Lastly, there is a rest of all the most interesting to mankind, I mean peace, that happy rest, which follows the trepidations and ravages of war. And now, having done with rest, let us bring the whole to a conclusion. We have said already, that the cause of all animal motion is good, either real or apparent. It is a further requisite, that it should be good, which is wanting; good at a distance: for were it present, the motion would then be superfluous. Thus we see the meaning of the philosophical critic, Scaliger: motionis enim appetentia causa est; appetentia, privatio: "the cause of motion is appetition; of appetition, is privation." It is to this privation, or want, that the wisdom of all ages has imputed industry, perseverance, and the invention of arts and sciences. This, in Virgil, is the Duris urgens in rebus egestas." Georg. i. 146. To this alludes Epicharmus, the poet and philosopher: Τῶν πόνων Πωλοῦσιν ἡμῖν πάντα γὰρ τ ̓ ἀγαθ ̓ οἱ θεοί. "The gods Sell us all goods at labour's painful price." Xenoph. Mem. 1. ii. c. 1. To this alludes the scripture, at man's earliest period, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.* But though want be thus essential to set man, and not only man, but all animal nature, in motion, yet is want itself an imperfection; and to be in want is to be imperfect. And hence it follows, that true greatness, or superiority of nature, consists not in having many wants, even though we can find means to get them gratified; but in having as few as possible, and those within the compass of our own abilities. It is to this doctrine that Virgil nobly alludes, when he makes Evander with an heroic dignity receive Æneas, not at the gates of a proud palace, but at the door of an humble cottage: Ut ventum ad sedes, hæc, inquit, limina victor Alcides subiit; hæc illum regia cepit: Aude, hospes, contemnere opes, et te quoque dignum Æn. viii. 362. Conformable to the same way of thinking is what Socrates says to Antipho in Xenophon: "You seem, (says he,) O Antipho, to be one of those who imagine happiness to be luxury and expense. But I, for my part, esteem the wanting of nothing to be divine; and the wanting of as little as possible, to come nearest to the divinity; and, as the divinity is most excellent, so the resting and standing still, rather than a motion." De An. 1. i. c. 3. See Hermes, p. 223, where this etymology is treated of more at large. Scalig. de Causis Ling. Lat. c. 114. x Gen. iii. 19. being nearest to the divinity is the being nearest to the most excellent." y Aristotle seems to have followed his old master (for such was Socrates) with respect to this sentiment: "To that being (says he) which is in the most excellent state, happiness appears to appertain without action at all; to the being nearest to the most perfect, through a small and single action; to those the most remote, through actions many and various.”2 He soon after subjoins the reason, why the most excellent being has no need of action: "It has (says he) within itself the final cause se;" that is to say, perfect happiness; but action always exists in two, when there is both a final cause and a power to obtain it, each of them separate and detached from one another." And hence, perhaps, we may be able to discern, why immobility should be a peculiar attribute to the Supreme and Divine Nature, in contradistinction to all other beings endued with powers of perception. To him there are no wants, nothing absent which is good, being himself the very essence of pure perfection and goodness." And so much for that motion which, though subsequent in contemplation to the physical, and thence called metaphysical, is yet truly prior to it in the real order of beings, because it appertains to the first philosophy. So much also for the theory of motion. y "Eoikas, & 'Avtipŵv, thy evdaioviav οἰομένῳ τρυφὴν καὶ πολυτέλειαν εἶναι· ἐγὼ δὲ νομίζω τὸ μὲν μηδενὸς δεῖσθαι, θεῖον εἶναι, τὸ δὲ ὡς ἐλαχίστων, ἐγγυτάτω τοῦ Θείου· καὶ τὸ μὲν Θεῖον, κράτιστον, τὸ δὲ ἐγγυτάτω τοῦ Θεῖον, ἐγγυτάτω τοῦ κραTlOTOV. Xenoph. Memorabil. 1. i. c. 6. sect. 10. 