Whatever may have been the influence upon the morals of the eastern people of this intermixture of morality with physics, to ourselves, with whom their views are only valuable as historical evidence of the workings of human intellect, the interest of treatises such as the present is much enhanced by the familiarity with which they exhibit this singular phenomenon in the form of what we may call the practical Pantheism of Asia. In this mysterious subject (here scientifically handled) it is, that we must look for the origin and force of almost all the peculiarities of Asiatic literature and speculative opinion. A principle of such extensive and influential range is entitled to a place among the political elements of the eastern world. No correct judgments can be formed, no creditable calculations drawn, in ignorance of its workings; and if these pages contained no other claim on public attention than the authentic insight they afford into this one metaphysical tenet, this alone would entitle them to go boldly forth as conscious vehicles of new and important information. One of the most singular facts attending its enunciation it is, that the student is all along presumed to be already in possession of its leading principles:* and as many may be glad to see the theory expounded who may not have leisure or inclination to search for and compare the passages in which it lurks, and many more may be well pleased to enter on the search with precise notions of what it is they are to search for, a few pages may be advantageously occupied in giving, what is no where else to be found, a connected outline of this remarkable system; not with the view of exposing its inconsistencies, (which might be an easy task,) but of illustrating the opinions and practices of its professors.
Indeed it is more in this minute and elaborate application of the principle, than in its primary nature, that it carries any thing at variance with European views. The general assertion belongs to every religion, and to the familiar phraseology even of the irreligious. We every day speak ourselves, and hear others speak, of Nature as an intelligent and powerful agent: “Nature works, Nature provides, Nature dictates,” &c.; though few by nature mean any thing more than a certain arrangement or influence, whose cause must be external to itself. Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ is another popular approach, and a still nearer one, to the Súfy system.
Christian theology, to a certain point, bears it company. Deity is allowed not only to pervade, but actually to produce and maintain, all things.* Scripture gives it a degree of sanction, and particularly that remarkable quotation by St. Paul of an earlier Pantheistic writer, “He is not far from every one of us, for in him we live, and move, and have our being.” The ardent temperament of the eastern people has not allowed them to rest satisfied with a distant acknowledgment of the fact. They have hailed it — exulted in it — canvassed and contemplated it in all its bearings — welcomed it to their homes and bosoms — carried it about with them in their journeys and avocations — in short, given to the impression the same preponderance in their ideas and feelings, that the principle professes to possess among the other functions and elements of being.
Better enunciations may perhaps be found for the doctrine, and the best may be open to ridicule; but the train of thought by which the Muslim schoolmen actually arrived at their conclusions seems to have been as follows. The universe being an entire whole, while its parts are different, those parts must be kept together in order to constitute it;* and the mode in which they are kept together is this, that they may have a relation and respondence, in virtue of which one is not complete without another; nay, without many others: and therefore each part strives to meet and unite with its correlatives.* How then is this mutual aptitude acquired? By the simplest arrangement adequate to such stupendous results; by the mere fact of their having originally belonged to a single and more compact unit, out of which the present is an expansion.* Each being thus in a manner torn from its collaterals, each has something belonging to collaterals; and neither party can be complete till they are restored to each other. What then is the unit so ramified and expanded? It can be but one, the earliest of any; and if so, then that being of which the negation is least conceivable; that is, divinity.*
In this spontaneous resolution of the first cause into fragmentary portions, some will possess greater and some less dignity and power; but none can be equivalent, as regards either, to the whole to which they essentially belong. The qualities and characteristics of the fragmentary state cannot, therefore, be permanently attached to any portion, not even the highest of all, without permanently lowering the powers of a portion of divinity; and therefore of the whole of it: neither of which is conceivable. Since therefore no single portion can continue in any single state, all portions must alternate in all states; and the indefeasible title which each has to be all, is realized, without prejudice to the new arrangement, by each becoming each in succession; till the units of which all is composed have been passed over: and so on ad infinitum. That is to say, a constant transmutation is going on of being into being; lesser things passing into greater, and therefore the greatest of all back into the least, as the only conceivable way of passing into that whole, now composed of many less, which is greater than the greatest.*
The conversion of mind into matter, or homogeneity of the two, which is the great preliminary difficulty to the theory, we may perceive how they would dispose of, if we attend to their ideas upon the equipoise or equilibrium:* not by the subterfuge of idealism, but by granting the reality of power (that is, tendency in opposite directions) and denying any entity of matter beyond or beneath it. Among the physical theories of modern Europe there is one which, by a very trifling alteration, may be made to supply all the postulates of their metaphysics. In the system of Boskovich the primary particles of matter are described as molecules surrounded by two contending atmospheres: — an outer atmosphere of attraction, by which intercohesion was maintained; an inner atmosphere of repulsion, by which the other tendency was countervailed and prevented from reducing matter to a single point. In this theory every one must see that the essential molecule of matter is entirely superfluous: let concentric powers be supposed, of opposite tendency and different distance, and we have atoms without matter — consistence without substance: solidity may be explained as a spasmotic state of elementary mind; and the important link usually wanting to complete the Pantheistic theory is at once supplied.
The next objection that presents itself they would palliate with equal skill. It is the old remark of Cicero,* that if the social virtues are a form of want, that is, of weakness, virtue would argue natural defect; and the greater the virtue, the more, to be consistent, we ought to despise the nature that exhibits it. To this they would answer, that the more perfect a whole may be, the greater is the relative detraction of a given defect; and the stronger the incentive by which the residuum is urged to regain that of which it has been deprived. Where weakness is absolute, there is want not only of the adjuncts to be desiderated, but of the very energy to desiderate. Excessive virtue only argues excessive weakness, inasmuch as it first argues excessive strength: the weakness therefore can only be of a relative kind.
