A FREE and IMPARTIAL CENSURE Of The PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY Being a Letter Written to his much Honoured Friend Mr N. B. By SAM PARKER A. M. OXFORD Printed by W. Hall for Richard Davis Ann. Dom. 1666. To the Reverend Dr. BATHURST The Worthy and Learned PRECEDENT Of TRINITY COLLEGE in OXFORD I Shall not need as the Custom is to argue the decency and fitness of this address nor to excuse its many nice and critical Solecisms because your absolute and unalienable Right to all the Fruits of my Studies has made it due and necessary and the Obligations of Duty cancel all the Laws of Indecency so that if to present you with so mean a trifle be unhandsome yet not to have done it would have been unjust For my Studies Sir are too deeply indebted to your Encouraging Directions to make any other repayment then by entirely resigning themselves up into your hands and therefore I cannot alienate any thing that 's theirs from being Yours without being guilty at once of the greatest Injustice and Ingratitude So that though I do but Injure your Name by concerning its Authority in behalf of so worthless a Trifle yet an Injury that 's the result of Duty and Gratitude may hope for not only your Pardon but such Sir is your Candour your Acceptance too since you cannot suspect the Reality of my Resentments when I decline not so Criminal an Evidence thereof and rather wilfully chose to commit any Faults and Indecencies than lose the least Opportunity to prove it I will not be so troublesome as to remind you of the retail of your Obligations yet there is one whose peculiar matchlesness obliges me to as peculiar an acknowledgement For to your prevailing advice Sir do I owe my first Rescue from the Chains and Fetters of an unhappy Education than which 't was impossible either for you to have conferred or for me to have received a greater benefit there being no Perfection to be Valued at so high a Rate as a true Freedom and Ingenuity of Mind 'T is this that distinguishes Churches from Herds And those men that have laid aside the free and impartial use of their Reasons are just as fit for Religion as Sheep and Oxen for they differ only in this that the one are Brutes without Reason and the other Brutes with it How could the Scythian have sacrificed Rational Being's had he not first sacrificed his Reason or the Egyptian adored Irrational Creatures had not himself been one Onions could never have been Deities if Egyptians had been men but when Reason was once banished the Temples no wonder if folly and superstition commenced Religion a stock might be a Deity when the Priest was no more But Sir the excess of my joy and Zeal tempt me to be impertinent Philosophy may perhaps think herself hardly dealt with to have two of her famousest Sects called to the Bar by so mean a Clerk as myself yet I think I have done them not a little Honour in citing them before so Eminent a judge and one so much their Peer in all Sublime Learning and Generosity of Soul that their great Masters Zeno and Plato might justly Resign the Chair and yield their Porch and Academy inferior to the College that you Preside Where the many good foundations and grounds of Polite Literature that you alone have laid may well be thought the only Talismans' of its present flourishing and prosperous Condition These Papers therefore which were form and hatched under your immediate Influences being to take their flight abroad into the World aught to be legitimated by no other than that Sun which has always shined so favourably upon all my Endeavours I cannot but acknowledge that Sir I have one selfish design in this Epistolary Address namely to bribe your affection that it may defend me from the Power of your judgement 'T is a very unusual request I confess but yet 't is mine at present that you would be pleased to Protect me from yourself For I here offer to your sight that Paper which did I not know your Candour to be proportioned to your other Accomplishments I could even wish might escape it And thus Sir by prefixing your Name to this Pamphlet I have not only Rescued it from your own judgement and the Contempt of others but have also in some measure gratified my own Pride in that as many as shall chance by the sight thereof to understand that there 's such a thing as I in the world may withal be informed of the Honour and Happiness I have in being Reverend Sir Your most Faithful most obliged and most humble Servant SAM PARKER A Free and Impartial ACCOUNT OF THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY SIR WE that are so inconsiderate as to print Books sell ourselves into the greatest Slavery in the world being thereby exposed to the severe commands of those that know us and severer lashes of those that know us not so that you may perhaps sooner expect to find me in a Venetian Galley then in the Press again Not as if I were either so little a Philosopher as to regard other men's Censures for I have too little esteem for the Generality of Mankind to be at all concerned how they esteem of me and you know 't is one of my greatest designs in this world to be one of the most unconcerned men in it or so little your Friend as to style your commands Burdens yet to be plain with you upon the warrant of our Philosophic Friendship had they not surprised me at a very seasonable time I had sent you no other reply then either of Excuse or flat Denial For though I was then addressing myself to some Mathematical Studies to the pursuance whereof I allotted the next portion of time yet the main of my Studies for some weeks before had been employed in Platonic Authors so that both my Brain and my Papers being well stuffed with Ideas I was not displeased with the opportunity you have given me of Venting the one and Methodizing the other The Task than you enjoin me is To give an account of two Passages in my Tentamina Physico-Theologica The one out of the last Chapter of the first Book in which I exclaim against the Platonic Philosophy as an ungrounded and Fanatic Fancy The other out of the last Chapter of the second Book where disputing against those that assert the necessity of the World's Eternal Existence I was occasionally obliged to glance upon the two grand Attributes of God's Dominion and Goodness hence you enjoin me to make good my charge against Plato by giving you a larger and more particular account of his Philosophy and to send you a further Explication of the Nature and Extent of the forementioned Attributes especially as they have reference to the lately revived Hypothesis of the Preexistence of Souls seeing I have there reckoned that up among other rash and unwarrantable opinions which some men think to maintain from the Nature of God's goodness together with a special account of the groundlesness of the Hypothesis itself But if Sir I now pay one part of this Debt I owe to your Commands I may safely presume upon your Candour for a forbearance of the other half because as I have often told you although the Recreation I sometimes take to frame my Thoughts and Conceptions into words almost equal the Ravishing delight I derive from their first Births and Discoveries yet too long a continuance at this employment is to me and I believe to most men else the most tedious and wearisome piece of Drudgery in the world so that if after this payment in part you will but grant me a short respite to refresh myself with a little Variety I do here engage to discharge the whole Debt when ever you shall demand it At present therefore deferring the latter half of my Task I shall only send you as satisfactory an account of the Platonic Philosophy as I am able and that it may be as full and entire as its brevity will permit I shall consider it in all its parts according to the most usual and perhaps most comprehensive division of Philosophy into Morality Logic Physic and Natural Theology FIrst then as for their Morality no Platonist can set an higher estimate upon it than myself For beside those useful and excellent Notices which it teaches in common with the Ethics of other Sects it may challenge a signal Pre-eminence upon several accounts as 1. In that the Rules and Directions it prescribes are Sober and Practicable it does not flatter men with Romantic Degrees of Happiness upon fond and fantastic Principles but complies with the conditions of Humane life and neither Promises nor Designs greater proportions of Felicity than our present Capacities will allow of The Platonists were not so Vain as to comfort themselves with high strained Paradoxes against the convictions of Sense and Experience They do not teach us when we are in the extremity of Pain and Anguish to sing Quam suave quam dulce hoc est Quam hoc non curo No but they esteemed of every thing as they found and felt it and therefore whatsoever they experienced agreeable to their Natures they put into the Accounts of Good as on the contrary whatsoever they found to be a Grievance they needed no other inducement to convince them of its Evil. Whereas it was the humour of the Stoics rather to strain for Parodoxes and Braveries than give practicable Rules of Life And therefore it was well observed by some of the Ancients that never any man could attain to that height of wisdom which the Stoical Philosophy pretends to Stoici eam Sapientiam says Cicero interpretantur quam adhuc nemo mortalis est consecutus And Seneca speaking of a true Stoic Fortasse says he tanquam Phoenix semel anno quingentis simo nascitur and then only mentions the single instance of Cato But the last time I had the happiness to Discourse with you you was sufficiently convinced how little the virtue of Cato and the honesty of Regulus are to be valued If you should demand of me an account of the Stoical Principles they are such as these That the Beggarly Stoic is the only Rich man because forsooth he is Master of all other men's wealth That he alone is beautiful free and noble that all other men are ugly sordid slaves That he alone is Prince and Emperor of the Universe That he can vie Perfection & Happiness with God Himself nay Seneca blushes not to affirm Epist. 53. est aliquid quo sapiens antecedat Deum That he alone is a true Poet Orator Painter Shoemaker Cobbler Tailor or that himself is good for everything and no body else good for any thing That to kill a Swallow is not a less villainy than Parricide That 't is as great a virtue to take a flea-biting patiently at it is to preserve one's Country by the most Gallant and Heroic Actions That there is as much prudence in lifting up your finger with discretion as in managing the Roman Empire That he always hath his will Wish what you will and you shall obtain what you wish Like old decrepit jolaus in Euripides that by the force of a wish retrived his youthful Vigour and Spritefulness etc. After all which you will think this a Paradox indeed that 't is impossible for a Stoic to be mad So Extravagant are their Principles that Plutarch has made it the Title of one of his Books That the Stoics talk more Extravagantly than the Poets I could quote you many places out of Lucian to this purpose against the Stoics but than it must only be to show you how well I am acquainted with his Writings for he is every where so abusive and bitter in his Satyrs against all sorts of Philosophers that if his mouth be any slander they must have been a pack of the Vilest Villains that ever breathed and upon that score I shall wave his Testimony To proceed therefore Whereas it was a Fundamental Principle of the Stoics to esteem all things out of the power of a man's own will nor good nor evil and thence not to reckon Health Cheerfulness good Name Wealth Friends Sickness Grief Disgrace Poverty Enemies into the accounts of Good or Evil. The Platonists on the contrary made their measures of Good and Evil from the observations of Sense and Experience They therefore went not about to persuade themselves that any accident which they felt to be evil was ere the less so by being placed beyond the reach and command of their own wills but looking about into the Nature of things they first found that Man was a complex and multifarious Being integrated of Body and Soul and so that his felicity could not be consummate if one constituent half of him was miserable and then that the body was liable to a thousand foreign contingencies which 't is not in the power of the mind of avoid but yet that Virtue and Consideration which have the most immediate and most diffused influence upon the repose and satisfaction of mankind derive entirely from within a man's self and depend not at all upon any external occurrencies whence they concluded that though the biggest portions of our felicity be at our own disposals yet that it must be acknowledged that some of the smaller parcels thereof are left to Chance and uncertain Emergencies And these they did not hope with the Stoics to escape by a wilful senselesness and stupidity like Posidonious who when a very importunate fit of the Gout attempted to interrupt his Harangue before Pompey cries out Nihil agis dolour quamvis sis molestus nunquam consitebor te malum esse the most pathetical Expression of the acuteness of his pain But the course they took was to purge their minds of froward popular humours and to sweeten them with mild and benign Principles to moderate and command their passions to furnish themselves with prudence and experience and then whatever happened to govern themselves by the Laws of Wisdom and Moderation Because though all the Fountains of contentment are not within nor do all our joys issue from our own Bowels yet they receive their chief tinctures thence and hereby almost all our happiness is prudently confined within the compass of our own minds for all intellectual endowments which are our greatest perfection because they perfect and advance our highest faculties depend upon ourselves and when the mind is furnished with Virtue & Wisdom it is able to extract something beneficial to its own Interests from the most malicious accidents For every thing having two ends as well as two handles if a wise man miss the one he will not fail to hit the other as he in Plutarch who throwing a stone at a dog but hit his cursed Mother in Law said That he had not missed his Mark. A Wise man having his Palladium deposited within his own bosom by whatsoever circumstances he is besieged must needs be secure if by good they minister to the delights of Temperance if by bad they are improved to the interests of Patience and Contentedness so that though a Wise man be obnoxious to the spitful injuries of Fortune and may be assaulted by foreign calamities yet his mind his Fort-Royal is impregnable and in the midst of all disappointments its serenity shines as indisturbedly as the Lights of Pharos in the midst of Storms and Tempests Hereby you see that though many of the ingredients of our happiness grow not within ourselves yet their composition being at our disposal 't is easy either to add to their good qualities or to allay their bad ones But because herein consists the Fundamental difference between the morality of the Academics and Stoics I will endeavour to assert and illustrate it a little more clearly by discussing the main objecdtion of the Stoics which is this If say they our satisfaction should depend upon foreign advantages and any part of our happiness should be beyond our power than it being suspended on a thousand uncertainties it would both render Philosophy useless and the condition of mankind unavoidably calamitous and deplorable in that no body can be master of his own satisfaction but must be forced to intrust it with so blind and so uncertain a thing as Fortune and so must needs be continually liable to infinite misfortunes and incessantly harassed with fears of losing those things which are not more necessary to his happiness than they are uncertain and variable Though this objection be pregnantly answered by every man's Experience of humane affairs yet partly because 't is the main Basis of Stoicism and partly because it reflects unhandsomely on the dealings of Providence supposing that mankind would be hardly dealt with if all his Goods be not placed within the confines of his own power I shall endeavour to silence it for ever which I think may be done by these ensuing considerations 1. That our Earthly happiness is never mere and unmixed but when 't is purest it 's diluted with some dashes of misery Eurip. Unallayed satisfactions are too Divine to be enjoyed any where but where the Divinity itself Resides For as to the happiness of this life there is no one ultimate Object or summum Bonum to the Acquisition whereof all other Goods do but contribute as Intermedial Instruments but every thing that Ministers to our Contentment is a Portion of our Sovereign Happiness which is nothing else but a man's present repose and satisfaction I can not therefore but commend that Principle of some of the Cyrenaicks that neither expected nor pursued any other happiness in this life beside what was to be found in every single action and affair thereof For all unanimously teach that the tranquillity and satisfaction of the mind is the Sovereign happiness of this life and yet that is only an act of the mind exercised about its present objects and not any distinct object thereof But the Creatures are not replenished with that variety of perfections as to be able to gratify all our Appetites much less with that infinite fullness as to be able to satisfy them for alas all Created Being's are but small fragments of perfection which only serve to support our Souls till we arrive at the fruition of that Object whose Prerogative it is to be adequate and satisfactory to all our desires and expectations The Stoics then forget themselves when they think an impossibility of being certainly and entirely happy here such an insupportable Misery when all things in this world are by the unalterable Laws of Providence imperfect variable and subject to the Vicissitudes of Fortune Now Wise men that consider the Nature and Inconstancy of things will not design to themselves more raised degrees of Blessedness than the World can afford but will be content to be as happy as their own Capacities and the present Condition of things will permit and not fruitlessly aspire to heights of felicity which they can never reach 2. Though some smaller parcels of our happiness be beyond the command of our wills yet the greater Portions thereof are not for instance all that in which the Stoics place their whose felicity and that is pregnant enough of Tranquillity to render our lives sedate and comfortable What though some appendages of our happiness are out of our own reach if the main body thereof be within it Sure if Virtue be so Sovereign a good as singly to complete our felicity it will be sufficient to support our repose in the absence of smaller helps and assistances Why then should they deem our estate so deplorable when we can be secure of our most important interests though some lesser concernments be left to the disposal of fortune 3. 