SECTION IV.. _substance of Ancient Philosophy._

Substance Of Ancient Philosophy.

I have consumed about forty years of my pilgrimage in two or three corners of the world, seeking the philosopher's stone called truth. I have consulted all the adepts of antiquity, Epicurus and Augustine, Plato and Malebranche, and I still remain in ignorance. In all the crucibles of philosophers, there are perhaps two or three ounces of gold, but all the rest is caput mortuum, insipid mire, from which nothing can be extracted.

It seems to me that the Greeks, our masters, wrote much more to show their intellect, than they made use of their intellect to instruct themselves. I see not a single author of antiquity who has a consistent, methodical, clear system, going from consequence to consequence.

All that I have been able to obtain by comparing and combining the systems of Plato, of the tutor of Alexander, Pythagoras, and the Orientals, is this: Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause. The world is arranged according to mathematical laws; therefore, it is arranged by an intelligence.

It is not an intelligent being like myself who presided at the formation of the world; for I cannot form a miserable worm; therefore, the world is the work of an intelligence prodigiously superior. Does this being, who possesses intelligence and power in so high a degree, necessarily exist? It must be so, for he must either have received being from another, or through his own nature. If he has received his being from another, which is very difficult to conceive, I must look up to this other, which will in that case be the first cause. On whichever side I turn, I must admit a first cause, powerful and intelligent, who by his own nature is necessarily so.

Has this first cause created things out of nothing? We cannot conceive that to create out of nothing is to change nothing into something. I cannot admit such a creation, at least until I find invincible reasons which force me to admit what my mind can never comprehend. All that exists appears to exist necessarily, since it exists; for if to-day there is a reason for the existence of things, there was one yesterday; there has been one in all times; and this cause must always have had its effect, without which it would have been a useless cause during eternity.

But how can things have always existed, being visibly under the hand of the first cause? This power must always have acted in like manner. There is no sun without light, there is no motion without a being passing from one point of space to another.

There is, therefore, a powerful and intelligent being who has always acted; and if this being had not acted, of what use to him would have been his existence? All things are, therefore, emanations from this first cause. But how can we imagine that stone and clay may be emanations of the eternal, intelligent, and puissant being? Of two things, one must be; either that the matter of this stone and mine necessarily exists of itself, or that it exists necessarily by this first cause; there is no medium.

Thus, therefore, there are but two parts to take; either to admit matter eternal of itself, or matter eternally proceeding from a powerful, intelligent, eternal being. But existing of its own nature, or emanating from a producing being, it exists from all eternity, because it exists; and there is no reason that it might not have always existed.

If matter is eternally necessary, it is in consequence impossible--it is contradictory, that it should not exist; but what man can assure you that it is impossible, that it is contradictory, that this fly and this flint have not always existed? We are, however, obliged to swallow this difficulty, which more astonishes the imagination than contradicts the principles of reasoning.

Indeed, as soon as we have conceived that all has emanated from the supreme and intelligent being; that nothing has emanated from him without reason; that this being, always existing, must always have acted; that, consequently, all things must have eternally proceeded from the bosom of his existence--we should no more be deterred from believing the matter of which this fly and flint are formed is eternal, than we are deterred from conceiving light to be an emanation of the all-powerful being.

Since I am an extended and thinking being, my extent and thought are the necessary productions of this being. It is evident to me that I cannot give myself extent or thought. I have, therefore, received both from this necessary being.

Can he have given me what he has not? I have intelligence; I am in space; therefore, he is intelligent and is in space. To say that the Eternal Being, the All-Powerful God, has from all time necessarily filled the universe with His productions, is not taking from Him His free-will; but on the contrary, for free-will is but the power of acting. God has always fully acted; therefore God has always used the plenitude of His liberty.

The liberty which we call indifference is a word without an idea--an absurdity; for this would be to determine without reason; it would be an effect without a cause. Therefore God cannot have this pretended free-will, which is a contradiction in terms. He has, therefore, always acted by the same necessity which causes His existence. It is, therefore, impossible for the world to exist without God; it is impossible for God to exist without the world. This world is filled with beings who succeed each other; therefore, God has always produced beings in succession.

These preliminary assertions are the basis of the ancient eastern philosophy, and of that of the Greeks. We must except Democritus and Epicurus, whose corpuscular philosophy has combated these dogmas. But let us remark that the Epicureans were founded on an entirely erroneous philosophy, and that the metaphysical system of all the other philosophy subsisted with all the physical systems. All nature, except the void, contradicts Epicurus, and no phenomenon contradicts the philosophy which I explain. Now, a philosophy which agrees with all which passes in nature, and which contents the most attentive mind, is it not superior to all other unrevealed systems?

After the assertions of the most ancient philosophers, which I have approached as nearly as possible, what remains to us? A chaos of doubts and chimeras. I believe that there never was a philosopher of a system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had lost his time. It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship, towers much above him who imagined innate ideas.