2 Εοικε γὰρ τῷ μὲν ἄριστα ἔχοντι υπάρχειν τὸ εὖ ἄνευ πράξεως· τῷ δὲ ἐγγύτατα, · διὰ ὀλίγης καὶ μιᾶς· τοῖς δὲ ποῤῥωτάτω, dià πλeιóvæv. Arist. de Cœlo. 1. ii. c. 12. p. 54. edit. Sylb. * Τῷ δ ̓ ὡς ἄριστα ἔχοντι οὐδὲν δεῖ πράξεως, ἔστι γὰρ ἐν αὐτῷ τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα· ἡ δὲ πρᾶξίς ἐστιν ἀεὶ ἐν δυσὶν, ὅταν καὶ οὗ ἕνεκα ᾖ, καὶ τὸ τούτου ἕνεκα. Ibid. The following remark may perhaps explain this sentiment, if it should appear ob scure. When a being finds its good fully and wholly within itself, then, itself and its good being one, it finds no cause of motion to seek that which it possesses already. Such being, therefore, from its very nature, is immoveable. But when a being and its good are separate, here, as they necessarily are two, the distant good, by being perceived, becomes a final cause of motion, and thus awakens within the being a certain desire, of which desire motion is the natural consequence. Such being, therefore, by its nature is moreable. Ammonius, in the following quotation, appears to have had this doctrine and these passages of Aristotle in his view. Οσα γοῦν πλειόνων τινῶν δέεται, πλείονας κινήσεις κινεῖται· τὰ δὲ ὀλιγοδεᾶ, ὀλι γοκίνητα· ἀμέλει τὸ Θεῖον, ἀνενδεὲς ὂν, καὶ πάντη ἐστιν ἀκίνητον: "All such beings as are in want of many things, are moved in many motions; those who have few wants, have few motions; but the Divinity being without wants, is therefore perfectly immoveable." Am. in Præd. 144. B. 145. b See before, p. 296. See before, p. 368. CHAPTER XVIII. CONCLUSION-UTILITIES DEducible FROM THE THEORY OF THESE ARRANGEMENTS-RECAPITULATION. d AND thus having finished the doctrine of these Philosophical Arrangements, or, in other words, of categories, predicaments, comprehensive or universal genera, (for we have called them indifferently by every one of these names,) together with such speculations both previous and subsequent, as were either requisite to explain the subject, or else naturally arose out of it; we imagine the utilities of this knowledge will be obvious to every one who has studied it with impartiality, and has aimed to know what it really is. In the first place, as we have usually begun the consideration of each arrangement from speculations respecting body, and have thence made a transition to others respecting mind; we may hence mark the connection between these two great principles which stand related to each other, as the subject and its efficient cause, and in virtue of that relation may be said to run through all things. Again: our mind, by this orderly and comprehensive theory, becoming furnished, like a good library, with proper cells or apartments, we know where to place our ideas both of being and its attributes, and where to look for them again, when we have occasion to call them forth. Without some arrangement of this sort, the mind is so far from increasing in knowledge by the acquisition of new ideas, that, while it increases the number of these, it does but increase its own perplexity. It is no longer a library well regulated, but a library crowded and confused: Ubi multa supersunt, Et dominum fallunt. Horat. Epist. 1. i. 6. Again as these Arrangements have a necessary connection with the whole of existence, with all being or substance on one hand, with every possible accident or attribute on the other; it follows, of course, that so general a speculation must have naturally introduced many others; speculations not merely logical, but extending to physics, to ethics, and even to the first philosophy. The reader, from these incidental theorems, (if the author has succeeded in his endeavours to represent them,) will have a taste how the ancients wrote, when they reasoned upon these subjects, and may gratify his curiosity (if he please) by comparing them with the moderns. It was not from an ostentatious d See before, p. 258, 9, 360; and below, p. 384. wish to fill his page with e See before, p. 258. f See before, p. 253. quotations, that the author has made such frequent and copious extracts from other authors. He flatters himself, that by this he has not only given authority to the sentiments, but relieved also a subject, in itself rather severe. From the writers alleged, both ancient and modern, the reader will perceive how important and respectable these authorities are. He will perceive, too, that, in the wide regions of being, some sages having cultivated one part, and some another, the labours of ancients and moderns have been often different, when not hostile; often various, when not contradictory; and that among the valuable discoveries of later periods, there are many so far from clashing with the ancient doctrines here advanced, that they coincide as amicably as a Chillingworth and an Addison in the same library, a Raphael and a Člaude in the same gallery. It is not without precedents that he has adopted this manner of citation. It was adopted by Aristotle long ago, in his Rhetoric and his Poetics. Aristotle was followed by those able critics, Demetrius, Quinctilian, and Longinus. Chrysippus, the philosopher, so much approved the method, that in a single tract he inserted nearly the whole of that celebrated tragedy, the Medea of Euripides; so that a person who was perusing the tract, being asked what he was reading, replied pleasantly, "It was the Medea of Chrysippus. Cicero has enriched his philosophic treatises with many choice morsels, both from Greek and Roman writers; and this he does, not only approving