'T is in our power to alleviate and qualify those evils which 't is not in our power to escape What though I can not avoid Sickness Poverty and Disgrace yet I may by prudent reflection avoid being grieved at them and may improve them to the benefit of Virtue and Wisdom The mould of a man's Fortune is in his own hands though the materials are not Although a firm and healthful habit of body be exceeding conducive to a cheerful Tenor of mind yet may I be cheerful without it though I might have been much more so with it When I cannot suit events to my desires I will suit my desires to them I will compromise with those grievances which I cannot shun and those blows of Fortune I cannot ward off by Prudence I will dead by meeting them with a hardy courage and resolution I know I cannot bend the Laws of nature of my own will there remains therefore no other remedy then that I sweeten and mollify their rigour by a cheerful and generous compliance with them and so according to that vulgar but very wise saying Make a Virtue of necessity and so that metal that 's most solid and generous is most malleable too But to dispatch methinks it becomes not a dull Apathist to object that we should be disquieted with perpetual fears if any parcel of our happiness should not be locked up within our own breasts sure he might resolve when there remained no other remedy to cast himself into an insensible Apathy How ever every man that premeditates the nature and uncertainty of things will neither be so stupid as to be surprised with any disaster nor so silly as to double it by a fruitless anxiety but will make the best of his condition by prudence and discretion 2. A second thing for which I value the Platonists above all other Philosophers is the innocent Gaiety and Pleasantness of their Humours For Whether I look into their Principles or into their lives I can see nothing but what is calm and cheerful For beside that their complexions were generally brisk and sprightly the Genius of their Philosophy was free and facetious It being one of its main principles That as God had provided ineffable pleasures for good men in the next world so he had made liberal provisions for their entertainment in this and consequently that this life affords enough to please though not to satisfy whence they were willing to enjoy all its innocent pleasures and sensualities though they thought them not of any great concernment to such as were furnished with capacities of rising above it and aspiring to heavenly delights And thus you may see how at the same time a wise man may enjoy the world and despise it too And from this manly and Philosophic indifferency of life resulted a handsome and generous contempt of death for they did not so much defy it out of a dogged neglect of life as slight it out of a sober and Philosophic uncertainty whether it were better that they continued in their present happiness or left it to enjoy more pure and generous delights This was the main ground of Socrates' undaunted constancy in reference to death because whether it were preferable before life it was uncertain and ambiguous to all but God alone as Plato concludes his incomparable Apology says Euripides Who knows whether is life to live or die To die is to be born into another world which every goodman may justly presume he shall find better than this Though the main reason why they were so willing to bid adieu to this present Stage of life was an eager curiosity to be acquainted with the transactions and Phoenomena of the next And methinks had I no other Rule to guide myself by then mere Philosophy I could willingly play the Platonist in this particular For though I am neither valiant nor miserable and am as yet in my green and unexperienced years and have tasted less of sensual delights than I believe any one placed in the same capacities and circumstances with myself for I have hitherto scarce employed any of my senses but that of seeing insomuch that though my Palate be not surfeited and cloyed with the same repeated relishes nor my Eye quite weary of beholding the same repeated objects yet I could be highly content upon the account of a Philosophic curiosity to leave this present Theatre that I might enter upon the next for the delight of being entertained with a new Scene of things Socrates having been discoursing of the condition In Apolog. of good men after death adds were I but sure of the truth of these things I would die a thousand deaths for an experimental knowledge of them Besides the whole life of man is transacted in the short space of 24 hours in the rest of his age he does but tread the same Stage over and over the same businesses always returning in the same compass of time Now any wise or generous person that shall but reflect upon the best spent day of his whole life will scarce find the business of it so enticing as to make him over greedy of more of it But a man that has been running in this Round several years should methinks be so sick and weary of doing the same things over and over as to be willing to be at Rest or at least to change his Employment so that though life be no misery yet because there may be a satiety of it deaths a privilege But for the Stoics that I may continue the parallel with their only Rivals in mortality they founded their satisfaction upon a scornful & friarly contempt of every thing & are so injurious to their Creator as to teach that he has provided nothing to entertain his Creatures with but a few such childish empty trifles as grave men i. e. Stoics should scorn to taste much less to feed upon But though the Platonists are not so impious as to think that God made the world vain yet they are so wise and observing as to perceive that it has made itself so and therefore I meet with no Sect raised so much above the admired and gaudy trifles of the vulgar as they nor any more confidently putting the world's Pomp quite out of countenance by a handsome and free-spirited disdain than they nor any less concerned in news and the little transactions of humane affairs Nor any better entertaining themselves with the various and odd humours of mankind making daily Comedies to themselves from the follies and little conceits of the inconsiderate many Thus the spangled & glittering Squire who came to Athens very brave and gallant with a numerous train of Attendants supposing himself fine enough to be adored by the Athenians and to be reputed at least a Demi-God was by the discreet and facetious Satyrs of the Platonic Philosophers laughed out of his vanity and reduced to discretion and sobriety And thus the Platonist in Lucian raises mirth to himself from the several Acts of the Play now he laughs at the Rich man's displaying his Purple with his troublesome crowd of poor-spirited Sycophants anon pleasing himself with the disturbances and foolish madness of the Horse-race & then with those pretty passages which happen at Funerals and making of Wills next at the silly pleasures of great Feasts and curious Entertainments and then at the little tumults & odd contingencies at the Baths etc. But to conclude this head the Platonists were generous souls that being raised above the little concernments and under-Shreiveries of this life as the Cardinals of Rome are pleased to style all secular employments sat as unconcerned spectators looking down from aloft with pity and disdain upon the odd Carriage of humane affairs And happy is he Celsâ qui mentis ab arce Despicit errantes humanaque gaudia ridet For no Prospect is so pleasant and delightful to the mind of man as when he sees all the world below him & beholds all others scrambling for aspiring to those things which himself contemns and tramples upon 3. The third good quality of the Platonists was their valuing good-nature at so high a rate which though it be a constitution no less virtuous and excellent then 't is charming and amiable yet the estimate they set upon it was proportionable to its real value Whence resulted that exceeding delight they took in the Society of ingenious and sweet-natured young Gentlemen V. Platonis Convivium upon which score they professed themselves as great Votaries to the Celestial Venus as common Mortals are to the Earthly one for their Amours were not kindled by lust and petulency they being professedly the most generous contemners of Women in the world but were pure and cleanly enough to become Angels and separated souls Plato's Love-Laws forbidding to court any other objects then abstracted and intellectual Beauties And Plotinus makes it the first ascent to wisdom Ennead 1. l. 3 to be affected with the mere proportions of Harmony abstracted from the sensible sound and to be enamoured with the features of beauty without respect to the body which they render beautiful And yet hence some have taken occasion to slander Plato himself together with his incomparable master Socrates as guilty of that unnatural beastliness of the lustful Sodomites Although Plato at the end of his Convivium has said as much to remove all suspicion from Socrates as a matter of this nature is capable of And himself in his first book of Laws detests and strictly prohibits this dishonourable impurity as a most unnatural impudence But the forementioned calumny had never gained any credit with us had it not been reported by some of the Ancient Fathers & yet it is too notorious to dissemble that they were not only very careless in their relations concerning the Philosophers being apparently guilty of innumerable but also in many Instances highly disingenuous insomuch that I find no Prose-writer to agree so much with their reports as Lucian whose main design it was to abuse every body that was grave and sober Which may a little appear by giving you an account of the original and progress of the forementioned slander The first Authors then of this and other resembling reports were the Comick-Poets who were persons of a free droling and Satirical humour and whose chief design in their Comedies was to abuse men with roguish and unlucky Stories whatever was their Argument their Plot was always satire They therefore who flourished about the time of the Peloponesian War when the government of Athens was popular were wont to traduce the great and rich men of the City But when the Grandees were grown too big to be brought upon the Stage by the alteration of the Government into an Aristocracy they betook themselves to abuse former Poets and in that Age Homer was sufficiently lashed but afterwards when Philosophy began to flourish the Philosophers upon every small quarrel that happened between them and the Poets were brought upon the Stage and persecuted with all their Satyrs And thus this foul charge of Sodomy wherewith Socrates has been so loudly impeached was nothing else but an abusive invention of Aristophanes who having an implacable picque against him endeavoured by all means to render him both odious and ridiculous For Socrates being of a grave and severe humour did not a little dis-relish the vanity and looseness of the Stage whereupon Aristophanes the Poet Laureate of that Age was so nettled that he immediately left the old Comical Argument of droling upon former Poets and set himself to abuse the Philosophers but especially Socrates all whose actions he continually persecuted with sharp and unlucky Satyrs And therefore whereas Socrates was wont to take home to himself the most ingenious & sprightly Youths he could meet with to bestow upon them an Education proportionable to their parts Aristophanes with too much foulness for any Ingenuous Person represents him as one that picked up the loveliest youths to the foulest and most beastly purposes And whereas Socrates taught that God was to be sought after in Heaven and not in their Images Aristophanes' perstringes him as one that Worshipped the Clouds and to this end he Wrote his only to abuse Socrates and his Gods Neither did their Malice rest here but proceeded to Death and Banishment for the Poets had the greatest hand in the impeachment of Socrates and Melitus that was his most vehement Accuser was one of Aristophanes' Players And a while after about the CXX Olimpiad one Sophocles a Pragmatical Fellow of the Poetic Faction procured a Decree for the Banishment of all the Philosophers from Athens which took effect till at length the Controversy being fairly debated before the Senate the cause of the Philosophers seemed so apparently innocent to them that they immediately caused the Decree to be canceled ordered that the Philosophers should be speedily called home and fined Sophocles five Talents Now though the Fathers could never meet with any such filthy Relations in sober and impartial Historians yet because they apprehended though very ineptly that it made for the Interest of Christianity that the best men among the Heathens should be but bad enough rather than be destitute of competent Testimonies against Socrates the most eminent instance of Ethnic Virtue they would cite them from such as were not only his Enemies but Poets and Satirists too i. e. from those who were not only obliged by their design to abuse all men especially the wiser and more serious sort but also were incensed with a peculiar spite and malice against him Any one therefore that is acquainted with the Genius of the Grecian Comedy in general and with this now mentioned Contest of the Philosophers and Comedians in particular will be far from thinking their Satyrs a sufficient Testimony against any man's morality And therefore some of our modern Critics are not very kind to the Philosophers when they think a good part of the Philosophic History is to be collected out of the Ancient Comedians Having consumed so many lines in Vindicating our Philosopher's chastity I shall wave adding any farther Evidences of the goodness of their Natures only give me leave to throw in this single item thereof that in the Platonic History you may meet with more instances of true Philosophic & Heroic Friendship then in all the world beside They were indeed generally somewhat too fond of their Friends & it was their expressing the offices of Friendship and Good-Nature by way of Allusion in amorous terms that gave too much ground for the forementioned slander And now Sir how much will this Excellent Quality recommend them to our esteem when we consider at how high a rate our Blessed Saviour himself valued it If we look into his Laws what are they but so many injunctions to the several instances of good nature Mildness Patience Mercifulness Humility Candour Ingenuity His new and peculiar Precept is That we should love one another and be kind not only to Friends but Enemies And therefore a peevish ill-natured Christian is the greatest contradiction in the World Peevishness being the greatest reproach and weakness of humane Nature and most contrary to the temper of the Divine Mind So that they who not long since were wont to discourse that the Saints or People of God i. e. That sort of people who can be Devout and Godly without being Virtuous are indeed peevish here but in Heaven this imperfection shall be removed might as well have told us that the Saints are Drunkards here but in Heaven they shall be Temperate the Saints are Cheats and Knaves here but in Heaven they shall be Honest the Saints are Adulterers here but in Heaven they shall be chaste for an habitual Peevishness is as inconsistent with the design of Christianity as the sins of an habitual dishonesty Drunkenness and Adultery And then if we look into our Saviour's life the unparallelled civility and obligingness of his Deportment seems to be almost as high an Evidence of the Truth and Divinity of his Doctrine as his unparallelled Miracles were For 't is altogether unimaginable that so sweet-natured a Person should be such a base and profligate Impostor as he must have been if he had been one And among all his Favourites it was the Gentle and sweet-natured St. john that was his darling Disciple whilst we often find him checking Peter's rude and unmannerly Zeal But all this while by good Nature I do not barely design a sweet Complexion and temperament of Body though that is an happy advantage to Virtue but such a Divine and Gracious temper of Mind as produces a sincere kindness and benevolence towards all men 'T is the fairest Character and Imitation of the Deity that distributes his Bounty to all and like his own Sun shines upon the Just and Unjust 'T is a Catholic Charity that enfolds the whole world in the Arms of love and kindness Only there are some persons of such pevish and self confined Spirits that will not suffer themselves to be embraced by those whose unbounded embraces equally comprehend all and disdain to be but the partial objects of an impartial Love These men confine the displays of their love and tenderness within the narrow and contracted Circumference of a small party and Excommunicate the residue of Mankind as unworthy their charity and think it a great pollution to entertain any kind thoughts for any besides themselves confining the Elect within the walls of Rome or Geneva Now against such testy and irregular Spirits the sweetest Natures have the greatest Antipathies not from any malice or bitterness against their Persons but from a true Zeal for largeness and ingenuity of Spirit and a real hatred against all those Pestilent qualities that tend to supplant or destroy it Whence the Blessed jesus who was the highest and most matchless Pattern of all the Instances of Good-Nature was remarkably sharp and severe in his Invectives against the Pharisees because these Illnatured Fellows despised and scorned all that were not of their Sect endeavouring to confine all Goodness to their own Faction and looking upon the rest of Mankind as a rout of vile and worthless Reprobates Now though our Saviour could win and oblige Publicans and Harlots persons of the most debauched and losest lives by his mild and sweet Deportment yet when He had to do with these holy Pharisaical Zelots' his usual Language was Ye Scribes and Pharisees Hypocrites ye are of your Father the Devil There being nothing more hateful to God than a high pretender to Religion void of Charity and true Goodness I have heard some men of a bitter and envious Complexion that have too much Gall to have the Innocence of Doves and that through the bitterness of their own Spirits cannot relish the sweetness of Good-Nature inveigh against the advancing of Good-Nature as if it were a more neat and secret design of undermining the Interests of Religion and advancing those of Atheism A Calumny as absurd as 't is impious For how can that undermine Religion which is its prime intendment Can any design be injured or defeated by its intrinsic and proper end And what more evident then that one of the main purposes of Christianity is to sweeten and refine our Natures What does our Lawgiver more vehemently and frequently urge than Meekness Mercifulness Humility and other resembling Instances of Good-Nature What bids greater defiance to the genuine Spirit of Christianity then rude churlish and ungentile Peevishness What more lovely in the Blessed jesus then the sweetness and obligingness of his Conversation What did he ever more inveigh against than an uncivil and Pharisaical Zeal howsoever otherwise sincere and cordial so that if to urge upon men the practice of Good-natured Qualities be to supplant Christianity than Christianity must supplant and contradict itself But men have unhappily of late Christened a sort of sulphureous and Fanatique fire by the name of Zeal And when once their minds are tainted and enraged by this hot devotional Zeal 't is as natural to them to be rude and base-natured as 't is to Dogs and Tigers Zeal is a fire in the Soul which unless qualified and slaked by meekness and a calm-nature doth not only prey upon the mind and devour its