an abstract Cause, and excludes this cause both from Man and the World. It has only a finite God, which is no God at all, for the two terms cancel each other. It has only a selfish Morality, which is no Morality at all, for the same reason. It reduces the Soul to the aggregate functions of the flesh; Providence to a law of matter; Infinity to a dream; Religion to priestcraft; Prayer to an apostrophe; Morality to making a good bargain; Conscience to cunning. It denies the possibility of any connection between God and Man. Revelation and Inspiration it regards as figures of speech, by which we refer to an agency purely ideal what was the result of the Senses and Matter acting thereon. Men calling themselves inspired, speaking in the name of God, were deceivers, or deceived. Prophets, the religious Geniuses of the world, mistook their fancies for revelation; embraced a cloud instead of a Goddess, and produced only misshapen dreams. Judged by this system, Jesus of Nazareth was a pure-minded fanatic, who knew no more about God than Peter Bayle and Pomponatius, but yet did the world service, by teaching the result of his own or others' experience, as revelations from God accompanied with the promise of another life, which is reckoned a pleasant delusion, useful to keep men out of crime, a clever auxiliary of the powers that be.
This System has perhaps never been held in all its parts by any one man,[1] but each portion has often been defended, and all its parts go together and come unavoidably from that notion, that there is nothing in man which was not first in the senses.[2] The best representatives of this school were, it may be, the French Materialists of the last century, and some of the English Deists. The latter term is applied to men of the most various character and ways of thinking. Some of them were most excellent men in all respects; men who did mankind great service by exposing the fanaticism of the Superstitious, and by showing the absurdities
- ↑ It is instructive to see the influence of this form of philosophy in the various departments of inquiry, as shown in the writings of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Collins, Mandeville, Hartley, Hume, Priestley, Paley, Horne-Tooke, Condillac, Helvetius, Darwin, Bentham, &c. But this philosophy could never fully satisfy the English mind. So there were such men as Cudworth, More, Cumberland, Edwards, Wollaston, Clarke, Butler, Berkely, Harris, Price, and more recently, Reid, Stewart, Brown, Coleridge, and Carlyle, not to mention the more mystical men like Fox and Penn, with their followers.
- ↑ See the judicious observations of Shaftesbury, eighth Letter to a Student.