PHYSICIANS.

Regimen is superior to medicine, especially as, from time immemorial, out of every hundred physicians, ninety-eight are charlatans. Molière was right in laughing at them; for nothing is more ridiculous than to witness an infinite number of silly women, and men no less than women, when they have eaten, drunk, sported, or abstained from repose too much, call in a physician for the headache, invoke him like a god, and request him to work the miracle of producing an alliance between health and intemperance, not omitting to fee the said god, who laughs at their folly.

It is not, however, the less true that an able physician may preserve life on a hundred occasions, and restore to us the use of our limbs. When a man falls into an apoplexy, it is neither a captain of infantry nor a sergeant at law who will cure him. If cataracts are formed on my eyes, it is not my neighbor who will relieve me. I distinguish not between physicians and surgeons, these professions being so intimately connected.

Men who are occupied in the restoration of health to other men, by the joint exertion of skill and humanity, are above all the great of the earth. They even partake of divinity, since to preserve and renew is almost as noble as to create. The Roman people had no physicians for more than five hundred years. This people, whose sole occupation was slaughter, in particular cultivated not the art of prolonging life. What, therefore, happened at Rome to those who had a putrid fever, a fistula, a gangrene, or an inflammation of the stomach? They died. The small number of great physicians introduced into Rome were only slaves. A physician among the great Roman patricians was a species of luxury, like a cook. Every rich man had his perfumers, his bathers, his harpers, and his physician. The celebrated Musa, the physician of Augustus, was a slave; he was freed and made a Roman knight; after which physicians became persons of consideration.

When Christianity was so fully established as to bestow on us the felicity of possessing monks, they were expressly forbidden, by many councils, from practising medicine. They should have prescribed a precisely contrary line of conduct, if it were desirable to render them useful to mankind.

How beneficial to society were monks obliged to study medicine and to cure our ailments for God's sake! Having nothing to gain but heaven, they would never be charlatans; they would equally instruct themselves in our diseases and their remedies, one of the finest of occupations, and the only one forbidden them. It has been objected that they would poison the impious; but even that would be advantageous to the church. Had this been the case, Luther would never have stolen one-half of Catholic Europe from our holy father, the pope; for in the first fever which might have seized the Augustine Luther, a Dominican would have prepared his pills. You will tell me that he would not have taken them; but with a little address this might have been managed. But to proceed:

Towards the year 1517 lived a citizen, animated with a Christian zeal, named John; I do not mean John Calvin, but John, surnamed of God, who instituted the Brothers of Charity. This body, instituted for the redemption of captives, is composed of the only useful monks, although not accounted among the orders. The Dominicans, Bernardines, Norbertins, and Benedictines, acknowledge not the Brothers of Charity. They are simply adverted to in the continuation of the "Ecclesiastical History" of Fleury. Why? Because they have performed cures instead of miracles--have been useful and not caballed--cured poor women without either directing or seducing them. Lastly, their institution being charitable, it is proper that other monks should despise them.

Medicine, having then become a mercenary profession in the world, as the administration of justice is in many places, it has become liable to strange abuses. But nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor. Such a man is very superior to the general of the Capuchins, however respectable this general may be.

PIRATES OR BUCCANEERS.

In the time of Cardinal Richelieu, when the Spaniards and French detested each other, because Ferdinand the Catholic laughed at Louis XII., and Francis I. was taken at the battle of Pavia by an army of Charles V.--while this hatred was so strong that the false author of the political romance, and political piece of tediousness, called the "Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu," feared not to call the Spaniards "an insatiable nation, who rendered the Indies tributaries of hell"; when, in short, we were leagued in 1635 with Holland against Spain; when France had nothing in America, and the Spaniards covered the seas with their galleys--then buccaneers began to appear. They were at first French adventurers, whose quality was at most that of corsairs.

One of them, named Legrande, a native of Dieppe, associated himself with fifty determined men, and went to tempt fortune in a bark which had not even a cannon. Towards the Isle of Hispaniola (St. Domingo), he perceived a galley strayed from the great Spanish fleet; he approached it as a captain wishing to sell provisions; he mounted, attended by his people; he entered the chamber of the captain, who was playing at cards, threw him down, made him prisoner with his cargo, and returned to Dieppe with his vessel laden with immense riches. This adventure was the signal for forty years' unheard-of exploits.

French, English, and Dutch buccaneers associated together in the caverns of St. Domingo, of the little islands of St. Christopher and Tortola. They chose a chief for each expedition, which was the first origin of kings. Agriculturists would never have wished for a king; they had no need of one to sow, thrash, and sell corn.