intellectual Powers and inflame all the Passions but its rage breaks forth and sets whole States and Kingdoms into a combustion and reduces the whole World to Ashes the greatest Zealots always proving the greatest Incendiaries so that what Homer says of the Syrian Star is not more true of any thing then this fiery Zeal Iliad 4. A fourth pre-eminence of the Platonists that I may insist on no more is their readiness & ability in the smaller Morals by which I mean their skill in all the Arts of behaviour and conversation For though I have sufficiently experienced a modest shamefacedness and uncoothness in ceremonial addresses to be the natural and unavoidable results of privacy as all Metals contract rust by lying yet the Platonists notwithstanding their contemplative retiredness were not inferior to the most polished Courtiers in the neatness and complaisance of their Deportment Which I am apt to ascribe chiefly to the readiness and pregnancy of their Fancies for though a sound and steady Judgement which rarely goes in company with subtle and flashy imaginations is the most useful and commanding ability in business yet 't is the quick and sprightly fancy that takes and commands most in converse A strong ready wit with a bold and plausible Tongue shall win more respect and reputation than all other more valuable and emproving accomplishments if wanting these advantages Besides they did not spend all their time and diligence in Bookishness which renders Scholars soft silly unexperienced things but proposing to themselves ability and judgement in business as one main end of Study they rather used their Learning than admired it according to that Aphorism of my Lord Bacon Crafty men contemn studies simple men admire them & wise men use them But the main ground of their good-meen was their being blessed with all the advantages of nature & education Were it not too tedious to run through the whole succession of the Academy from the first rise thereof to its utmost period it would not be difficult to represent to you how every member thereof superinduced to a pure complexion and a gentile education the advantages of Travel and severe Study and what more could be desired to complete them in all the Realities and Ornaments of Humane Nature As Plato himself was of so well-tempered a complexion that he chose an unhealthy place of residence for a check and revulsion to his too high and luxuriant habit of Body and yet lived to a great age unacquainted with sickness and diseases and at last this Socratic Swan expired insensibly in a pleasant contemplation Est etiam says Cicero quietae & purae atque eleganter actae aetatis placida ac lenis senectus qualem accepimus Platonis qui uno & octuagessimo aetatis anno scribens mortuus est And then for his Parentage though I do as little credit that he was begot either by Apollo or by a Spectre in his shape as I do that he was born of a Virgin Mother and yet both are reported by many Authors and seem to be believed by more yet 't is past doubt that his extraction was from two of the most Ancient and most Noble Families in Athens his Mother Perictione being of the race of Solon and his Father Aristo of the Family of the Codri And then for his Education he was no Athenian Cockney but was Socrates' darling favourite Traveled into all parts of the Learned World resided a considerable time in the Court of Dionysius where he was both admired and envied by the Courtiers for the unaffected Gracefulness of his addresses and some say the reason why he received so bad usage from the Tyrant was that he excelled him so far in all the Arts and charms of conversation that he seemed to be almost as much respected and admired as himself For he knew how to be facetious without being vain or trifling & how to be serious without being sour or morose his behaviour was always mild and courteous his humour always cheerful and uniform and his gravity at an equal distance from moroseness & vanity to be brief he was entirely adorned with all the accomplishments that can command either love or honour And then for Plotinus his deportment as Porphyry relates in his life was so gentile that his Audience was composed of a confluence of the Noblest and most Illustrious Personages in Rome his integrity so eminent that he was deputed overseer to most of their Wills and Arbitrator in most of their Controversies and yet managed all with that Candour Prudence and Sincerity as that he neither lost one Friend nor Purchased one Enemy in five and twenty years' Residence at Rome For the rest of his life consult Porphyry and Eunapius For the life of Porphyry I refer you to Eunapius but yet I cannot omit this single instance of the goodness of his humour that after an obstinate conflict and many reiterated controversial Rencounters with Amelius as soon as he was convinced that Truth and Amelius stood together he neither scrupled to make a Public Recantation then nor to record it to Posterity that himself was baffled as he has done in the Life of Plotinus than which we scarce know a greater instance of an Heroic Candour For Proclus consult his Scholar Marinus the Neapolitan and Philostratus the younger De vitis Sophistarum I say the younger because he was Nephew to him that wrote the History of Apollonius Tyanaeus though they be usually confounded upon the Authority of that careless Rhapsodist Suidas who has been the Author of infinite other resembling mistakes lastly consult Eunapius for the lives of AEdesius jamblicus Sopater Constantine's unhappy favourite Eustathius and his eminent wife Sosipatra of whom so many strange stories are reported Crispus one of Iulian's Courtiers a man of eminent prudence and policy Oribasius julian's Physician Maximus and Chrysanthius his great Favourites the former whereof was an eminent Courtier during the time of Iulian's Reign & afterwards I fear too much an instance of Christian Cruelty and Revenge though the generous Chrysanthius could never be courted from his Philosophic retirements by all the Emperor's importunity Proaeresius who was so famous an Orator that the City of Rome erected to him a public Statue of Brass with this inscription Regina Rerum Roma Regi Eloquentiae Hephaestion Himerius Libanius Nymphidianus etc. and you will find them such a succession of Gentile Virtuous and Generous Persons that the Ethnic world cannot show the like To these I might add the novel restorers of Platonism for as the Platonic succession expired not long after the reign of julian having received its mortal wound from Constantine who dissolved their Schools and dispersed their Professors so about the fourteenth Centurie it began to revive and to wrestle with Aristotle's Philosophy for some of the Grecian Prelates that then sat in the Council of Florence called to reconcile the Greek and the Latin Churches seeing all other Philosophy quite dashed out of Countenance in these Western Parts by the Aristotelian they were not a little zealous to restore that of Plato whence arose the disputes between Georgius Trapezuntius and Georgius Scholarius on the behalf of Aristotle and Bessarion Bishop of Nice made Cardinal for his eminent services in the Council and Gemistus Pletho on the behalf of Plato But Pletho getting into favour with Laurentius Cosmo the great Duke inspired him with such a mighty zeal for the Platonic Philosophy that he immediately devoted young Ficinus Son to one of his chiefest Physicians to its Restauration and educated him accordingly and invited that worthy Hero johannes Picus the Earl of Mirandula Georgius Vespusius Christophorus Landinus Angelus Politianus and others to Florence where they erected an Academy Which with much more you may meet with in the extant Epistles of the Earl of Mirandula Marsilius Ficinus and Angelus Politanus But I proceed though the Platonists could Artificially conform their Behaviour to the more refined and Gentile sort of Men yet as for that savage Beast the Popular Rout they valued no more to please them then to gratify Wolves or Tigers for really Sir folly is so moulded into the Constitution of the common and mechanical sort of men that that Philosopher must be well-nigh as absurd as they who supposes them capable of wisdom when they have scarce wit or judgement enough to think a thought that is not inept and ridiculous Their childish and froward humour is not unhandsomely displayed by Charon All that they think is Vanity all that they say is false and erroneous that they reprove is good that they approve is naught that which they praise is infamous that which they do and undertake is folly So that 't is not possible for any man who aspires to wisdom to condescend to any compliance with their base and absurd humours And therefore these Sons of wisdom were regardless of them as of Apes and Baboons But now for the Stoics their Conversation was insolent and supercilious their looks affected and artificial their Deportment was such a sour and morose behaviour as the vulgar stile gravity And I think josephus was not much mistaken when he described the rude and ill-natured Pharisees by comparing them with the Stoics says he describing his own Sect For as the supercilious Pharisees accounted their own Sect the only School of Sanctity so the Stoics esteemed themselves the only Sons of wisdom and all others Children Fools and Madmen I might both evidence these things by several particular instances and add several other Prerogatives of the Platonic Morality but because I fear I have more need to beg your pardon for having been already so tedious I shall only tell you that you may find the fairest and exactest Idea and Picture thereof in the Life and Precepts of Socrates the several lineaments of which lie scattered and diffused in Plato's Writings but are pretty handsomely collected into one Table in a late French discourse of Mr. julien Davion Entitled Le Crayon du Christianisme en la Philosophie de Socrate And now I proceed to the ne●●●art of my Task their Logic of which my censure is briefly this That as Plato's manner of arguing is more succinct than the tedious way of Syllogising so 't is not less sure and evident for what discourse can proceed with greater evidence and conviction then after you have explained the Terms of the Question and agreed with your Adversary about the matter debated of to propose to him some Principles so clear and palpable that they shall either presuppose or enforce his assent and from thence to lead him by Induction through a series of propositions depending upon and orderly deduced from your first Proleptick Principles till he is fairly brought or unawares betrayed into an unavoidable necessity of assenting to the Truth you assert Which is the method that Plato pretends to I must confess that arguing by Syllogisms is more suitable to Youths and Novices in Reason but 't is far more Elegant and Manly to manage a few short Interrogatories with that dexterity and strength of Reason as thereby to distress your Adversary so far as to force him either to Seal to your Opinion or to retract his own former concessions For in the former Method the Disputant moves on by slow Progressions and takes a great compass about to approach and get up to his Enemy but in the latter his motion is quick and nimble and the engagement so direct and smart that it cannot be closely pursued but by Persons very expert and knowing in the Art and Laws of Reasoning But some that make the best Laws are not always their best observers Thus though Plato's discourse about practical matters are exceeding handsome and pertinent yet when he treats of speculative Notions his rules of arguing could not be more strict close and exact than his Argumentations were wide In his Plato Exotericus lose and incoherent When Patricius confidently asserts Plato's demonstrations in his Parmenides to be so strong and undeniable Ut nullae tales apud Mathematicum ullum reperiantur I commend his confidence but dare not contradict his assertion because I think it unhandsome to contradict in a matter which I dare not be very confident I understand But when Cardinal Bessarion asserts Adu. Calum l. 1. c. 5. Totum Platonis Timaeum ex syllogismis demonstrativis constare I who have read over that discourse with as much caution and attention as I could dare by the Cardinal's leave pronounce that there is not one demonstrative syllogism in the whole Book nay that there is not one true and valid Argument but that the whole discourse is weak and incoherent And to speak out plainly that Person will much oblige me that shall direct me to one material ratiocination about speculative Theories in all Plato's Writings where I cannot show him some manifest flaw or other For they either 1. bottom upon uncertain and inevident Principles as they generally do but because there can be no certainty in the conclusion without a certainty in the premises and the certainty of intermediate propositions depends upon the first if that be uncertain the whole train of Inferences deduced from it though aptly connected to each other must needs be so too Or else 2. they are circular as in his Meno he bottoms the Souls Reminiscency of those Ideas it conversed with in a former state upon its presupposed Immortality and yet in his Phaedo he fairly argues for the Souls Immortality from its presupposed Reminiscency And any one that peruses his Writings warily will find them to abound with infinite such Circles Or 3. he wanders into matters remote and impertinent to the Subject and Argument of his Discourse roving into disputes of a quite distant nature from the Question in debate or beating about through wild intricate and uncertain Ambages or taking a wide and tedious compass to pursue and drive a trivial word into its proper signification Though perhaps this charge will admit of an Apology Because most of his disputes were managed against the Sophists of that age who made it their whole business to maintain wrangles by tricks and shifts of words and therefore whoever undertook to dispute against them must of necessity be engaged in word quarrels And hence it was that Plato does almost every where take such large compasses merely to vindicate the signification of a single word against their idle cavils and though sometimes he may pursue his task presly and coherently yet because of the small importance of the matter debated of his discourse must needs be both very tedious and not very profitable Or else 5. there is some flaw and incoherence in some of the intermediate propositions which must needs mar the chain of his whole Discourse For the certain knowledge of Consequences is only conditional and supposes the Truth of Premises so that where any Proposition is false there the coherence ceases and all conclusions that follow it are absurd because incoherent But if I should give you a Catalogue of his Circular arguings incoherences contradictions non-consequences and all other violations of the Laws of Reasoning I must send you a Volumn as vast as his And besides it would not be less fruitless than tedious and might seem to aim at no other design but merely his disparagement But yet that you may not suspect me of rashness in drawing up so big a charge against so eminent a person without being able to back it with a proportionable evidence I suppose it will not be impertinent to give you a competent proof of it if I can perform it without being tedious Which may be done by proposing one instance and referring you to an Author that will supply you with infinite more if you think it worth the while to examine them The Instance I shall give you is the known and famous Argument for the Souls Immortality in his Phaedrus The sense of which words is fully and more plainly contained in this Analysis The Soul is always in motion that which is always in motion is self moving that which is selfmoving is never deserted of itself that which never deserts itself never ceases to move that which never ceases to move is the source and origine of all motion that which is the source of all motion has no beginning and that which has no beginning can have no ending To omit that every Proposition is either false or uncertain or incoherent as yourself will easily observe judge whether we are not likely to have a mighty proof of the Souls immortality when it must be resolved into its own self-subsistence The Author I shall refer you to is johannes Baptista Crispus his Quinarius Primus de Ethnicis Philosophis caute Legendis 'T is a Book of no small bulk containing above 500 pages in folio and yet the main business of it is to display the defectiveness of Plato's arguings Where you may be supplied with infinite apparent & palpable instances thereof if you will be at the pains to read and consider them We might possibly have had a better account in Theopompus his Book of which thus Athenaeus 11. 