Through heaven, and earth, and ocean depth He throws
His influence round, and kindles as He goes.
Hence flocks, and herds, and men, and beasts, and fowls,
With breath are quickened, and attract their souls.
Hence take the forms His prescience did ordain,
And into Him, at length, resolve again.
No room is left for death: they mount the sky,
And to their own congenial planets fly."
Dryden's "Virgil."
That Divine Wisdom that moves all the known parts of the world had
made so deep an impression upon the Stoics, and on Plato before
them, that they believed the whole world to be an animal, but a
rational and wise animal--in short, the Supreme God. This
philosophy reduced Polytheism, or the multitude of gods, to Deism,
or one God, and that one God to Nature, which according to them was
eternal, infallible, intelligent, omnipotent, and divine. Thus
philosophers, by striving to keep from and rectify the notions of
poets, dwindled again at last into poetical fancies, since they
assigned, as the inventors of fables did, a life, an intelligence,
an art, and a design to all the parts of the universe that appear
most inanimate. Undoubtedly they were sensible of the wonderful art
that is conspicuous in nature, and their only mistake lay in
ascribing to the work the skill of the Artificer.
SECT. XXX. Of Man.
Let us not stop any longer with animals inferior to man. It is high
time to consider and study the nature of man himself, in order to
discover Him whose image he is said to bear.
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