Neither has the atheist any security against a Hades or unseen world, filled with the most ghastly apparitions; and it is a fact, as has been remarked by Bayle, who was himself a skeptic, that many of this unhappy class have had most horrid fears of ghosts and hobgoblins. Their great champion Hobbes furnishes a noted example of this. Some might regard it as an inconsistency, and yet their system can allege nothing against the position that such appearances are not the mere fictions of a diseased imagination, but have a real existence in rerum natura. Who can assign any bounds to the working of púois and rúxn? The atheist cannot even be sure that he may not, on his own hypothesis, live again. Eternity is very long, and viewedin reference to it, everything ceases to be improbable, except what is inconsistent with the attributes of an à priori God. But remove this idea, and what hinders us from supposing that, in the endless changes of matter, the same atoms which now form the atheist's body, and give rise to the energies of his soul, may again come into the same combinations, may recreate a brain with the same particles, having the same figure, site, and order, and, of course, producing the same thoughts and sensations, or, in short, renew an existence, in all respects identical, which may recollect all the misery of the past, and can only indulge the same awful anticipations for the hopeless and godless future. Plato seems to have already had in mind a class of semitheists or semi-atheists, such as we have been considering, who might believe in a kind of Deity younger than Nature, and yet possessed of vast power and intelligence. After alluding to the common opinion that astronomers must be atheists, because they are so in the habit of resolving all the phenomena of the Heavens into necessities (ȧváyκaiç) and natural laws, he mentions a class who acknowledged the existence of mind in the motions of the celestial bodies, M but who strangely regarded this mind as itself the result, say that it is Nous, or Mind, that orders all things in the that no one can be a consistent theist who does not hold that spirit is older than matter. The position that matter is eternal would be in direct opposition to this, and therefore he could not himself have maintained that doctrine, whatever appearance of it there may be in some obscure passages in the Timæus. See this more fully examined, Note L., on the ancient dogma, De nihilo nihil fit. On this subject of Túxn and púois, compare Aristotle, Physic. Ausc., lib. ii., ch. 4. XIV. Atheistical Doctrine that Law and Religion were not by Nature, but by Art. PAGE 14, LINE 16. Οὕτω δέ καὶ τὴν νομοθεσίαν πᾶσαν, οὐ φύσει, τέχνῃ δέ. This is simply mentioned as one of the inferences from their doctrine, namely," that legislation or law was not by nature, but by art." It was, however, just the inference that Plato deemed of the most dangerous consequence, and against which he directs all the strength of his reasoning, both here and in many other parts of his dialogues. Compare the Gorgias, and especially that long argument of Callicles (482, C.), in which he advances this same doctrine, namely, that law, and right (Tò díkalov), and religion are not by nature, but by human appointment, which is equivalent to what the atheist here is supposed to mean by Tέxvn, as something junior and posterior to nature : ὡς τὰ πολλὰ δὲ ταῦτα ἐναντία ἀλλήλοις ἐστίν, ἥ τε φύσις καὶ ὁ νόμος, κ. τ. λ. Gorgias, 483, Α. It is a doctrine which in all ages has had its advocates, and in modern times has been specially revived by Hobbes and his followers. It is this inference that gives atheism all its interest. As a speculative tenet for the intellect merely, it would have no charms even for the darkest mind. If this creed be true, then not only religion, but also all morality, and all right views of law, are without any foundation either in God, or in any nature of things proceeding from him, or in any nature at all implying a moral sanction and which necessarily suggests the idea of something older, and higher, and stronger than itself. They are all, in that case, the offspring of Texvn, or Art. That is, they have only a human origin; since, in this creed, Art is the result of the junior production, Mind; or, in the language which Plato ascribes to the atheist, ύστέραν ἐκ τούτων γενομένην ANHTHN EK ONHTON. They can, therefore, have only human sanctions, and it is this conclusion which, to the depraved soul, gives atheism all its value, while, if the intellect alone were concerned, it would shrink from it as from the very "blackness of darkness" itself. The ancient atheists saw that there could be no true natural morality without the belief in a God, and they did not pretend it. As in the moral and political philosophy of Plato, the Deity was the beginning, middle, and end: ó μὲν δὴ θεός (ὥσπερ ὁ παλαιὸς λόγος) ἀρχήν τε καὶ τελευ. τὴν καὶ μέσα τῶν ὄντων ἁπάντων ἔχων, lib. iv., 715, or, as he says in another place, ὁ δὲ θεὸς ἡμῖν πάντων μέτρον äv elŋ μáλiota, 717; so, on the other hand, he justly represents those against whom he is here contending, as holding to no conscience, no law, no right and wrong, as well as no religion and no God. They reasoned, however, like their modern followers of the school of Hobbes, in a vicious circle. From an atheistic assumption, they proved that law was not by nature, but by art, and then from this latter position, taken as established, they argued that Divine worship, being enjoined by law, was also by art, and not by nature: θεοὺς εἶναι πρῶτόν φασιν οὗτοι τέχνῃ οὐ φύσει ἀλλά τισι vóμos. Page 14, line 20. We see the absurdity of the thing in the way Plato states their positions and their πρтоv pevdos; yet, by concealing this vicious and circular mode of reasoning, such writers as Hobbes have seemed to make out a most formidable argument. This atheistical dogma, that religion is the creation of law and the civil magistrate, is most strikingly set forth in the following fragment attributed by Sextus Empiricus (Advers. Mathem., lib. ix., sec. 54) to Critias, one of the thirty tyrants of Athens, and by Plutarch (De Placit. Philosoph., i, 6 and 7) to Euripides, who, he says, utters these sentiments in the character of Sisyphus instead of his own, through fear of the Areopagus. We give these verses in full, because of their intrinsic interest as one of the most remarkable remains of antiquity, because they set forth in all its strength the substance of all that has ever been said on this head from that time down to the present, and because they furnish a specimen of most finished poetry, of a higher stamp than atheism could have been supposed to employ in the utterance of its dark oracles: Ἦν χρόνος ὅτ ̓ ἦν ἄτακτος ἀνθρώπων βίος Τοῦτ ̓ οὐχὶ λήσει τοὺς θεούς· τὸ γὰρ φρονοῦν |