15. Plato's Dialogues are trifling and false and that many others of them are stolen out of the Discourses of Aristippus or Antisthenes or Bryson of Heraclea After this brief account of Plato's Logic I come now to his Natural Philosophy in which I shall endeavour all possible brevity because this part as well as the former doth not so directly concern my present design the intendment of my charge being chiefly against his Natural Theology But that my Discourse may be entire in all its parts and regular in its method I shall to my account of his Logic cast in this of his physiology Which will be sufficiently displayed and disparaged too by telling you that in its main strokes it accords with the Aristotelean Philosophy a parallel between them was asserted and demonstrated by Ammonius Porphyry Hierocles V. Phot. eclog. CCLI and others of the sacred succession among the Ancients and among Modern Writers has been attempted by Foxius Carpentarius Marronius Buratellus and others The Retail of instances you may see in them but he that tells you in gross that they agree in one Principle by which alone they solve all the appearances and productions of Nature tells you all For as Aristotle resolves all Phaenomena into his Forms which he starts from the Bosom of matter so Plato solves all by the Soul of the Universe and Ideas which in Greek are all one with Forms For the Mechanical Hypotheses having been probably advanced to a considerable Grandeur by Leucippus and Democritus of whom Plato makes not any mention in all his Writings and other Ancient Vertuosis these two great and ambitious Wits Plato and Aristotle designing a Philosophical Empire to themselves scorned to be so meanly employed as only to improve other men's principles and therefore endeavoured to amuse the world with new ones which they knew others could as little confute as themselves could prove by reason of their obscurity and remoteness from sense How little Aristotle intended his Forms should be understood is already infinitely notorious and how little mind Plato had that it should be ever known what kind of Thing his Universal Soul is is as notoriously apparent from his descriptions of it which are nothing else but some odd fantastic Schemes of numerical figures and proportions as you may see in both the Timaeus' where 't is highly pleasant to read how seriously he prescribes the Method of its Composition out of numerical Ingredients Take saith he all the numbers which make up Musical proportions as Diapente's Diatesserons and an infinite number more but be especially careful not to omit the double that which arises by even proportions as 1 2 4 8 etc. and that whose proportions run into odd numbers as 1 3 9 27 etc. Mix and pound them together with all possible exactness and if you find any void spaces between the even and odd numbers fill them with the smallest which are some very fine and minute fragments and when you have wrought all exceeding exactly into the shape of the Letter I divide it in the middle long ways into two equal parts cross them in the form of the Letter X and be sure to fasten them very strongly at the Commissure and then bow all four joints till at length you make them so pliable as to bring them into a Spherical figure and then 't is brought to a right Animary Temper and Harmony If this description to what ever purpose 't is designed be not prodigiously silly and ridiculous pray tell me what is And yet this senseless insignificant Jargon is made the sole and intimate Principle of all Natural Events All Motions Generations Corruptions Alterations Sympathies Antipathies the properties of Bodies the figure of the Heavens the system of the Stars the motions of the Planets Eclipses Comets Meteors The roundness of the Earth the Flux and Reflux of the Sea the Original of Rivers and Fountains the Generation of Winds Thunder Lightning Clouds Rain Hail Snow Ice Dew Petrification the wonders of the Magnet the Generation and Transmutation of Metals the Powers and Specific Virtues of Plants the Variety of Animals their Origine their Shapes their Nutrition their Faculties The Qualities of the Elements Heat Cold Gravity Levity Fluidity Firmness Rarity Density Perspicuity Opacity Hebetude Subtlety Smoothness Asperity Hardness Softness Stubbornness Flexibility Light Colours Sounds Tastes Smells and all other Phaenomena of Nature are only so many Tricks of this Magical kind of Soul If I could have satisfied myself it had been to any purpose I should have given you an account of his enormous absurdities in all the forementioned particulars as they are discoursed of in his Timaeus which contains the whole Body of his Natural Philosophy But I shall beg your leave to dismiss this Theme partly because none have more professedly disclaimed the Platonic physiology than they that stickle most for his other Whimsies partly because the Aristotelian Philosophy having been of late so shamefully baffled this which agrees so much with it in its main Principles and more in its Genius must of necessity perish together with it and so will as little need as deserve any particular confutation partly because their physiology is well nigh purely Theological The Platonists always Treating of as Proclus observes so that in ventilating and sifting their Theology I must also of necessity discuss their Natural Philosophy which is every where so intimately mingled with it but chiefly because I am lately grown such a despairing Sceptic in all Physiological Theories that I cannot concern myself in the Truth or Falsehood of any Hypotheses For though I prefer the Mechanical Hypotheses before any other yet me thinks their contexture is too slight and brittle to have any stress laid upon them and I can resemble them to nothing better than your Glass drops from which if the least portion be broken the whole Compages immediately dissolves and shatters into Dust and Atoms for their parts which rather lie then hang together being supported only by the thin film of a brittle Conjecture not annealed by experience and observation if that fail any where the whole Systeme of the Hypothesis unavoidably shatters And how easy a thing it is to spoil the prettiest conjecture is obvious to the most vulgar observer The chief reason therefore why I prefer the Mechanical and Experimental Philosophy before the Aristotelean is not so much because of its so much greater certainty but because it puts inquisitive men into a method to attain it whereas the other serves only to obstruct their industry by amusing them with empty and insignificant Notions And therefore we may rationally expect a greater Improvement of Natural Philosophy from the Royal Society if they pursue their design than it has had in all former ages for they having discarded all particular Hypotheses and wholly addicted themselves to exact Experiments and Observations they may not only furnish the World with a complete History of Nature which is the most useful part of physiology but also lay firm and solid foundations to erect Hypotheses upon though perhaps that must be the work of future Ages at least we shall see whether it be possible to frame any certain Hypotheses or no which is the thing I most doubt of because though the Experiments be exact and certain yet their Application to any Hypotheses is doubtful and uncertain so that though the Hypothesis may have a firm Basis to bottom upon yet it can be fastened and cemented to it no other way but by conjecture and uncertain though probable applications and therefore I doubt not but we must at last rest satisfied with true and exact Histories of Nature for use and practice and with the handsomest and most probable Hypotheses for delight and Ornament And now I pass over to the main design of these Papers which is to give an account of the Platonic Theology The Civil Part whereof viz. That which concerns their Public Worship I shall omit For all the Religious Observations of their Country being trifling obscene or inhuman their temporizing Conformity to them stands upon Record as one of their greatest Blemishes Though it must be confessed that the Platonists were of all men the greatest Refiners and Improvers of Helenisme instead of rude and barbarous Usages introducing civil and more modest Ceremonies And yet the latter Platonists or second School of Plato degenerated into the basest and foulest Superstition being the greatest Patrons of Theurgical Rites and Magical Arts or rather juggling Tricks for whatever they were they could be no better especially those of them that did most Pythagorise As Apollonius Tyanaeus that grand stickler for Ehtnicism jamblicus one of their Famousest Devoto's julianus the Syrian Surnamed Theurgus from his Eminent knowledge and agility in Magical Tricks were great Zealots for the Pythagorean Philosophy But if you look into Eunapius you will see that not only these but the Emperor julian Porphyry Maximus Libanius Amelius Sopater AEdesius Chrysanthius and others were Zealous Asserters of this Magical kind of Juggling chiefly as 't is supposed to confront the Christian Religion and the Miracles on which it stood But I forbear to prosecute this Theme my intention being not to discourse of their public and political actions but only of their private sentiments Their Theology then consisted of two parts Practical or that which concerns Theological Virtues and Speculative or that which concerns speculations about Theological matters Which two parts integrate a Body of Divinity not unlike to that of King Ptolemy's man in Lucian who was one half perfectly black and the other exceeding white so that part of their Theology which relates to practice is eminently clear and perspicuous whilst that which is employed in Theory and Contemplation is monstrously dark and obscure This latter I shall endeavour to evince more largely in the sequel of my discourse but for a brief evidence of the first take this short Catalogue of their Sentiments concerning Religion which are such as these It 's main design is to perfect and dignify humane Nature 't is consonant to our Natural Reasons complies with our Natural Necessities relieves our Natural Wants It consists in living up to our Faculties and acting as becomes Rational Being's In clearing the Soul from prejudices and prepossessions and pursuing Truth with an honest and impartial Simplicity In following the Conduct of Reason and being confident in its Guidance seeing the Condition of him that does so is as secure as 't is certain that Infinite Goodness cannot be angry with him that has endeavoured with all faithfulness and diligence to know and do his Duty It resides in the Mind and Spirit not in Customs and bare Ceremonies It is Free and Ingenuous not Slavish and Troublesome because it flows from a true Love of God and Goodness It is truly Noble and Generous and requires of us to act suitable to the Dignity of rational Being's to keep up the Splendour and Grandeur of our Natures and to scorn any Action that 's unhandsome or unworthy our Station and Quality It commands us only to live like Men and forbids us nothing but what makes us Brutes or Devils It teaches us to imitate and resemble the Divine Perfections to be Godlike in Wisdom and Justice and Goodness in Meekness and Pity and Clemency in Kindness and Patience in forgiving Injuries and Pardoning Enemies in doing hurt to no Man and doing good to every Man It interdicts us not any Innocent Delights but only restrains the Extravagancies of our Passions and Appetites It is the most conducive Instrument in the world to the pleasures of both Mind and Body Infelicities though Providence were banished the World being the Spontaneous Issues of Vile Practices and Sin the Natural Womb of Punishment it therefore permits unless in some special contingencies all Corporeal Pleasures as far as they are healthful and pleasant and debars us of no delights but those that are destructive of the Tranquillity of our Minds or Indolency of our Bodies It produces a sweet and gracious temper of Mind that causes an universal benevolence and kindness to Mankind It makes us Affable Humble Courteous Charitable Moderate Prudent Unpassionate It consists of Love Candor Ingenuity Clemency Patience Mildness and all other Instances of Good-Nature It detests nothing more than a Peevish Froward Morose Uncivil Passionate Furious Talkative Fanatic Zeal It begets a true Liberty and Freedom of Spirit It Exempts us from all effeminate Fears and Scruples and begets the greatest Serenity and Cheerfulness of Mind It instructs us to dread no Evil from God but to look upon Him as an infinitely Gracious and Benign Being that designs nothing more than the happiness and perfection of his Creatures that Transacts with Mankind by gentle and paternal Measures and that is so far from tying upon us Niceties and Scruples that he pities our Infirmities and bids us to concern ourselves only about plain and palpable Duties It is the most sprightly and vivacious thing in the world driving away all sad and gloomy Melancholy begetting in us a firm and rational Confidence and the ineffable joys of a good Conscience It advances the Soul to its Just Power and Dominion and enables it to govern all Corporeal Appetites and therefore enjoins us above all things to shun Intemperance not only for its own Intrinsique Baseness but for its mischievous Effects because it naturally so debauches and dulls our Reasons as to disable them for all good and virtuous Actions For Religion is pure cleanly and spiritual but an intemperate sensuality is nasty sottish and makes the mind of man cheap and foolish and unapt for any thing that is Manly Generous and Rational and so is the greatest Impediment to all the ends and Exercises of Religion which directly tends to the enobling of our Natures the fortifying of our Reasons the subduing of all our lower and sottish Appetites the advancing of our manly and intellectual Abilities in any thing that renders us less like Beasts and more like men But as for Intemperance that does by a natural necessity besot and weaken the vigour of our Reasons and so directly thwart all the ends of Religion for it either stupifies or enrages our Spirits either stuffing our Bodies with dull watery and flatulent humours or putting their Ferments into irregular and extravagant motions I have often known a rude wild dissolute choleric ungovernable Spirit enter into persons otherwise of a well-inclined Complexion by no other way then a wide and devouring Throat To conclude our work in this World is to see that the maintain its own Authority against all the assaults of rude and barbarous Passions that it tame and civilize that wild and savage Beast to which Providence has tied it that by a complete Victory over all ignoble and unhandsome motions of the brutish Faculties it may be in a manner restored to the condition of a pure and intellectual Being and so be capacitated to relish the joys proper to God and Spiritual Natures for we are not capable of that degree of Felicity which they enjoy till our Souls are rendered so by proportionate degrees of Purity and Holiness for the happiness of Heaven is pure and intellectual and therefore our minds are purged here from all feculencies of matter that they may be fitted and qualified to relish its Enjoyments so that when the vigorous Energy of the Soul has melted down all the drossy parts of sluggish and unwieldy matter and is become Godlike and purely spiritual than it shall mount up into the Regions of Bliss and Happiness and shall be admitted into an intimate converse and union with the Divine Nature and shall live in the Ravishing Contemplations and Embrace of uncreated Beauty and bathe its dilated Faculties in the full streams of Infinite Goodness and Sun itself in the Invigorating Beams of Light and Love and spend a whole Eternity in the blissful Acts of Love and Joy and Peace and every thing that can procure or increase its happiness By all which you easily discern that Religion is no Arbitrary Exaction but Wise and Rational and of natural necessity to perfect and refine our Natures to raise and purify our Minds to prepare and fit us for a higher and more Divine Condition the Soul being not capable or fit without it to enjoy the pleasures of God and Heaven And now I descend to their Speculative or Metaphysical Theology which the Platonists style Divine The Peripatetics Primitive Philosophy and include in it that which they call Sapience or Metaphysics so that I shall not confine myself to matters merely Theological but shall take in all the general Principles of Science especially because I do not intend a pursuit of all particular Disputes for that would be an endless undertaking but only some such General Exceptions as though they may have a more direct aspect on Metaphysical Speculations yet may concern their Philosophy in gross and cast an oblique look upon all its other parts This premised I proceed 1. The first thing therefore against which I except is their way of resolving knowledge into its first and fundamental Principles in that by rejecting the Testimony and Judgement of sense in matters of Philosophy they do but involve and perplex the Principles thereof under the pretext of a more abstracted and intellectual discovery of things For hereby the minds of men are taken off from the native Evidence of plain and palpable Truths and are fain to ground all their knowledge upon nice and subtle Speculations whereby at least clear and unquestionable Truths are resolved into Principles infinitely more uncertain and disputable than themselves And that the Platonic way of resolving knowledge is justly chargeable herewith needs no other proof then barely to represent it They then suppose that the Truth of all Being's consists in a conformity to their Archetypal Ideas whereby they mean some General Patterns by which all the Individuals of each species are framed so that to investigate the Nature of things we must endeavour to know the Resemblance they have to their Originals and that therefore to reflect upon these and to consider their agreement with sensible things is the only way to attain a certain knowledge of the Natures of the things themselves And therefore Plato concludes the Omniscience of the first Mind from the supposition that it is furnished with the Ideas of all things And that Mankind might be in a capacity of knowing the Natures of things he asserts that God has hanged a multitude of these little Pictures of himself and all his Creatures in every man's understanding that by attending to them he might direct himself in his Conceptions and Notions of the things themselves and that herein alone consists the Nature of true Science In Timao and therefore the only difference he assigns between Science and Opinion is that the one attends to these unchangeable Ideas but the other to the uncertain and variable Reports of sense And in another place In Epist. ad Dionis Amicos discoursing more particularly of this Notion to the Science of a thing he requires a threefold knowledge viz. of its Name of its Definition and of its Picture which last he asserts to be the chief cause of knowledge and instances in a Circle to the true Science whereof 't is necessary that we know by what name to express it and then its Definition that 't is a figure whose parts are every where equally distant from the Centre and lastly that it be represented to us by some visible figure which says he gives us a far more solid knowledge of the nature of a Circle then the other two and is that which advances our knowledge from Opinion to Science Now continues he the same use that these delineations have in Mathematical Theories Ideas have in Physical Speculations as therefore we best understand what a Circle is by looking upon its Delineated Figure so the surest knowledge we can have of the Natures of things is gotten by contemplating their Ideal Pictures or Images engraven on our understandings But first methinks this fetching of Principles and Proleptick Notions out of the mind of Man is the same thing as to anatomise the eye to search for the first Principles and Postulata of Optics For as 't is the Nature and Office of the Eye to contemplate and observe those objects with which 't is presented and thence to frame Optical Rules and Maxims so 't is of the mind to speculate and consider those things which are any way conveyed to its notice and thence to make general Rules and Observations which after an exact scrutiny and comparison of every individual are justly admitted for Proleptick and fundamental Verities so that general Axioms are only the results and abridgements of a multitude of single Experiments thus from the plain experience and observation of all mankind was framed that unquestionable Maxim That the whole is greater than its parts because they saw and found it was so in all individual Bodies in the world and the Reason why all men assent to it at the first proposal is because they cannot look abroad but they are presented with innumerable instances thereof every visible thing in the world being a whole compounded of parts sensibly smaller than itself Now to what purpose should Providence imprint such obvious and apparent Notices as this upon the minds of Men when as but to open our eyes is enough to discover their undoubted Truth and Evidence A man that has animadversive Faculties has as little need to be minded of such obvious and apparent Certainties as a man that has his Eyes in his head has to be taught that there is a Sun in the Heavens But suppose that we were born with these congenite Anticipations and that they take Root in our very Faculties yet how can I be certain of their Truth and Veracity For 't is not impossible but the seeds of Error might have been the natural Results of my Faculties as Weeds are the first and natural Issues of the best Soils how then shall we be sure that these spontaneous Notions are not false and spurious Now the only way to be fully satisfied of their Truth and Sincerity is to examine them by a wary