When the buccaneers took a great prize, they bought with it a little vessel and cannon. One happy chance produced twenty others. If they were a hundred in number they were believed to be a thousand; it was difficult to escape them, still more so to follow them. They were birds of prey who established themselves on all sides, and who retired into inaccessible places; sometimes they ravaged from four to five hundred leagues of coast; sometimes they advanced on foot, or horseback, two hundred leagues up the countries. They surprised and pillaged the rich towns of Chagra, Maracaybo, Vera Cruz, Panama, Porto Rico, Campeachy, the island of St. Catherine, and the suburbs of Cartagena.

One of these pirates, named Olonois, penetrated to the gates of Havana, followed by twenty men only. Having afterwards retired into his boat, the governor sent against him a ship of war with soldiers and an executioner. Olonois rendered himself master of the vessel, cut off the heads of the Spanish soldiers, whom he had taken himself, and sent back the executioner to the governor. Such astonishing actions were never performed by the Romans, or by other robbers. The warlike voyage of Admiral Anson round the world is only an agreeable promenade in comparison with the passage of the buccaneers in the South Sea, and with what they endured on terra firma.

Had their policy been equal to their invincible courage, they would have founded a great empire in America. They wanted females; but instead of ravishing and marrying Sabines, like the Romans, they procured them from the brothels of Paris, which sufficed not to produce a second generation.

They were more cruel towards the Spaniards than the Israelites ever were to the Canaanites. A Dutchman is spoken of, named Roc, who put several Spaniards on a spit and caused them to be eaten by his comrades. Their expeditions were tours of thieves, and never campaigns of conquerors; thus, in all the West Indies, they were never called anything but los ladrones. When they surprised and entered the house of a father of a family, they put him to the torture to discover his treasures. That sufficiently proves what we say in the article "Question," that torture was invented by robbers.

What rendered their exploits useless was, that they lavished in debauches, as foolish as monstrous, all that they acquired by rapine and murder. Finally, there remains nothing more of them than their name, and scarcely that. Such were the buccaneers.

But what people in Europe have not been pirates? The Goths, Alans, Vandals, and Huns, were they anything else? What were Rollo, who established himself in Normandy, and William Fier-a-bras, but the most able pirates? Was not Clovis a pirate, who came from the borders of the Rhine into Gaul?

PLAGIARISM.

It is said that this word is derived from the Latin word plaga, and that it signifies the condemnation to the scourge of those who sold freemen for slaves. This has nothing in common with the plagiarism of authors, who sell not men either enslaved or free. They only for a little money occasionally sell themselves.

When an author sells the thoughts of another man for his own, the larceny is called plagiarism. All the makers of dictionaries, all compilers who do nothing else than repeat backwards and forwards the opinions, the errors, the impostures, and the truths already printed, we may term plagiarists, but honest plagiarists, who arrogate not the merit of invention. They pretend not even to have collected from the ancients the materials which they get together; they only copy the laborious compilers of the sixteenth century. They will sell you in quarto that which already exists in folio. Call them if you please bookmakers, not authors; range them rather among second-hand dealers than plagiarists.

The true plagiarist is he who gives the works of another for his own, who inserts in his rhapsodies long passages from a good book a little modified. The enlightened reader, seeing this patch of cloth of gold upon a blanket, soon detects the bungling purloiner.

Ramsay, who after having been a Presbyterian in his native Scotland, an Anglican in London, then a Quaker, and who finally persuaded Fénelon that he was a Catholic, and even pretended a penchant for celestial love--Ramsay, I say, compiled the "Travels of Cyrus," because his master made his Telemachus travel. So far he only imitated; but in these travels he copies from an old English author, who introduces a young solitary dissecting his dead goat, and arriving at a knowledge of the Deity by the process, which is very much like plagiarism. On conducting Cyrus into Egypt, in describing that singular country, he employs the same expressions as Bossuet, whom he copies word for word without citing; this is plagiarism complete. One of my friends reproached him with this one day; Ramsay replied that he was not aware of it, and that it was not surprising he should think like Fénelon and write like Bossuet. This was making out the adage, "Proud as a Scotsman."

The most singular of all plagiarism is possibly that of Father Barre, author of a large history of Germany in ten volumes. The history of Charles XII. had just been printed, and he inserted more than two hundred pages of it in his work; making a duke of Lorraine say precisely that which was said by Charles XII.

He attributes to the emperor Arnold that which happened to the Swedish monarch. He relates of the emperor Rudolph that which was said of King Stanislaus. Waldemar, king of Denmark, acts precisely like Charles at Bender, etc.

The most pleasant part of the story is, that a journalist, perceiving this extraordinary resemblance between the two works, failed not to impute the plagiarism to the author of the history of Charles XII., who had composed his work twenty years before the appearance of that of Father Barre. It is chiefly in poetry that plagiarism is allowed to pass; and certainly, of all larcenies, it is that which is least dangerous to society.

PLATO.