enly bodies it looked upon as
mere meteors or manifestations of fire. With superficial simplicity, it
received the notions of absolute directions in space, up and down, above
and below. In a like spirit is adopted, from the most general
observation, the doctrine of four elements, those forms of substance
naturally presented to us in a predominating quantity--earth, water,
air, fire. From these slender beginnings it made its first attempt at a
cosmogony, or theory of the mode of creation, by giving to one of these
elements a predominance or superiority over the other three, and making
them issue from it. With one teacher the primordial element was water;
with another, air; with another, fire. Whether a genesis had thus taken
place, or whether all four elements were co-ordinate and equal, the
production of the world was of easy explanation; for, by calling in the
aid of ordinary observation, which assures us that mud will sink to the
bottom of water, that water will fall through air, that it is the
apparent nature of fire to ascend, and, combining these illusory facts
with the erroneous notion of up and down in space, the arrangement of
the visible world became clear--the earth down below, the water floating
upon it, the air above, and, still higher, the region of fire. Thus it
appears that the first inquiry made by European philosophy was, Whence
and in what manner came the world?

[Sidenote: Its irreligious solution thereof.]

The principles involved in the solution of this problem evidently led to
a very important inference, at this early period betraying what was
before long to become a serious point of dispute. It is natural for man
to see in things around him visible tokens of divinity, continual
providential dispensations. But in this, its very first act, Greek
philosophy had evidently excluded God from his own world. This settling
of the heavy, this ascending of the light, was altogether a purely
physical affair; the limitless sea, the blue air, and the unnumbered
shining stars, were set in their appropriate places, not at the pleasure
or by the hand of God, but by innate properties of their own. Popular
superstition was in some degree appeased by the localization of deities
in the likeness of men in a starry Olympus above the sky, a region
furnishing unsubstantial glories and a tranquil abode. And yet it is not
possible to exclude altogether the spiritual from this world. The soul,
ever active and ever thinking,