and discreet Experience the Test whereof will remove all ground to doubt for the future of their Integrity And if so to what purpose do Connate Principles serve for before I have made Trial I cannot use them because I have no Reason to trust them till I can be certain of their Veracity which I cannot be but by Experience which yet makes them useless because Experimental knowledge is of all others the safest and most unquestionable and therefore must needs render all lesser evidence vain and unnecessary At lest when our knowledge proceeds in an Empirical way 't is solid and palpable and made so undoubtedly certain from the plain and most undoubted Testimony of Sense and Experience as undeniably to convince Scepticism of a pitiful and ridiculous Obstinacy But when we begin our knowledge from Notions within ourselves besides that 't is a difficult and nice dispute to prove that the mind of man is furnished with any such innate Prolepses and that we are destitute of any sure to discern Natural Anticipations from Preconceptions of Custom and Education unless we bring them to the Touchstone of Experience 't is doubtless that Generalites are not capable of so palpable and convictive an Evidence as single and particular Observations Advancement of Learning l. 1. c. 5. And therefore my Lord Bacon has well noted it as none of the least obstructions to the advancement of knowledge that Men have sought for Truth in their own little Worlds and that withdrawing themselves from the Contemplation of Nature and the Observations of Experience they have tumbled up and down in their own Speculations and Conceits And so have by continual meditation and agitation of Wit urged and as it were invocated their own Spirits to Divine and give Oracles unto them whereby they have been deservedly and pleasingly deluded But secondly however the case may be as to other Innate Notions the Existence of Plato's Ideas is altogether precarious and uncertain and therefore absolutely unfit to be made the foundation of all Science for by them they unanimously understand real Pictures and Images of things painted and carved upon the Mind rather than Habits Thoughts or Conceptions and therefore Plato defines them to be which further appears from the grounds from whence they labour to deduce them for it is evident say they that the Eternal Mind exerted Intellectual Actions from all Eternity but because there can be no Intellection without an Intelligible Object it must follow that there must be Exemplars and Ideal objects in the Divine Mind to terminate the actions thereof But to suppose that the understanding cannot act unless it be employed about an object really existing is not only precarious but for any thing appears to the contrary contrary to every man's Experience seeing we are all able to create Chimaeras at pleasure But though this Postulatum were granted as to created Intellects yet to tie and limit the Contemplations of the Divine Mind to a pre-existent object is beside many other absurdities not less rash and unwarrantable then to confine the operations of Omnipotence to the Laws of Matter and Motion seeing then there 's no tolerable Evidence to be produced of the Truth and Reality of these Mental Images what can more betray the cause of Science to the Exceptions of Sceptics then to resolve its utmost Truth and Evidence into such uncertain and imaginary Principles 2. A second Fault for which they are justly  is their serious endeavouring to know and define the Notions of abstracted Essences for these pure and Seraphic Intellectualists forsooth despise all sensible knowledge as too gross and material for their nice and curious Faculties and disdain to pursue any knowledge but what is pure and Intellectual that is such as is suitable to their refined and as it were separated Understandings and therefore they chiefly employ their Thoughts about abstracted and purely Metaphysical Being's and thence they take upon them exactly to describe the mere Essences of all sorts of Being's whether Material or Immaterial whether they belong to the intellectual or to the sensible World In order whereto they resolve all Being's into their simple and unmixed Ingredients and then attempt to assign their precise notions and differences from each other Thus they Analyse all Physical Bodies into ten Principles or Primitive Ingredients for first they supposing that all things by how much the less perfect they are are so much the more compounded and then placing Bodies in the lowest rank of Being's they infer that something of all Superior Essences must concur to their Constitution so that all Bodies must participate of the nine Superior Orders of Being's See Patricius' Panarchia especially the eleventh Book viz. Form Quality Nature Soul Mind Life Essence Unity One from the mixture of which after the four several ways of Composition i. e. of Profundity Latitude Longitude and Solidity results Corporeiety And some are so strangely subtle and abstractive as to make a real and substantial difference between Matter and Body Again to pass by their several kinds of immaterial Motion and Harmony they make five sorts of Numbers Divine whose Property is Uniformity Substantial whose Property is Immobility Animarie whose Property is a Power of Selfmoving Natural whose Property is a Capacity to be moved Mathematical which is the common sort and the grossest of all because say they it may be deciphred by External figures But if they are able to frame a Conception of any Number besides that which is Mathematical they have more faculties than I who am born but a Man and live by the use of my Reason and five Senses And yet they confidently enough assay to give the world minute descriptions of these and such other nice and subtle Essences It will be unnecessary to examine their particular performances if I can evidently Convict the Attempt itself of Folly and Madness as I presume to you I easily can Because I know you are already sufficiently convinced how fruitless and insignificant these definitions of Metaphysical and abstracted Essences are for they are in truth nothing else but notifying that thing by more words of a narrower signification which at other times is signified by a single one of a larger Import as if in Arithmetical Accounts we should denote one greater sum by many little ones But the expressing of a thing by divers words does not more unfold its Nature then when 't is signed by one because the use of Words is not to explain the Natures of Things but only to stand as marks and signs in their stead as Arithmetical figures are only notes of Numbers and therefore Names are as unable to explain abstracted Natures as figures are to solve Arithmetical Problems I am not ignorant that it has been an ancient and creditable Opinion of the Platonists that Names have in them a natural resemblance and suitableness to things and are peculiarly expressive of the several natures and properties of those things they are used to represent But words being merely several Modifications of sound made by the Organs of Speech can have no likeness to any thing but sounds and where a word signifies any peculiar sound it may have a natural resemblance to it by giving it a sound like that which it represents as Tintinnabulum and Clangor which words strike the Organs of hearing somewhat after the same manner as those things do of which they are expressive But to imagine that any words should carry in them a resemblance to any things besides Noises is an absurd and groundless conceit which will evidently appear by imposing upon words contrary significations and applying them to express things quite contrary to what they now signify For Example take the Names by which Fire is expressed in all Languages and apply them to water and so on the contrary call Water by the names of Fire and you will easily perceive they have no more natural Correspondency to the one then to the other and that the Names of fire have as much agreement with the Nature and Properties of water as they have with the thing they now signify and that they would as well express it if men would agree to change their Imposition And therefore I conclude that the office of Definitions is not to explain the Natures of things but to fix and circumscribe the signification of Words for they being Notes of things unless their significations be settled their meaning must needs be Equivocal and uncertain that is unless it be determined of what things such particular Names are signs no man shall be able to signify his Thoughts to another because he will use uncertain signs And therefore to define Matter Form Substance Accident is not to unfold the Intrinsic nature of those things of which the names of Matter Form Substance Accident are marks and signs but only to define what things I intent to express and signify by these Names And unless I have some Idea and knowledge of that thing which I call Form or Accident Antecedently to my denoting of it by these Names they will be altogether insignificant because I know not what thing 't is which they signify and the Names themselves give me no more knowledge of those things than Gas and Blas or any other words of no defined signification All which I hope sufficiently evinces the vanity of Metaphysical definitions in order to the discovering the hidden Essences of things But yet further we are so far from attaining any certain and real knowledge of Incorporeal Being's of an acquaintance with which these Visionists so much boast that we are not able to know any thing of Corporeal Substances as abstract from their Accidents there 's nothing can more perplex my Faculties than the simple Idea of naked matter And certainly it was never intended that mere Essences should be the Objects of our Faculties And therefore the truly wise and discerning Philosophers do not endeavour after the dry and sapless knowledge of abstracted Natures but only search after the Properties Qualities Virtues and Operations of Natural Being's the knowledge whereof may be acquired by Observations and Experiments but there are no certain means or rational Methods that I could ever yet meet with to investigate the mysterious Ideas of bare and abstracted Essences Besides all Being's are either Objects of sense or not now to go about to discover the nature of the former by metaphysical definitions would be ridiculous seeing they are far better understood by our senses If any one should ask me what a Bedstaff or a Joint-stool is the only way to acquaint him what they are is not to amuse him with fine artificial definitions but to show him the things themselves And besides to abstract sensible things from materiality is to abstract them from themselves because their very Essences are Material And then of them that take upon them to describe the Natures of Being's that are not obnoxious to sense I demand by what ways and methods they came to that knowledge For 't is not enough to prove that this or that is the Idea of any thing because some fanciful men are able to make pretty Hypotheses concerning it but if any man have attained any certain knowledge thereof he is able to give a rational account of the way and method by which he proceeded in his Enquiry But this these bold definers neither have nor can do but if you will be so civil as to take their words they will requite your Civility by acquainting you with more strange and stupendious Mysteries And here before I conclude this head I cannot but proclaim a Quarrel against the Metaphysics of the School-Doctors who pretend too by their definitions to unfold the most hidden and abstracted Essences of Things But their performance is a pregnant Argument of the vanity of their undertaking For their Vast Volumes are filled with well nigh nothing but empty and insignificant words frivolous and confused distinctions useless and imaginary notions precarious and uncertain suppositions senseless and unintelligible Discourses and with a deal of such fantastic and uncouth stuff as makes Fools stare and Wise men laugh But the Intrinsic Essence of any one Being is no more explained and unsecreted after all their Labour than it was afore This Sir you may understand as a recantation of my Error or rather bemoaning my unhappiness in that I have contrary to what you once advised me lost so much time and industry in these absurd and senseless Authors And though this be only to accuse yet 't is as easy a task to make good my charge to the utmost as 't is to make it but that because it cannot be done unless by an induction of particular instances would require a larger Discourse than can be allowed to a Digression in this Letter 3. My Third Impeachment is their affecting a mysterious obscurity and abstruseness thereby to render their notions more solemn and venerable Of this I might produce you infinite Instances But for a full conviction let me only engage you to spend one hour either in Plato's Parmenides which though Proclus thinks an entire & exact System of Platonic Divinity In Plat. Theol. lib. 1. cap. 7 8 9 10 etc. yet himself wastes several Chapters in an Enquiry after the scope and design of that Dialogue or any of those of his Theological Commentators whom they will allow to have understood him for Patricius will not allow that his first Glossers to the number of above 75 were able to reach his meaning In his Plato Exotericus but chiefly Proclus his 6 Plato's Theology or for brevity sake his Theological Institutions annexed to them Of the Obscurity and Ambiguity of Plato's sentiments concerning the Deity I have treated you know where & therefore thither I refer you only let me note Adv Calum l. 2. c. 3. the passage is somewhat too tedious to transcribe that when Cardinal Bessarion professes to give us a brief & summary account of Plato's notion of God in his Parmenides he amasses together as their manner is a Cento of flat contradictions & gives a Description much like that Peripatetic Riddle of matter Aelia Laelia Crispis nec Mas nec Foemina nec Androgyna nec casta nec meretrix nec pudica sed omnia and then applauds both himself and Plato for their Orthodox sentiments about the Deity Just such another senseless jargon is that supposititious piece of Dyonysius the Areopagite de Divinis Nominibus Again is it not a wild kind of speculative fanaticisme to explain the unaccountable Ideas of immaterial Being's by numbers and figures of which I have already given you a sufficient Instance But if I should transcribe their pretty dreams and conceits of the superessential Unity of the Divine Orders and Oeconomys of the of the Paternum Profundum jynges Teletarchae Fontani Patres of the Field of Truth the Super-celestial Regions & Invisible Heavens together with the descriptions of their several Inhabitants & of all other Intellectual Hypostases I am confident it would tempt your gravity though you were Stoically morose much beyond the essay of a smile unless perhaps your perusal of jacob Behem may have prevented their novelty But the Grecian Theology as Proclus contends being founded by Orpheus Plat. Theol. l. 1. c. 5. advanced by Pythagoras and completed by Plato as Orpheus represented his mysteries by Tales and Fables Pythagoras by Numbers and Symbols so Plato and his Followers have in imitation of them communicated their Notions by Emblems See Proclus in Platon Theol. lib. 1. c. 4. Fables Symbols Parables heaps of Metaphors Allegories and all sorts of Mystical Representations as is vulgarly known All which upon the account of their Obscurity and Ambiguity are apparently the unfittest signs in the world to express the Train of any man's thoughts to another For beside that they carry in them no Intelligible Affinity to the Notices which they were designed to intimate the Powers of Imagination are so great and the Instances in which one thing may resemble another are so many that there is scarce any thing in nature in which the Fancy cannot find or make a Variety of such Symbolising Resemblances so that Emblems Fables Symbols Allegories though they are pretty Poetic Fancies are infinitely unfit to express Philosophical Notions and discoveries of the Natures of things and besides seeing they have left us no key to these dark Ciphers there can be no sure and constant way to unriddle what conceptions are locked up under them so that it does not only require a great deal of pains to frame conjectures of their mea●ing but the surest we can pitch upon are withal so uncertain and ambiguous that they unavoidably leave us fluctuating in mere uncertainties And what wife man will take so much pains for such a knowledge that can at highest amount but to a doubtful guess The truth of it is they have by these Exorbitances been highly injurious to the advancement of true and solid Philosophy for it needs little less pains to discover their meaning then perhaps it would to have examined the thing itself and yet when that is done we are as far from our end as before The end of Philosophy is to search into and discover the Nature of things but I believe you understand not how the Nature of any thing is at all discovered by making it the Theme of Allegorical and dark discourses But I must not too much aggravate this Accusation upon the Platonists in particular seeing it has been the Catholic Crime of all the Learned World The Monk of Viterbo in his Counterfeit Berosus derives this Art of wraping up and unfolding Mysteries at the same time from Noah but perhaps another man would have fetch 't its Invention from the Oracular Devils who taking upon them to foretell what they could not foreknow were forced to use such shifts to hide their Ignorance Ambage nexa delphico mos est Deo Arcana tegere And from hence they who affected a Title of Wisdom imitated their Oracles and because they undertook to explain those secrets which were above the reach of their Inquisition that they might not discover their ignorance instead of their knowledge they wrapped up their Mysteries in dark and enigmatical Representations as being too Sacred and Venerable as they pretended to be prostituted to vulgar and unhallowed Minds Stromat l. 5. Clemens Alexandrinus roundly charges almost every Sect of the Philosophers herewith * Laert. in his Life Only Epicurus took the word Perspicuity for his Motto whereas the rest generally disclaimed it The story is common that Hipparchus was banished Pythagoras his School and a set in his place as of a Person lost and all because he went about to unriddle the Pythagorick Arcana Cic. de finibus l. 2. neither is Heraclitus his Surname because of the obscurity of his Writings less famous Clarus ob obscuram linguam magis inter inanes as Lucretius quibbles upon him & Laertius relates of him in his life That he Wrote a Book so monstrously obscure that at length it became a Controversy whether it treated of a Commonwealth or of Nature And no less common is Aristotle's Epistle to Alexander Plut. in Alex. wherein he professes that though he had made his Books public yet he had not published them and therefore he divides his Writings into exoterics that were Intelligible to Vulgar Readers and Eisotericks that were Intelligible to none but Sons of Art whence Atticus in Eusebius compares him to the Cuttlefish because he like that sort of Fish hides himself with his own Ink And how well the School-Doctors his great Admirers have imitated him I need not tell you only I have more than once with pleasure observed it of