196 NATURAL THEOLOGY. 



same paths of thought which had led Spinoza, Goethe, 

 and others of later time to the same general issue ; 

 any seeming variations being due either to ambiguities 

 of language or to the mental temperament of the en- 

 quirer. When, for instance, we take up Goethe's writ- 

 ings we find him pressing on to his pantheistic conclu- 

 sion with a power and poetry of language which 

 entangle his reason, and almost disguise his conclu- 

 sions from himself. Even Newton, in a paragraph of 

 his own handwriting which I have seen, gives expres- 

 sion to what must be declared a pantheistic view of 

 the nature of the Deity ; though elsewhere solicitous to 

 avoid a conclusion which Cudworth not inaptly terms 

 4 the deifying the nature of things,' and which, by what- 

 ever path arrived at, leaves the mind in an impene- 

 trable labyrinth of its own creation. 



I do not know any attainment of natural theology 

 in our own time, either by abstract reasoning or induc- 

 tive evidence, which has not been in some way pre- 

 ceded and prefaced by those who have thought or 

 written in ages gone by. Dryden asks, in his ' Eeligio 

 Laici' 



Canst thou by reason more of Godhead know 

 Than Plutarch, Seneca, or Cicero ? 



And but for the limitation of verse he might have 

 added the great names of Plato and Aristotle ; and 

 among Eoman writers those especially of Lucretius and 

 Pliny, who in one way or other exhaust every concep- 

 tion which human reason can apply to the Divinity 

 above it. We have various references to the same 

 theme as handled by the earliest Greek philosophers, 



