204 Idolatry and Philosophy of the Zabians. 
ously regarded the heavens, adoring the stars, and had made such 
successful progress in science, as even to discover a number of artifi- 
cial cycles, which seem to indicate their knowledge of the precession 
of the equinoxes, an occurrence, which from its very nature, must 
have been discovered by long observation, involving a knowledge of 
the nicer mechanic arts, and were its theory found out, a perfect 
acquaintance with the attractive* power of the sun, of Kepler’s law 
of the squares, of the spheroidal figure of the globe, and perhaps some 
general idea of the nutation of the earth’s axis.t+ 
That desire of propagating what is more than the truth, which 
unfortunately is so prevalent among our contemporaries, was freely 
indulged in those early ages. Plutarch says, that most of the Egyp- 
tian fables, are mere allegories of natural operations; Dionysius of 
Halicarnassus and Prochus, that all the Greek fables, were physical 
circumstances, clothed in romance.{ Philo Biblius thought, that 
the Egyptian Thoth, wrote his sacred books in a mystic manner, 
in order to create reverence and respect, or upon the principle, that 
Eusebius$ elsewhere mentions, because the ignorant crowd were 
as incapable of understanding what was written, as what was sup- 
pressed. By the fragments of Sanchoniathon of Berytus, and Be- 
rosus the Chaldean, we see that this was their style, and from the 
circumstance mentioned by Eusebius, that the former had much 
trouble when compiling his history, to select truth from allegory, 
we learn that writers more ancient than himself, invented accounts 
and mysterious fictions, drawn from their ideas of different cireum- — 
stances. Personification, is a figure which we are naturally prone 
to use. We cannot then wonder, why these early philosophers who 
looked upon the stars, and saw them so bright, who observed their 
regular motion, their number and their distances, and who reasoned 
upon them as though they were eternal, should, at last, reason them- 
selves into a pantheistic belief, of some spirit,|| which nourished the 
life of being,—a soul, which diffused through the vast members of 
this universe, agitates the whole mass, and forms but one immense 
body. 
* See Lagrange’s prize essay on the libration of the Moon, Newtoni Prince. Phil. 
Nat. or in the absence of an acquaintance with the integral and differential calcu- 
lus, Frisius in Cosmogyraphia. 
+ Principio Assyrii trajectiones motusque stellarum cbservaverunt.—Chaldei 
_ diuturna observatione siderum scientiam putantur efficisse. Cicero de divinatione, 
hie We ca + Euseb. prep. evang., L. 1, c. 10. 
§ Prep. E. L. 1, c.9. | Virg. En. 6, v. 727, 