Aegidius that where he cannot make his Master Aquinas speak good sense though the Nonsense be palpable he attributes a Mysteriousness to his extraordinary and more than humane subtlety Shall I add the proud Race of Spagyrists who like Aeneas go clothed in clouds and what they discover by their fire darken by their smoke I might add many modern Writers but I forbear only methinks all the World seem to have gone to School to that Pedagogue in Quintilian Qui discipulos obscurare quae dicerent juberet graeco verbo utens Institut l. 8 c. 2. All Writers are ambitious to have Commentators and certainly 't is not a little estimation that obscurity gains from the Vulgar whence that commendation in Quintilian Tanto melior ne ego quidem Intellexi and that conclusion in Lucretius Omnia enim stolidi magis admirantur amantque Inversis quae sub verbis Latitantia cernunt But all that they understand they despise says Synesius in his Encomium of Calvisi●● Now since I have ventured to play the Aristarchus in reference to so many eminent Vertuosis methinks I may dare to add the same Censure of our late English Rosie-Crusians but yet of all men I am most sorely afraid of angering these because they seem to be of a very quarrelsome Humour and to have a huge ambition to be esteemed the Polemical Scripturients of the Age whereas I have been scared from Engaging with a Rosie-Crucian ever since I first saw the Controversial Rencountres of Eugenius Philalethes and besides to confess my fears to you I know not but the Romantic Heroes of this Order may have retrieved the lost Invention of Enchanted Arms especially that lovely Fairy Knight descended as the Romance of his Life relates it 't is a prettier Tale then that of Amadis de Gaul of the Cesar Heydons of Rome and the venerable Author of the Heydonian Philosophy as himself modestly styles his own ignorant uncouth and ridiculous Scribble But 't is more fitting that these Pedantic Cheats were chastised by the Public Rods in that they directly Poison men's minds and dispose them to the wildest and most Enthusiastic Fanaticisme for there is so much Affinity between Rosi-Crucianisme and Enthusiasm that whoever entertains the one he may upon the same Reason embrace the other And what Pestilential Influences the Genius of Enthusiasm or opinionative Zeal has upon the Public Peace is so evident from Experience that it needs not be proved from Reason To conclude I am confident that from the beginning of time to this day there has not been so great a Conjunction of Ignorance with Confidence as in these Fellows which certainly of all other Aspects is the most contrary and malignant to true knowledge 4. My next Accusation is that instead of pure and genuine Reason they abound so much with gaudy and extravagant Fancies I that am too simple or too serious to be cajoled with the frenzies of a bold and ungoverned Imagination cannot be persuaded to think the Quaintest plays and sport of wit to be any true and real knowledge I can easily allow their Discourses the Title of Philosophical Romances a sort of more ingenious impertinencies and 't is with this estimate I would have them read But when they pretend to be Nature's Secretaries & to understand all her Intrigues or to be Heavens Privadoes talking of the Transactions there like men lately dropped thence encircled with Glories and clothed with the Garments of Moses & Elias and yet put us off with nothing but rampant Metaphors and Pompous Allegories and other splendid but empty Schemes of speech I must crave leave to account them to say no worse Poet's & Romancers true Philosophy is too sober to descend to these wildnesses of Imagination and too Rational to be cheated by them She scorns when she is in chase of Truth to quarry upon trifling gaudy Phantasms Her Game is things not words I shall not presume to censure Plato's Style for its being too Pompous & Poetic though this has been done already by Aristotle Dionysius Halicarnasseus Vossius and other Professors of the Critical Art Only I remember I had not long conversed with Platonic Authors when I took occasion to set it down as a note to myself that though a huge luscious stile may relish sweet to childish and liquorish Fancies yet it rather loathes and nauceats a discreet understanding then informs and nourishes it That Platonisme is almost nothing but an Allegory is too notorious to want a proof Plato's two famous Dialogues viz. his Symposium and his Phaedrus ranked by Ficinus among his Metaphysical and Theological Treatises treat of nothing but Love and Beauty and of them too in Poetic Schemes and Fables 'T is pretty to read their Metaphysical Discourses of Truth which are nothing else but Love-stories The soul being enamoured with the transcendent Beauty and Loveliness of Truth is inflamed with impatient desires of enjoying her embraces and therefore Woos and Courts her with indefatigable Patience for she must be supposed as all other Beauties are excessively coy and difficult but by diligence and importunity the understanding wins and enjoys her And then they express their embraces in the same language they would speak of the private transactions between Man and Wife Thus you see they have the main Property of Romaneers to talk much of Love And indeed Plato himself seems to have been the first Author of Amorous Romances for towards the beginning of his Convivium he chides the Poets that lived before him for their Omissions in reference to Love and that when they had made Panegyrics of all the other Gods None of them had ever attempted an Elegy upon This. Now to Discourse of the Natures of Things in Metaphors and Allegories is nothing else but to sport and trifle with empty words because these Schems do not express the Natures of Things but only their Similitudes and Resemblances for Metaphors are only words which properly signifying one thing are applied to signify another by reason of some Resemblance between them When therefore any thing is expressed by a Metaphor or Allegory the thing itself is not expressed but only some similitude observed or made by Fancy So that Metaphors being only the sport of Fancy comparing things with things and not marks or signs of Things All those Theories in Philosophy which are expressed only in metaphorical Terms are not real Truths but the mere Products of Imagination dressed up like children's babies in a few spangled empty words such as the Greeks call empty Phraseologies that have not Notion & Thing enough to fill them out Thus their wanton & luxuriant fancies climbing up into the Bed of Reason do not only defile it by unchaste and illegitimate Embraces but instead of real conceptions and notices of Things impregnate the mind with nothing but Airy and Subventaneous Phantasms But 't is still more fantastic and absurd to talk metaphorically concerning those things of whose Ideas we are utterly ignorant & of which we are not able to discourse in Proper Terms for such Discourse must needs be Nonsense and the matter of it must needs be nothing because they treat of they know not what For Metaphors not signifying things and things being always signified by proper Terms what can be more evident than that mere Metaphors without proper Terms are employed about nothing at all or only an Imaginary something And they that talk thus do but first imagine a Subject and then imagine in it some Resemblances to something else that is in effect they make a bauble and then play with it Of this Nature to give you one Instance are the greatest part of their discourses concerning the Soul in discoursing of which they draw Metaphors from all the Senses Members and Functions of the Body from all the General Hypotheses of Nature from all the Phaenomena of the Heavens and the Earth from all the several Properties and Operations of the several species of Creatures and apply them to the Nature Faculties and operations of the Soul But because they are altogether ignorant of the nature and substance of the Soul and are not able to express the greatest part of these things by proper terms all these Metaphors must pass for idle and insignificant Nonsense because they signify we know not what and describe we know not how so that methinks the Platonic Philosophy is just such another thing as the Epicureans fancy the world to be a Mass of pretty words handsomely and luckily packed together I must confess that before I had examined it by reason of its huge Tumid words I looked upon it at a distance as the loftiest and sublimest knowledge in the world but when I came to survey it more closely I soon found that it was nothing else but words so that I may more handsomely compare it to a Landscape in which at a distance appear huge Rocks and vast Mountains that seem to vie height with and outreach the Clouds and yet by a nearer approach these vast bulky Appearances are found to be nothing but a few Artificial Shadows 5. Another miscarriage is that they employ much of their Contemplations in things altogether uncertain and unsearchable They delight excessively to wander into remote and invisible Notions and to talk confidently as Travellers into foreign Regions are wont to do of doubtful and unaccountable Problems and any thing which is as far distant from Humane discovery as concernment Which scopeless desire of searching into things exempt from humane Inquisition is that which renders Curiosity Criminal For Curiosity itself is a gallant and heroical Quality and the natural Product of a Generous Complexion but when it aspires after the knowledge of things placed above its Reach it degenerates into a vain and fruitless Ambition or rather an unnatural lust of the mind after strange and extravagant Notions Though the Truth of it is The minds or rather fancies of men have such a natural liquorishness after the knowledge of things strange and remote that they swallow nothing with so grateful a Gusto as stories of things rare and unusual neither care they how uncertain and fantastic they be so they be but odd and prodigious and hence it comes to pass that men are generally more tickled and enchanted with Legends and Romances then with useful and remarkable Memories Which they say is the Reason why the Ancients made so much use of Fables and Apologues to instruct the People because they carried in them something monstrous and exceeding the limits of Probability The senseless multitude that could not relish the wise Discourses of Socrates would be much taken and surprised with a pretty and extravagant Tale of a Lion an Ape or a Fox etc. But not to aggravate this Childishness of these dull and muddy Souls 'T is an unpardonable Luxury and Wantonness for Wise and considering Philosophers to spend their time and study to disclose distant and inscrutable Mysteries and frontlesly to dictate to the world in such Theories as are infinitely remote from humane knowledge and discovery and which 't is as impossible to know as it would be if they had never been And that the Platonists are of all men most chargeable with this folly these few ensuing instances may demonstrate As when they confidently take upon them to give the world exact and minute descriptions of Incorporeal Being's To give an account of the Nature and Oeconomy of the Godhead and how the several Ranks of Ideas are suspended upon the three Uniform Hypostases to pry into the most hidden Recesses of the Divine Mind and distinctly to delineate how the Ideas of all Created Perfections are there displayed To discourse about the Substance Nature Properties Offices Actions Orders and Polities of Angels To assert that the Heavenly Host is divided into three Hierarchies and that each Hierarchy is subdivided into three Orders and every Order into as many Legions as there are contained Individuals in every Legion i. e. 6666 and that this Ternary of Hierarchies and Norary of Orders do Circulate about the threefold Essence of God as the Planets about the Sun with infinite other the like Dreams about their peculiar Natures Offices Distances and Employments See Proclus in Plat. Theolog. l. 4. c. 19 And withal to pretend to demonstrative Evidence in these things Again when they confidently assert the First Mind to be the only Author of Souls and that humane Souls were tempered in the same Vessel where the Soul of the Universe had been wrought and that they were made out of some remaining fragments of that mixture out of which the Gods of the second and third Classis had been framed That the First Mind had deputed the Genii or junior Deities Guardians of his Offspring and that it is they that Mary them to their Respective Vehicles When they define whether the Apostate Genii be purely immaterial and whether they be vitally united with matter and whether they were made peccable only by union with their Vehicles whether any of the Aerial Spirits be Atheists or no whether any of them be of a sportive droling humour and delight to effect Antic Prodigies in the Air to abuse and affright silly Mortals How they change Intelligence and discourse together When they delineate the cosmography of the Archetypal World replenished with the Immaterial Ideas of all material Being's and describe the Systeme of the Invisible Heavens When they frame particular Hypotheses not only of the nature of the Soul but of the manner of its living before its lapse into this life and after its return home again Lastly when they Graphically describe the manner of the world's last and final Conflagration I might add too their Hypotheses about the manner of the world's Production for unless they had been Spectators it was not possible for them to know in what way and method the Universe was Erected that depending wholly on the free Election of the Divine Will Though some Learned Men have thought it a mighty Confirmation of the Truth of the Mosaic Writings if they could but evince a consonancy of any of the Philosphers Hypotheses with the Mosaic Account of the Origine of the Universe as if their naked surmises could give any Testimony to Truth For either they received the Account they give from a credible Tradition and if so then Moses was the first Author thereof for none else could give any certain Account of the Process Providence was pleased to use in the Production of things but certainly 't is no Argument of the Truth of the Mosaic Account because the jews told it to the Egyptians and they to the Grecians for this can add no Authority or Evidence to it Or else they were of their own framing and consequently were altogether groundless and unwarrantable Conjectures for it was surely impossible any man's Reason should tell him the particular Circumstances of the world's Creation as that its material Principle was a Tohu and a Bohu that it was agitated by the Divine Spirit that several Portions were formed at several times that all was finished in six days space rather than five or seven and the like this design therefore of discovering a Consonancy between the Hypotheses of any of the Philosophers concerning the Origine of the Universe and the Mosaic Account thereof is absolutely scopeless and unprofitable But this is a digression that has thrust its self in here before I was aware of it To resume therefore my former Theme is it not the highest and most disingenuous madness for men to give such confident and definitive sentences in matters so remote and unaccountable All the forementioned particulars to which it were easy to add a thousand more are apparently beyond the reach of humane Cognisance and such things as cannot be known but by Revelation there being no other means to attain to any knowledge of things of their vast distance and remoteness And if we will but reflect upon our own Thoughts we must confess that we cannot perceive the Ideas of Being's that are not placed within the Horizon of Sense and those that pretend to a discovery of them had better pretend to Oracles Prophecies Illapses and Divinations then to the sober and steady Maxims of Philosophy And therefore 't is not unusual with the Platonists to pretend to a kind of Enthusiasm They style themselves the inspired Priests of Truth and their Philosophy as if it had been poured into them in a Divine and Ecstatical Fury and Proclus says it a thousand times of Plato and his Commentators that they did as if they had written with a kind of Bacchical Enthusiasm And they every where talk so like Prophets and Oracles as if they were inspired at least by a Bath-Col And 't is hugely pleasant to read their own Exorbitant Parades of the Exalted Divine and Extatick sublimity of Platonic Contemplation they boast so often of sequestering themselves from all Corporeal Commerce and soaring up into the Ethereal Regions that a man would expect News from the third Heaven every day If they were in good earnest we might expect strange discoveries indeed but alas these Sons of Imagination are as little troubled with Real Ecstasies as other men only they are pleased to express the Frenzies of their fiery and subtle Fancies by these Allusions So that let them talk never so Seraphically of retiring from the trivial and common Entertainments of sense they do but sit down in the Theatre of Fancy and entertain themselves with the Idola Specus or Images of their own Complexion and though they take them for great Realities as other Sleepers do their Dreams yet when they awake out of their fanciful Visions and return to a strength and consistency of Reason they then discern them to have been only evanid Appearances represented as all Dreams are upon the Scene of Imagination Now 't is a great mistake of some men to think it necessary that we should be able to confute such vain and ungrounded Positions and that for this Reason because they are out of the Sphere of humane knowledge for though they may sometimes perchance like the Cartesian Vortices justle with some certain Truth's belonging to our Sphere by reason of their Vicinity yet that happens by chance and is not necessary But being in their own Natures out of our View 't is not to be expected we should give any account of them because that would be to assert what we cannot know which is to commit the very fault we are now chastising 't is therefore sufficient to show the absurdity of an assertion if I can evince it to be unevident though I can not to be untrue for it is not less unbecoming a Wise man to assent to an uncertainty than to an untruth because 't is not the real certainty of a Truth that is a sufficient motive of our assent but its evidence to us for all Truths are in themselves equally certain though not equally necessary and durable but 't is from the variety of evidence that the difference of our knowledge proceeds and howsoever assertions may be in themselves real and certain Truths yet unless they are evident as well as certain they will be to us vain and fictitious Phantasms And therefore I cannot but commend this one Paradox of the Stoics That a Wise man is always free from Opinion Ignorance and Error From Opinion because he will not assent to uncertainties from Ignorance because what he knows not he knows that he knows it not and so has as much knowledge of the thing as he is capable of from Error because he that will neither assent to what is uncertain and knows what is to be known and what not can scarce be liable to mistakes And it was none of the least Instances of Epicurus' Wisdom and Modesty that he made it one of his chiefest Physiological Canons that he had nothing to do