow to visit the hearth on which it rested when living. It is laid down as a certain truth deduced from the surest principles of demonology by the Jesuit Thyræus, who had profoundly studied that science that whenever the apparition of a brute beast or monster was seen, it was a Devil in that shape.Quotiescumque sub brutorum animantium forma conspiciuntur spiritus, quotiescumque monstra exhibentur dubium non est,autoprosoposadesse Dæmoniorum spiritus.For such forms were not suitable for human spirits, but for evil Demons they were in many respects peculiarly so: and such apparitions were frequent.

1A northern word, used in Cumberland and Yorkshire. Brocket and Grose neither of them seem aware that this spirit or dæmon had the form of the beast. Their derivations are severally “Berga hill, andgeestghost;”—“Bar, a gate or style, andgheist.”

The locality of the spirit will suggest a reference to the IcelandicBerserkr. In that languageBeraandBersiboth signify abear.

Thus the Jesuit reasoned, the possibility that the spirit of a brute might appear never occurring to him, because he would have deemed it heretical to allow that there was anything in the brute creation partaking of immortality. No such objection occurred to the Doctor in his reasonings upon this point. His was a more comprehensive creed; the doubt which he felt was not concerning the spirit of brute animals, but whether it ever existed in a separate state after death, which the Ghost of one, were there but one such appearance well attested, would sufficiently prove.

He admitted indeed that for every authenticated case of an apparition, a peculiar cause was to be assigned, or presumed; but that for the apparition of an inferior animal, there could in general be no such cause. Yet cases are imaginable wherein there might be such peculiar cause, and some final purpose only to be brought about by such preternatural means. The strong affection which leads a dog to die upon his master's grave, might bring back the spirit of a dog to watch for the safety of a living master. That no animal ghosts should have been seen afforded therefore in this judgment no weak presumption against their existence.

O Dove, “my guide, philosopher and friend!” that thou hadst lived to see what I have seen, the portrait of the Ghost of a Flea, engraved by Varley, from the original by Blake! The engraver was present when the likeness was taken, and relates the circumstances thus in his Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy.

“This spirit visited his imagination in such a figure as he never anticipated in an insect. As I was anxious to make the most correct investigation in my power of the truth of these visions, on hearing of this spiritual apparition of a Flea, I asked him if he could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw. He instantly said, ‘I see him now before me.’ I therefore gave him paper and a pencil, with which he drew the portrait of which a fac-simile is given in this number. I felt convinced by his mode of proceeding, that he had a real image before him; for he left off, and began on another part of the paper to make a separate drawing of the mouth of the Flea, which the spirit having opened, he was prevented from proceeding with the first sketch till he had closed it. During the time occupied in compleating the drawing, the Flea told him that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of such men as were by nature blood-thirsty to excess, and were therefore providentially confined to the size and form of insects; otherwise, were he himself, for instance, the size of a horse, he would depopulate a great portion of the country. He added that if in attempting to leap from one island to another he should fall into the sea, he could swim, and should not be lost.”

The Ghost of the Flea spoke truly when he said what a formidable beast he should be, if with such power of leg and of proboscis, and such an appetite for blood he were as large as a horse. And if all things came by chance, it would necessarily follow from the laws of chance that such monsters there would be; but because all things are wisely and mercifully ordered, it is, that these varieties of form and power which would be hideous, and beyond measure destructive upon a larger scale, are left in the lower stages of being, the existence of such deformity and such means of destruction there, and their non-existence as the scale of life ascends, alike tending to prove the wisdom and the benevolence of the Almighty Creator.

FACTS AND FANCIES CONNECTING THE DOCTOR'S THEORY WITH THE VEGETABLE WORLD.

We will not be too peremptory herein: and build standing structures of bold assertions on so uncertain a foundation; rather with the Rechabites we will live in tents of conjecture, which on better reason we may easily alter and remove.

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