UISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. 353 



Astronomy and mathematics are important to the interests of civi- 

 lization, from the assistance they lend to the arts, to agriculture, navi- 

 gation, and geography, by the means they afford of fixing that 

 measure of time which is the framework of all our remembrances, 

 the regulator of our existence. Here again we trace the impatient 

 haste which characterizes the infancy of reason, the tendency to pass 

 over the intervening steps and suppose causes rather than leave 

 effects unexplained. Astrology was nursed in the same cradle with 

 astronomy. Man attaches so much interest to the knowledge of 

 future events that he promptly seizes on every opportunity of form- 

 ing an art of divination ; and the influence of the celestial bodies 

 over the great phenomena of nature offered, by their analogy, a 

 tempting field to the imaginative disciples of prophecy, who con- 

 nected man so intimately with all else in existence that they considered 

 the same foresight might calculate the changes of a season and the 

 events of a life. 



Having thus taken a cursory view of the origin of philosophy in 

 the countries of Asia, let us turn our eyes to Greece. There its pro- 

 gress was slower ; but as its development in the first period was by a 

 stmilar process, and as the materials were most probably borrowed 

 from the eastern sages, the account of the one will throw a light on 

 the history of the other. Like them the Greeks used the language 

 of poetry as their interpreter. The theogony of Homer and Hesiod 

 personify the powers of nature. The Orphic mysteries and initiations 

 were the vehicles in which their speculative doctrines were trans- 

 mitted. 



The my thology of the Greeks was emblematic of the revolutions of 

 the universe and the works of nature. But, as they borrowed much 

 of their primitive knowledge from foreign nations, the obscurity of this 

 mixture of heterogeneous elements became the more impenetrable. 

 Historical recollections and biographical anecdotes became confounded 

 with the emblems which expressed the motions and changes of the 

 system of the universe. The poets, when they possessed themselves 

 of these brilliant conceptions, used them, as the property of genius, 

 with the licence of an art whose chief characteristics are invention 

 and embellishment. The traces of the ideas contained in the original 

 allegories were continually fading away. At the same time mytho- 

 logy received from them a new life. Benignant spirits peopled the 

 earth and the water, and animated the air, breathed in the plants, and 

 presided over the arts. A never-ending festival gladdened the face 

 of nature. The delicate nymphs and modest graces hymned it on 

 their lyres. The youth of the mind luxuriated in these sportive cre- 

 ations of fancy, was adorned by all the ephemeral beauties of imagi- 

 nation, and flowers seemed to spring from the footsteps on its path- 

 way. By some Greek authors Homer has been styled the father of 

 philosophy. And he deserves the title at their hands, for having united 

 in one great system the allegories and fables of mythology, and 

 having clothed them in the most brilliant possible dress, given them 

 to the admiration of future ages. 



According to Diogenes Laertius, Dinus, who lived anterior both 

 to Homer and Hesiod, wrote a book on the generation of the 