with matters merely Possible and merely Contingent and therefore he was always wont to state and conclude all Questions about the Phaenomena of the Heavens and all other remote and unevident Inquiries with nothing else but It may be so Besides in such cases any man may assert whatever a warm or giddy Brain may suggest and we shall have equal inducements to embrace contrary Hypotheses thus as Mahomet has somewhere in his Alcoran described the Systeme of the invisible Heavens the Orders of Angels & the several Folds in which their several Choruses reside as well as Plato so I have as great Reason to induce me to credit the Mahometan Hypothesis as the Platonic And then to dispatch we are not concerned in such cases to show the vanity of the Assertion for that we suppose impossible but that of the Assertor whom we blame for acting so much against all the Rules of Reason in affirming that which 't is evidently impossible for him to know whereby he both troubles the world with debates equally unnecessary and endless and obstructs the Advancement of True Knowledge by diverting those that are in quest after it into dark dubious and endless Traverses And certainly among the many things that have been hindrances to the discovery of Truth none seem to have been of a more unhappy and diffused Influence than that men have been generally digging for it where its veins lie too deep and out of the fathom of humane Industry Now if this one Caution against dogmatizing in matters remote and unevident were well imbibed it would not only prove an effectual Antidote against many thousand pestilent controversies that infest the world but also a deadly Bane to the Platonic Philosophy for if in reading the Platonists you shall as you proceed but ask them for a rational evidence of their magisterial dictates especially in those things which they boast of as their sublimest speculations and resolve that you will not make them matters of opinion till they shall have given you some rational inducements so to do I will engage you shall never be one of their Disciples though you should study them to the revolution of their Great Year Before I take my leave of this Consideration I cannot but note that this Impudent humour of talking confidently of things uncertain and widely remote from humane Cognizance was the peculiar crime of the first and earliest Heretics in the Christian Church Thus the main of the Heretical Opinions of the Gnostics and the several sub-dividing Factions of them Valentinians Saturnilians Basilidians and other primitive Heretics were only some extravagant Hypotheses concerning the Divinity and its Essential Emanations and their several Syzigiae and Pleromata out of which they framed a peculiar Oeconomie of the Godhead compounding the Divine Nature out of a multitude of Orders and Individuals you may fancy it such a kind of Monster as the Picture of Mr Hobbs' Leviathan And this they did by blending some Fancies out of Plato and Fables out of Hesiods Theogonia with the Gospel of Saint john as the Fathers unanimously conclude And as 't is reported of Simon Magus that he endeavoured to compound a Religious Worship out of the Rites of Paganism and the Sacraments of Christianity so 't is manifest that the Gnostics would have integrated one System of Divinity by mingling the Orphean Pythagorean and Platonic Theology with the Doctrines of the Gospel Of this sort of men and their Doctrines all the more learned Commentators understand the frequent cautions of the Apostles against Heresies and Heretics and peculiarly that eminent passage Colos. 2. 8. where the Apostle warns them against Philosophy and vain deceit after the Tradition of men after the Rudiments of the world i. e. a a false knowledge that pretends to know the highest mysteries upon the naked Assertions of some confident men And of these and the several emanations of the Godhead do they understand those fabulous Saint Paul mentions 1 Tim. 1. 4. so that the Heretics the Apostles speak of were only giddy and opinionative men that took upon them to introduce the Opinions of the Philosophers into the Christian Faith For which reason it was that Tertullian styled the Philosopher's Hereticorum Patriarchus because from them were borrowed the greatest part of Heretical Opinions Thus the Learned * Dissert de vita & scriptis Porphyr c. 1. Holstenius has made a Parallel between the Pythagorean and Manichean Principles And johannes Baptista Crispus in his discussing of Plato's Opinions has at the end of every Chapter shown what Heresies sprung from each Opinion In this Notion of Heresy the School-Doctors will prove as Arch-heretics as any of the Ancients for they have in the same manner corrupted the simplicity and purity of Christian Religion by blending the Placits of Aristotle with the Articles of Faith as Manes and Valentinus did by mingling with the Christian Faith the Philosophy of Plato and Pythagoras And then they have filled their vast Volumes with subtle and nice Hypotheses made out of this mixture out of which are of necessity generated an infinite number of idle and unprofitable Altercations or as as my Lord Bacon prettily styles them Vermiculate Questions because they are generated from the putrefaction of ture and solid knowledge like worms from putrified substances though perhaps they may ere long deserve that Epithet upon another score I might have added to them the late grand Dogmatical Master of Orthodoxy whose rude Dogmatising has occasioned as many Controversies in the Christian Church as ever Manes or Valentinus did The result of all this is to direct to the true Apostolical Notion of Heresy which is not so much an Opinion that is apparently false as one that is groundless and unwarrantable and so naturally tends to the creating unnecessary disputes and making Factions and Divisions as Plotinus speaks of the Gnostics Ennead 2. lib. 9 that they were Inventors of new and vain Opinions to no other end then the erecting of a peculiar Sect. And though most of the Primitive Heresies were false and impious as well as rash and ungrounded yet that which gave them their denomination was their vanity and tendency to create mischievous and destructive Schisms The way then to prevent Controversies and to avoid Schisms is not to define but silence groundless and dividing Opinions The Church should in such cases imitate Socrates' Daemon that never gave any positive Answer but as oft as it was consulted answered either No or Nothing because they are usually started about matters uncertain and consequently undeterminable So that when both Parties determine contrary to each other and upon that separate they are both equally Schismatics because they both divide upon insufficient and unwarrantable grounds For instance to pass by that early and unhappy Quartodecimarian Schism In that grand Schism of the Greek Church from the Roman though the latter was notoriously Schismatical yet the former was not altogether guiltless for although they had Reasons sufficient to warrant a secession from the Romanists as the Pope's usurpation in challenging a Power to impose on them new Articles of Faith and putting of this Tyranny into practice by requiring of all that would be Members of the Roman Communion to receive his addition of the Filioque into their Creeds Now I say had they divided only for the maintaining their own Liberty against the Papal Encroachments and for not admitting the addition of Filioque as an Article of Faith their separation had been just and noble But when they stood as obstinately on the other side as the Romanists did and would not admit of an Union but upon Condition that it might be received as an Article of Faith that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father only they cannot be cleared of a Schismatical division Now if instead of being dogmatical in both these contrary Extremes both Parties had agreed to silence the Controversy and decide it neither way as Truth would not have been less secured so Peace would have been much better preserved I conclude therefore in the words of a late Learned and Judicious Divine If the Church had stopped and damned up the Originals and Springs of Controversies rather than by the determining for the one part to give them as it were a Pipe and Conduit to convey them to Posterity I persuade myself the Church had not suffered that inundation of Opinions with which at this day it is overrun The supposed Agreement between MOSES and PLATO DISPROVED I Have Sir presented you with these Reflections rather than any other not so much because I apprehend them more considerable though perhaps they are so as because they first occurred to my Thoughts For it had been no difficult work to have added Infinite more but these Considerations being already too prolix and the small portion of Time allotted for this Task almost expired I shall wave those that remain and only vindicate the Accusations I have already made by examining & controlling an Apology that endeavours to wash them off For it is replied on Plato's behalf that he cannot well be charged with Rashness and Futility but the Accusation must reach Moses also and the rest of the Sacred Prophets because from them Plato borrowed his choicest and sublimest Theories which if in any thing vain and trifling the first Authors ought in reason to bear the greatest Blame & so at length my charging Plato with Futility if it be valid will fall foul upon Moses himself Which farther completely excuses his Rashness seeing he delivered his Theological Theories not from his own Fancy but derived them from so good and sure an Authority as Moses and the Prophets And that he did so is the unanimous consent of all the learned world Fathers School-Doctors and Modern Writers agree not more unanimously in any one Principle then this is now become as vulgar and trivial as a Proverb The particular account they give hereof is this That Plato derived many of these Mysteries from Pythagoras who in his Travels into Egypt and the East had either immediately received them from the Jews themselves or from the Egyptian Priests and the Chaldean Wise men who came to know them by Converse with and Tradition from the Jews And that Plato himself travelling into Egypt in quest after knowledge received his choicest and most important notices concerning Divine and Supernatural things from the Jews who about that time in great flocks resorted thither or from the Egyptian Priests who either derived them from the Mosaic writings or received them from the Jews by an Oral Tradition For say they God delivered to Moses in Mount Sinai a twofold Law The Written Law and The Vocal Law which is the Mystical and Enigmatical meaning of the Former but by reason of its extraordinary sacredness was not exposed to the rude People but only whispered and conveyed in the slender Pipe of Auricular Tradition from age to age among the great Sanhedrim and the Prophets down to the time of Esdras by whom and the great Synagogue of which many of the latter Prophets were members it was committed to writing least by reason of their frequent dispersions and captivities it should by some ill fortune perish which carried its stream out of the private Channel in which it run before and soon spread it abroad among Foreign Nations especially in Egypt and Chaldea where great numbers of Jews resided For an eminent Instance of all which they allege the Doctrine of the Sacred Trinity which say they being one of the Rarest and Choicest Mysteries of this Vocal Cabala was greedily embraced by the Egyptians from whom Plato and his Followers received that clear and full knowledge thereof which appears so much every where in their Writings To all which I answer in these ensuing Considerations 1. That it is so far from being matter of commendation that it is rather a disparagement to have been conversant in and borrowed from the old Eastern and Egyptian Learning That the Ancient Sages of Egypt and the East were acquainted with the first Rudiments of Mathematical Sciences is evident from the most authentic Records of Ancient Times & from that skill which the Grecians gained among them But it is as evident that all their Theological Learning was lamentably frivolous obscure fabulous uncouth magical and superstitious The Scythian Tarabostesci the Persian Magis the Indian brahmin's and Gymnosophists the Egyptian Priests the Bards and Druids of Gaul and Britain and other Ancient Sects have I confess made a great noise in the world yet they that endeavour to celebrate them most tell us so many Superstitious and Pedantic stories as sufficiently evince them to have been no very extraordinary Persons Any one that considers those few Opinions and Ratiocinations of theirs that are still extant will easily conclude them to have been men of no great Reason or Judgement Some have endeavoured to maintain the Credit of this Ancient Learning by retreiving and collecting its scattered Fragments and others by counterfeiting supposititious Authors such as Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus but whoever will be at the pains to peruse Zoroaster's Oracles the Books of Trismegist the Writings of Psellus and the Earl of Mirandula's Riddles with which he challenged all the Learned world will need no other proof of the Vanity of all pretences to the more abstruse and mystical Learning of the Ancients I do not question but that great and honourable Personage I last mentioned was a Person of stupendious Parts and Learning yet I am sure that those Notions wherewith he made the greatest Noise in the world were but grand and pompous Futilities The Old Egyptian Learning was so Famous that the Spirit of God Act. 7. 22. 1 King 4. 29 30. sets forth the Eminency of Moses' knowledge by his skill in it & the matchlesness of Solomon's Wisdom by its exceeding it And therefore I conclude that it was conversant about more generous and more useful Notices then afterwards such as Geometry Astronomy Policy Physic and other resembling Arts which either were perfective of their Rational Faculties or did minister to the uses and necessities of Nature as is generally reported by all Ancient Historians But had the Pristine Learning of Egypt been the same it was in latter Ages it had been as great a disparagement to Moses as 't is now justly reputed a commendation that he was accomplished in all the Egyptian learning and had amounted only to this that he was a vain trifling superstitious Fellow And what the Egyptian Priest objected to the Greeks that they were always Children might be more truly applied to themselves if it be the property of children to value trifles What childish fooleries their Hieroglyphics were Learned Men now prove from the lost labour and fruitless industry of Kirchers Oedipus Aegyptiacus CertaSinly if they had designed to abuse and debauch this humour they could scarce have contrived more fond and extravagant Emblems and indeed their courseness and unlikeness to the things they should resemble sufficiently discover them to have been but the rude Essays of a barbarous and undisciplined Fancy The truth of it is the Egyptians seem to have had only knowledge enough to know that their neighbours had none at all and cunning enough to vaunt an Inspection into strange and abstruse Mysteries knowing that others by reason of their Ignorance could not control them and by reason of their credulity would be very apt to credit them and thence they continually abused the credulous Grecians with Tales and Fables And surely the Egyptian Priest took not a little secret pleasure In Platonis Timaeo when he perceived Old Solon to entertain his Romantic and Legendary account of Ancient Times with so much greediness and satisfaction unless perhaps himself had been imposed upon by earlier Romancers for I fancy the Egyptian Priests to have been such another generation of men as our Monks were in the darkest times of Popery who believed as well as recorded those Legends which earlier Impostors had Coined So that if the ancient Sages of Greece had purchased no more knowledge by their Travels into Egypt than those few remainders of Egyptian learning still upon Record excepting a few Mathematical Theories they had spent their time and pains to as little purpose as the famous Traveller of Odcomb who footed most parts of the known world to no other purpose then to describe his Hosts Beard or Signpost I might here also give an account of the mean abilities of Orpheus and Pythagoras but I delight not to speak too hardly of any Vertuoso's Ashes and therefore I forbear For it is not my design by representing these Primitive sages as fools and dunces to rob them of that esteem and veneration with which they have been deservedly honoured in all succeeding Ages for though it be granted that their knowledge was much inferior to that of latter Ages for Learning being then in its Infancy must needs be Childish but is since grown more solid and manly yet it is but reasonable they should be allowed bigger Proportions of Honour and Renown not only because they were very wise Men considering the rudeness and ignorance of the times in which they lived but because they were the first founders and discoverers of that knowledge which after Ages have but improved and the world surely is much more beholding to those that first invent useful Arts and Sciences than to those that only improve them it is therefore just they should be allowed greater Glory though they had much less knowledge than their followers Besides Theological speculations met with the latest and slowest improvements and therefore those that might have considerable skill in other Theories might be as indeed they were barbarously ignorant in these 2. I perceive not any such clear Agreement between the Platonic Philosophy and the Sacred Scriptures as may give us any tolerable ground of suspecting the one to have been derived from the other For most of the Notions in which Plato speaks most consonantly to the Scriptures are so obvious and so universally acknowledged that it is easy to discern how he came by them without any acquaintance with the holy Writings such as are the Being of God the Immortality of the Soul the Essential differences of Good and Evil some general Rules of Natural and Essential Goodness Thus his Exceptions against the Grecian Idolatry and Superstition must by all means be transcribed from the Mosaic Writings and when in the Eighth Book of his Laws V. Collium de animab Pagan l. 5. c. 17. 25. Clem. Alex. Strom. 