PHILOSOPHY 433 the writings of Plato, as well as of many of the stoics. Seneca identifies providence, nature, and fate with God. The natural theology of Socrates is substantially reproduced in Cice- ro's De Natura Deorum, in which also we meet the argument from design for the being of God, illustrated by a memorable passage which Cicero quotes from Aristotle. The theism of Epictetus and Plutarch is that which recognizes a supreme personal intelligence, while that of Antoninus approximates to pantheism. The atomic philosophy, originating with Leucippus and Democritus, and adopted by Epicurus and his poetical expositor Lucretius, was regarded as atheistic, although Cudworth asserts strenu- ously that it may harmonize well with theism. Neo-Platonic as well as much of Gnostic specu- lation adopted the theory of emanations from the Supreme Deity who could not come in contact with matter or imperfection, and to the emanating asons the works of creation or providence were ascribed. Among some of the Arabian scholars, and also in a few of the scholastics, we discern pantheistic tendencies. These also assert themselves in some of the continental writers of the 15th and 16th cen- turies, but they reach their culminating point in Spinoza, by whom the previously asserted dualism of mind and matter is reduced to the one original universal substance which he calls God. From his time the writers on natural theology have been numerous. Howe, Boyle, Bentley, Ray, and several members of the royal society are among the authors of the closing part of the 17th century. Derham, Nieuwentyt, Cheyne, and many of the Boyle lecturers belong to the early part of the next century ; while more recent authors in this de- partment have been Paley, Fergus, Chalmers, Brougham, and the writers of the Bridgewater treatises. Much of the matter which they have contributed to the literature of natural theology would have been classed as philo- sophical by ancient standards. The criticisms on the various kinds of argument urged for the being of a God have been numerous, and form an important element in modern philo- sophical literature. Pantheism, as distin- guished from theism, asserts the consubstan- tiality of God with nature. Its rudest form is a universal fetichism. In its philosophical de- velopment, it makes God the one substance, of which all phenomena of mind and matter are but the modes or attributes. He is the impersonal Absolute, who sleeps in the mine- ral, dreams in the animal, and wakes in man. God is nature, pervaded and inspired by an immanent principle; and nature is God, in the manifestation of his essence or the evolution of his power. Development. The attempt has repeatedly been made to reduce philosophy, historically considered, to certain uniform laws of development. The actual progress which it has sometimes made, at certain periods in a marked degree, has favored this attempt ; while its frequent relapse and resumption of anti- quated positions and opinions has seemed to indicate that no such laws, even if they had actually operated, were discoverable. Schelling held that the various parts of philosophy, and philosophy itself, must be exhibited in a sin- gle conformity as the advancing history of con- sciousness; while Ritter's professed object in his "History of Philosophy" was, while ad- hering strictly to facts, to present it as a " self- developing whole." This, however, does not come up to the idea of Hegel, who would re- gard the history of philosophy in the unity of a single process. He contends that the nature of things is such that the historical sequence of the various philosophical standpoints must, without essential variation, accord with the systematic sequence of the different categories of logic. In other words, free the fundamen- tal thoughts of the various systems from what is adventitious, or formal and locally applica- ble, and we have the various steps that mark philosophical progress. In opposition to this, it is contended that history combines liberty with necessity, and presents a play of endless contingency ; and moreover, that the historical and logical developments of philosophy do not, as a matter of fact, coincide ; the logical pro- cess being from the abstract to the concrete, while the history of philosophy is from the con- crete to the abstract, so that what is really first in itself is really last for us. Rejecting there- fore the assumption that the evolution of phi- losophy in history must correspond to the evo- lution of logical philosophy, we are compelled to recognize the physical, psychological, and ethical questions which it has raised, as mark- ing the stages of its advancement. No exact order of philosophical development can be laid down a priori, and we find as a historical fact that no such order has been observed. Many of the gravest questions of modern philosophy were discussed in the early centuries, and some- times with an acuteness which has perhaps never been surpassed ; while, as noted by Rit- ter in his account of the Neo-Platonists, the progress of philosophical development, after reaching a certain point, has either become retrograde, or like a circle renewed its former round. Still, though philosophy has had as- signed it various problems, often but remotely connected, and at the same period has been engaged in different spheres of thought, and though some of its questions not only are hitherto unsolved, but may prove ultimately insoluble to human reason, we can yet dis- cern an order, although by jno means logical or continuous, of progressive development. "Wonder," says Aristotle, "is the first cause of philosophy." Hence the heavenly bodies and the forces of nature are first to be consid- ered, and the earliest philosophies are mainly the cosmogonies embodied in the ancient my- thologies. But as the operation of natural causes is discerned, the mind is impelled to the study of conditions proximate to the re- sult observed, and here we have the explana-
