Historical Relations 105 



the official faith and the opinions not only of the educated classes 

 but of all intelligent men. The idea of " universal solidarity," 

 of the interdependence on one another of all parts of the universe, 

 produced a new form of religion. The world itself must be divine. 

 " Deity," says Pliny, " only means Nature." From such a view 

 to the monotheism of Virgil, in which the world as a whole is 

 regarded as the artistic product of an external god, might perhaps 

 be no great step, but the pagan world as a whole failed to take 

 interest in that step. God, if God there be, had made the world 

 and in making it had made its laws. It was the laws that were the 

 effectual rulers, and it was by those laws that the pagan world was 

 hypnotised. The position was the opposite of that of those later 

 Deists who "sought through Nature, Nature'^, God." It was 

 precisely Nature that made God meaningless. 



Science, linked with Stoicism, thus assumed a fatalistic and 

 pessimistic mood. " God, if God there be, is outside the world 

 and could not be expected to care for it," says Pliny. The idea of 

 immortality seems to him but the " childish babble " of those who 

 are possessed by the fear of death. After death, so Pliny, like 

 Lucretius, would have us believe, man is as he was before he 

 was born. 



Once, and once only, in these later classical scientific writings 

 have we a clear note of real hope. It is very significant that that 

 note is sounded in connection with a statement of a belief in the 

 progress of knowledge, an echo of the Greek thought of the fifth 

 and fourth centuries B.C. It is even more significant too that the 

 note is sounded by one who approached, nearer perhaps than any 

 other pagan Latin philosopher, to the idea of the divine immanence. 

 In his " Quaestiones Naturales,'''' Seneca wrote : 



" There are many things akin to highest deity that are still 

 obscure. Some may be too subtle for our powers of comprehension, 

 others imperceptible to us because such exalted majesty conceals 

 itself in the holiest part of its sanctuary, forbidding access to any 

 power save that of the spirit. How many heavenly bodies revolve 

 unseen by human eye ? . . . How many discoveries are reserved for 

 the ages to come when our memory shall be no more:, for this world 

 of ours contains matter for investigation for all generations? . . . God 

 has not revealed all things to man and has entrusted us with but a 

 fragment of His mighty work. But He who directs all things, who 

 established and laid the foundation of the world, and who has clothed 