1. Euseb. prepar Evang. l. 11 12. he enjoins Solemn Festivals in honour of the Gods he must needs have it from the fourth Commandment of the Decalogue and when in the Tenth Book he declaims against Irreverence in Divine Worship he must by all means borrow it from the second Precept and when in his Eleventh Book he treats of honour due from Children to their Parents he must doubtlessly have read the fifth Commandment and the like in other Instances Whereas the natural reasonableness of these Principles is in itself so apparently clear & evident that they could scarce escape the observation of any rational and inquisitive man and therefore Plato's lighting upon them is no more an Argument that he was conversant in the Mosaic Writings then is his saying that the Sun is the brightest Star in the Firmament And then as for their more hidden and abstruse mysteries where they seem to agree most their difference is greater than their agreement and it would not be difficult to show how these Notions which have the fairest Consonancy to Scripture are derived from Hypotheses that have none at all as I shall anon evince in the Article of the Trinity And shall in the Interim show the infirmity and vanity of this conceit by showing the weakness of that Authority upon which it is grounded The first time then that I met with it was in Modern Authors who vouched the Authority of the Primitive Fathers for it betaking myself therefore to them I found some of them to aver it indeed with no small earnestness especially Clemens Alexandrinus Eusebius Theodoret but upon no better grounds than the naked assertions of two or three jews especially Cleobulus and josephus and that when contending about the Glories and Prerogatives of their own Nation in which Controversy men of all Nations are apparently partial for their own but none so grossly as the Jews who would have their Nation the only Fountain of all knowledge and wisdom as if all other men had been mere Mushrooms and had not reason enough to reflect upon and observe the natures and properties of Things and therefore Aristobulus the first Founder and Foundation of this Conceit does with the same Confidence maintain that the Peripatetic Philosophy was stolen out of Moses and the Prophets Apud Clem Alexand Strom. 5. as that the Fancies of Plato and Pythagoras were taken thence There are perhaps one or two obsolete Grecian Testimonies produced on the behalf of this Opinion but I shall not be at the pains critically to examine their weight and authority because I have as great a suspicion of all those obsolete records concerning the jewish Nation cited by some Ancient Authors as I have of their Sibillan Prophecies and other confessed Impostures in that most of them discover their own Forgery As those so famous and still credited Testimonies of Apollo's Oracle on behalf of the Jews of which there is ● gre●t multitude in Eusebius his Praeparatio Evangelica among the rest this is one of the famousest lib. 9 c. 10. The Chaldeans and Hebrews alone are Professors of true Wisdom who worship the Eternal God in a pure and holy manner 'T is strange Eusebius should think the world so credulous & yet so credulous it has been as to believe that this Distich ever dropped from Apollo's Oracle for whether that were inspired by the Priests or by the Devil I am confident they were neither of them so honest or so simple as thus openly to commend the jewish Religion and condemn their own But now as for those Writers who were best able to give the truest account of the Commerce between the Jews and the Grecians if there had been any they are universally silent in it The Ancient Records of Greece are scarce more silent in any thing than the jewish Nation Though they relate frequent Voyages of their wise men into Foreign Countries yet no mention at all of their jewish Traffic they acknowledge their Geometry to have been imported from Egypt their Astronomy from Chaldea their Arithmetic from Phenicia their Theology from Persia but no account of their Cargo from judaea And Lactantius justly and seriously chides with the Ancient Philosophers because they neglected to trade with the Jews for wisdom as well as other Nations De verâ Sap. cap. 2. Equidem mi●ari soleo says he quod cum Pythagoras & postea Plato amore indagandae veritatis ad Aegyptios & Magos & Persas usque Penetrassent ut earum Gentium ritus & sacra Cognoscerent suspicabantur enim sapientiam in Religione versari ad judaeos tamen non accesserint penes quos tum solos fuit & quo facilius ire potuissent There are indeed some conjectures to make it probable that the Grecians might confound judea with Phoenicia which if true 't is a good Argument that they had very little knowledge of it for 't is not likely that any who conversed with the jewish Nation should confound them with the Phaenicians when there was so vast not only difference but contrariety between them as to their Civil State Laws Customs and Religion Nay the Jewish Religion Customs & Laws being of so peculiar a constitution from those of all other Nations it can scarce be supposed but that those who so carefully observed the Laws and Customs of Foreign Nations as the Grecian Philosophers did should have taken a more signal and particular Notice of the jewish Constitutions if they had been acquainted with them Besides all which let me add that we find as great a consonancy of the opinions of the Wise men of other Nations with the Hebrew Writings where there appear no footsteps of commerce between them as of the Grecians For instance though Numa Pompilius is generally acknowledged the first Pythagorean being more ancient than Pythagoras yet there is not the least appearance of any commerce between him and the Jews And therefore when Mr Selden thinks that if those 7 Books of Wisdom found in the Field of Petilius An De jure Nat. & Gent. l. 1. c. 2. ab U. C. DLXX. and attributed to Numa by an Inscription upon the Chest in which they were were really his that he was probably not unacquainted with the Discipline of the Hebrews only because Cassius Hemina and C. Piso in Pliny report that the matter contained in them was very consonant to the Pythagorick Philosophy the best foundation of the conjecture is the deserved greatness of his own name and authority for you cannot but perceive that in itself 't is very fond & frivolous and if such a licentious latitude may be allowed in historical guesses Quidlibet ex Quolibet will soon be as warantable a maxim in History as 't is in the Epicurean Philosophy It were easy to have given you a larger account hereof but I write a Letter not a Treatise 3. As to the pretence of a Vocal Cabala I can scarce without amazement consider with what confidence and eagerness some learned men of late have cried up an invention so novel and fanciful for I know nothing more precarious and destitute of tolerable pretences than these Cabalistical Traditions being only a late & silly Invention of the jewish Rabbins for they are altogether unknown to and unmentioned by the ancient both Jews and Christians Oedip. tom 2. class 4. prefat. And yet Kircher who never gives out at credulity would have every one that does not believe the Divine Original of the Cabala to be convicted of Heresy as an Enemy to the Divine Providence But for my part I cannot understand how any Rational man can be at all concerned for so vain and frivolous an Invention of the Modern i. e. trifling Rabbins But he that could find all the Learning of the world in an Egyptian Hieroglyphic may find all the Articles of his Faith in a Rabbinical Fable 'T is certain that the Cabala was invented since the dispersion of the jewish Nation there being not the least footsteps of it before but in what Century or Period is uncertain and must remain so for from the Destruction of jerusalem there commenced as to the jewish History a Tempus a Period always fit for Fables there being no Records or Monuments of their Condition and Affairs unless some few fabulous Relations in the Talmud But whatever became of them 't is certain that being given up to a vain and trifling spirit they employed themselves in foolish & absurd Inventions of which making Mystical and Allegorical Interpretations of Scripture is none of the least especially when they prefer them so much before the true and literal meaning for they compare the Scripture itself to a Candle but the Mystical sense to a jewel for the discovery whereof of the Candle is lighted and the Misnical Doctors that is they that study only the literal sense are compared to Apothecaries who only prepare those Medicaments which the Physician prescribes but the Cabbalistical Doctors to Physicians who understand their Natures Uses and secret Properties And therefore they leave the literal and superficial sense of Scripture to the rude and ignorant People whilst they that are Learned dive into the mysteries and depths of the Law and by the help of Fancy fetch strange and wonderful secrets from Words Letters Points from their several Shapes Combinations Transpositions Abbreviatures Arithmetical Indications and the like And then with a frontless Impudence assert that they came Originally from Adam Abraham and Moses You may see enough of this Cabbalistical Trash in a thousand Authors but most Copiously in Reuchlin de Arte Cabbalistica and in that grand Thesaurus of Learned Trifles Kirchers Oedip. tom 2. Class 4. The first that produced them into the Christian World was the Earl of Mirandula in whose time the very word Cabbala was so unknown that as Hottinger relates out of Garzon it was taken for a Witch Vetula venesicits dedit● And the Earl himself relates in his Apology that one of his greatest Antagonists being asked what this Cabbala was replied that he was a certain notorious Heretic that had opposed himself against jesus Christ and that from him his Accomplices and Followers were named Cabbalistae The Earl when he had at a high price purchased some small fragments of it from the jews thought himself Master of the most ancient and valuable Monument in the World The mistake was pardonable in him but unpardonable in those who since have had opportunity to examine its first rise and antiquity and cannot discern the least Traces of it beyond the Talmudical Rabbins Besides this I might overthrow the Cabbala from rational Arguments taken from the thing itself as that it would reflect upon the Wisdom of God that he should convey down such material and important Truths as are supposed to be contained in the Cabbala by so uncertain and questionable a way as Oral Tradition That it renders the Word of God ridiculous and useless and makes its meaning altogether doubtful and ambiguous and exposes it to the giddy and fanciful Conjectures of every warm Brain but the groundlesness of the thing itself makes all other confutation needless Some not unlearned men have urged the Consistency of the Cabbala with itself and the suitableness of the Allegory to the Text as no contemptible Argument of its Truth and Solidity But alas beside that most of their Analogies between the Mystery and the Text are sufficiently forced and uncouth there 's nothing more easy then for Fancy to find some Consonancy between the most distant things especially in such various and unlimited things as Allegories are If you should require it I think I could with an ordinary plausibility draw up a body of the Epicurean Philosophy out of the Writings of jacob Behem and yet perhaps it would puzzle you to think of any Hypotheses of a more distant Genius than they Such an Africa is Fancy that it can couple things of the most distant and contrary Natures And therefore I shall never think the prettiest Parallels Analogies and Similitudes to be any tolerable Arguments 4. Having thus evidenced the unwarrantable Rashness of deriving Platonic Notions from jewish Traditions I come in the next place to give 1. A brief Account of the Rise of that seeming agreeableness between the Platonic and the Christian Trinity 2. To show by what Principles and steps the Platonists happened upon their Triad For the first it seems to have its Original from those counterfeit and supposititious Authors which pretended to the greatest Antiquity but yet were really composed by the Gnostics out of the Ethnic and Christian Theology and ascribed to names of the greatest Antiquity and Veneration such as Hermes Trismegistus Zoroasters Oracles the Sybillan Prophecies now it were strange if in these Authors there did not appear some kind of Resemblance and Vicinity between the Platonic Philosophy and the Holy Scriptures seeing they had by all Artificial ways blended them together as by coupling their different terms to express the same thing for whereas the Scripture styles the first Person of the Trinity and Plato the first of his Trinity they joined them together and call him and as the Second Person is in Scripture termed and in Plato in these he is generally styled Now they that knew nothing of the Imposture meeting with such an Artificial agreement between Platonic Notions and Christian Doctrines might easily imagine that it was natural The first Author of this mistake seems to have been Ammonius of Alexandria Father to that Golden Chain of Philosophers of the Sacred succession who being both a Christian and a Platonist & lighting upon these Spurious Books in which the Platonic Notions and Christian Articles were blended and reconciled together might thence be easily induced to fancy a true and real Consonancy Pa●arch lib. 9 between them And therefore Patricius avers that he was the first that understood aright the notion of Plato's Threefold Principle and that he came by this knowledge by perusing the Books of Trismegistus And hence those Platonists that followed him might speak of the Trinity more consonantly to the Scriptures than perhaps they intended though not long after these Impostures were discovered by Porphyry as himself relates in the Life of Plotinus For the second the Platonic Triad is widely different from the Christian for they intent by it so many Orders and Ranks of Intellectual Being's and frequently added a fourth which was the Humane Soul and set it at no greater distance from the Third by which they meant the Soul of this Universe then that was removed from the Second by which they meant the First mind or soul of the Immaterial world And their Progress to the knowledge of these Being's proceeded in this Method 1. They suppose all things to ascend by Scales to Unity as Plato endeavours to prove in his Parmenides Unity is the Origine of all Number or all mixed and compounded Being's must be at last resolved into some one simple and unmixed Principle otherwise the resolution would be endless so that all blended and Heterogeneous Perfections both material and immaterial must of necessity exist somewhere simple and unmixed And then all Immaterial Perfections being found blended together in the Humane Soul they concluded that as many degrees of Perfection as they could discover there that there were so many Ranks of superior and more homogeneal Being's in the Intellectual world The Soul therefore as they apprehended consisting of four parts must have the fourth Rank in the order of Intellectual Being's and by consequence there must be three superior Orders more simple and uncompounded which must by several steps as far exceed each other as the lowest order surmounts the Soul to the highest whereof must of necessity agree pure and mere simplicity 2. That which is the supreme Being and consequently the first Author of all other Being's must of necessity be the highest perfection and contain in itself all the Excellency and Accomplishments of all its Productions & yet by virtue of the former maxim it can be but one simple and uncompounded perfection and therefore to find out its Nature they consider with themselves what one Simple Perfection is so absolute and transcendent as to comprehend all others and at length conclude that Goodness is the most consummate and most entirely complete Perfection conceivable and therefore that the most simple and unmixed Goodness must be the First Being Which as 't is i. e. pure goodness so it is i. e. mere Unity or rather simplicity and has the same Relation to the other Being's as Unity has to Number Now they do not attribute the Creation and Government of the world to this Being we have already discovered but to the second Being for say they it could not flow from the First unless the Ideas of all Things had resided in him but then he could not have been absolutely simple having such a multiplicity of Ideas within him But Ideas lodging in the Intellect the Second Being which was nothing but Intellect was not only capable of receiving them but had in him as it were an Ocean of them which flowing from him filled all Possibilities of Being with actual Existencies Upon this account they styled there because it was not the immediate Fountain of Things but only the Cause of that which was And therefore I am apt to think that upon what Rationalities soever they pretend to introduce their that their first inducement to it was that they might rise higher than Anaxagoras and those other Philosophers that asserted an Eternal to be the First Being and First Cause of all things 3. Intellect or Understanding being the Noblest Perfection next to Goodness the second thing must be simply and absolutely and being the Supreme Entity it must also be but because 't is compounded of Intellect and Entity 't is only by Participation And hence was started that nice Controversy whether is superior Ens or Unum The Earl of Mirandula's Book the Uno & Ente is only a Dispute against the Platonists to prove Unity not superior to Entity because they assert their Original and Uncreated to be the Principle of all Being's whilst itself is and therefore they will not permit you to term it but have invented that higher one of a Nature that is placed above Essentiality But seeing by the way signifies nothing but the Essence or Existence of the Thing to which it is applied 't is a gross Contradiction to deny it of any thing that really exists because if it exists it must surely be itself and if so it may by consequence with as great Propriety of speech be denominated as any thing else But whatever that Term imports the signification of is of necessity most uncertain and ambiguous for no body understands how much advanceth the signification of and because it may signify any thing it does in effect signify nothing for an indeterminate signification is all one with an insignificant one And yet in this Particle consists a great part of the mysterious sublimity of the supposititious and counterseit Areopagite But 't is not my business to confute but to represent their Notions seeing therefore they will Place the Supreme Cause of all the Second Being in order which is must be becasuse it is 4. Their third Principle which proceeds from the second as that from the first is by which they understand nothing but the Soul of the Universe and therefore usually style it as being the Architect of the World and hence as they assert the or self originated Goodness to be Causally Intellect and the or First mind to be Causally Soul so they make to be because 't is the Cause of Matter and the Universe I have already given you Plato's wild description of this Hypostasis and therefore especially because I begin to tyre and falter I shall not trouble you with any farther account thereof having sufficiently showed the difference of the vulgar Doctrine of the Trinity from the Platonic Triad and withal from what Principles and by what Reasonings the Platonists happened to own and assert their Threefold Principle It were easy Sir to add Infinite Considerations more but if these wherewith I have already presented you be material I have said enough if not too much Being therefore already tired I will not put myself to the trouble of caressing you with a fine and courtly Conclusion but shall Bluntly and without any Ceremony sum up the main scope and signification of this tedious Letter into this one Serious and Eternal Truth that I am Sir Your most Faithful most Humble and most Affectionate Servant S. PARKER PAg. 16. l. 15. for Mortality read Morality p. 18. l. 7. for scrambling for aspiring read scrambling for And aspiring p. 33. l. 3. for Politanus read Politianus p. 93. l. ult. for read FINIS