Another important difficulty there is which they do not equally elucidate; and that is the inutility of the vast and operose mechanism resorted to. If all end where it began, there seems to be no result in the process, and therefore no cause for it; or if the primum mobile is held to be under any physical necessity for carrying it on, or to derive any advantage from so doing, then is the divine nature not a perfect or self-sufficient one. These consequences are both alternately denied throughout the Treatise;* but as they are negative of each other, these writers must have further means, though not here apparent ones, of reconciling or adjusting the two. Whether the Muslims had yet arrived at it does not appear; but the tendency of the theory certainly is, to admit that the vital principle returns to its source in an improved or amended form — that the great work of transmutation is carried on with an ever-increasing capacity for its own mysterious purposes.
How the Muslims contrived to reconcile this theory with their religious persuasions, we may learn at length from pp. 42, 43, and 44 of the Introduction; according to which, each separate revolution of this stupendous mechanism would constitute an analogous æra in the celestial dispensations, on the close of which, all the adjustments required by the state of existing relations between the Creator and created would be carried into effect, in conformity of course with pre-established engagements; and the order of nature would be left at liberty to commence a fresh, and probably, as we have seen above, an amended course. The scriptural account of human beatification, to which the allusions are so frequent, would only indicate an intermediate state or stage of being, as intervening between earthly existence and that final re-union with the supreme nature which is implied in the fact of original derivation from it. The pains of Hell they would admit; but only as a restorative process, the severity of which argued its completeness, and the eternity of which was evident in its effects.* Though the lower natures, as we have seen, were held to pass into the higher, it was only to the last that immortality could be properly attributed. Any approach to the Indian and Pythagorean* tenet of convertibility, — or return from a higher to a lower state, was stigmatized as a pestilent heresy under the name of Tanāsukh* — scepticism, or invalidation of scripture truth. The survival was true only of the element: there was no survival of the meaner being; no lasting identity of the man with any pre-existent individual; except in a very few cases, where it was held of certain scriptural characters, that the earlier had re-appeared in the latter. The initiatory processes of vegetable and animal formation were indeed intended to invest the spirit with qualities indispensable to its further improvement in the human form; but they did not bring the spirit to that point at which the faculties and impressions could combine themselves into an inseparable system. This it was the intent, the privilege, and the responsibility, of human nature, and of no other, to accomplish.* So understood, their doctrine is not without support from the greatest of Protestant divines. In his third sermon on the Immortality of the Soul, Archbishop Tillotson argues at great length,
“That the most general and common philosophy of the world hath always acknowledged something in beasts besides their bodies; and that the faculty of sense and perception, which is in them, is founded on a principle of a higher nature than matter. And as this was always the common philosophy of the world, so we find it to be a supposition of scripture, which frequently attributes souls to beasts as well as to men; though of a much inferior nature. And therefore, those particular philosophers who have denied any immaterial principle or a soul to beasts, have also denied them to have sense, any more than a clock or watch or any other engine. * * * * *
“This, I confess, seems to me an odd kind of philosophy; and it hath this vehement prejudice against it, that if this were true, every man would have great cause to question the reality of his own perceptions: for to all appearance the sensations of beasts are as real as ours; and in many things their senses much more exquisite than ours. And if nothing can be a sufficient argument to a man that he is really endowed with sense, besides his own consciousness of it, then every man hath reason to doubt, whether all men in the world besides himself be not mere engines; for no man hath any other evidence that another man is really endowed with sense, than he hath that brute creatures are so. * * * * * *
“Immortality imports that the soul remains after the body, and is not corrupted or dissolved with it. And there is no inconvenience in attributing this sort of immortality to the brute creatures. * * * Whether they return into the soul and spirit of the world, if there be any such thing, as some fancy, or whether they pass into the bodies of other animals which succeed in their rooms, is not necessary to be particularly determined. It is sufficient to lay down this in general as highly probable, that they are such a sort of spirits, &c. * * * *
“Immortality, as applied to the spirit of man, imports that their souls are not only capable of continuing, but living in this separate state, so as to be sensible of happiness and misery. * * * And this is that which constitutes that wide and vast difference between the souls of men and beasts; and this degree of immortality is as much above the other as reason and religion are above sense.”
The continually contracting space within which these speculations could be canonically conducted received its last limitation in the airy regions of idealism. This subtle doctrine it has been usual to consider the offspring of a more accurate philosophy than that of the Peripatetics: and yet if ever there was a system which contained undeniable elements of the purest idealism, it was this of the Muhammedan Súfies.* For, holding all visible and conceivable objects to be portions of the divine nature, it was impossible that they should admit the imperfections observable in them to have any real existence. Thus, far the greater part of all assignable qualities, as they could only exist in the perceptions of those observing them, passed at once into the precincts of a quasi delusion.* Here however the danger was imminent. Sin and evil were the most notable of the qualities thus disallowed: and this being granted, the distinctions of virtue and vice would be rendered in a great measure nugatory, and the foundations of morality dissolved.* This difficulty, which is no more than what all ideal systems have to contend with, as we know the Muslims utterly repudiated and condemned, it is fair to suppose they met, as other idealists do, by insisting on the palpable distinction between the nature and relations of objects. It is only by reasoning from relation that we have all along determined nature; and if we withdraw the first, we can no longer maintain the second. But in point of fact the contradiction cannot really take place. All that we do is to change the modus of existence; we do not and cannot affect existence itself, or any the least of its consequences. The whole system of relations, therefore, with all their train of rights and duties, virtues and vices, punishments and rewards, must be preserved and observed to the last, precisely as if no such discovery had ever been arrived at.