the practice himself, but justifying it by the practice of the philosophers then at Athens, among whom he names Dionysius the Stoic, and Philo the Academic. Seneca and Plutarch both pursued the same plan, the latter more particularly in his moral compositions. To these may be added, though of a baser age, my own learned countryman, John of Salisbury, who, having perused and studied most of the Latin classics, appears to have decorated every part of his works with splendid fragments, extracted out of them. Two later writers of genius have done the same in the narrative of their travels; Sandys at the beginning of the last century, and Addison at the beginning of the present. And so much by way of apology for the author himself. But he has a further wish in this exhibition of capital writers; a wish to persuade his readers, of what he has been long persuaded himself, that every thing really elegant, or sublime in composition, is ultimately referable to the principles of a sound logic; that those Diog. Laert. 1. vii. s. 180. h Tusc. Disput. L. ii. s. 10. 1 This extraordinary man flourished in the reign of Henry the Second, and was therefore of Old Salisbury, not of New Salisbury, which was not founded till the reign of Henry the Third. John (of whom we write) having had the best education of the time, and being not only a genius, but intimate with the most eminent men, in particular with pope Adrian, (who was himself an Englishman,) became at length a bishop, and died in the year 1182. See Fabricius, in his Biblioth. Lat. vol. ii. p. 368; and in his Biblioth. Med. et Infim, ætat. See also Cave's Histor. Literar. vol. ii. p. 243. principles, when readers little think of them, have still a latent force, and may be traced, if sought after, even in the politest of writers.k By reasoning of this kind he would establish an important union; the union, he means, between taste and truth. It is this is that splendid union which produced the classics of pure antiquity; which produced, in times less remote, the classics of modern days; and which those who now write ought to cultivate with attention, if they have a wish to survive in the estimation of posterity. Taste is, in fact, but a species of inferior truth. It is the truth of elegance, of decoration, and of grace; which, as all truth is similar and congenial, coincides, as it were, spontaneously with the more severe and logical; but which, whenever destitute of that more solid support, resembles some fair but languid body; a body, specious in feature, but deficient as to nerve; a body, where we seek in vain for that natural and just perfection, which arises from the pleasing harmony of strength and beauty associated. Recommending an earnest attention to this union, we resume our subject by observing, that it is in contemplating these orderly, these comprehensive arrangements,' we may see whence the subordinate sciences and arts all arise; history, natural and civil, out of substance; mathematics, out of quantity; optics, out of quality and quantity; medicine, out of the same; astronomy, out of quantity and motion; music and mechanics, out of the same; painting, out of quality and site; ethics, out of relation; chronology, out of when; geography, out of where; electricity, magnetism, and attraction, out of action and passion; and so in other instances. Every art and every science being thus referred to its proper principle, we shall be enabled with sufficient accuracy to adjust their comparative value, by comparing the several principles from which they severally flow. Thus shall we be saved from m * See the numerous quotations through Horace, Persius, Juvenal, and others. every part of this treatise. There are few theories so great, so comprehensive, and so various, as the theory of these predicaments, or philosophical arrangements. The ancients had many methods of representing works of such a diversified and miscellaneous character. Fruits of various kinds, promiscuously blended, used to be presented in a dish, as an offering to Ceres. This dish, so filled, they called lanx satura; and hence lanx satura, or rather satura, or satira alone, (lana being understood,) came to signify, by metaphor, a "miscellaneous writing;" such as were the compositions of Lucilius, A satire, in this sense, did not mean sarcasm, calumny, or personal abuse; it meant no more than a writing, where the subject was various and diversified, such as Juvenal well describes it, when he speaks of his own works: Quicquid agunt homines, nostri est farrago libelli. Again, we all know that groves and forests are diversified with trees; with trees of various figures, magnitudes, and species; and hence it was that Statius called his miscellany collections of poems by the name of Silvæ. m See before, p. 258. |