So completely, however, are men the creatures of habit, that it proves difficult to change the grounds of reality, without bringing reality itself into suspicion. The heresies were in every instance so much more palpable than the arguments which rebutted them — the cause of moral laxitude and neglect meets with such a powerful advocate within us — that the dangerous tendency of the Súfy metaphysics was commonly admitted to form a serious objection against their profounder cultivation.* A yet more cogent dissuasive lay in the difficulty of satisfying others as to the soundness of those limits, which it was suffi­ciently troublesome at all times to maintain to their own conviction. The princes and commanders, who, like our own Henry, were invariably dabblers in scholastic science, could hardly have pursued its conclusions to equal lengths with the recluses over whose opinions they never hesitated to arrogate a jurisdiction; and many a profound theolo­gian must have suffered in reputation, fortune, and even life, for the incapacity of his self-created judges. Hence, in this very work, the reserve and ambiguity with which the subject is treated.* But it is chiefly in the works of the Poets that neophytes are warned of the perils that await them in this treacherous path. The vast and recondite nature of the subject, supplying those conversant with it with sources and symbols of feeling only distantly to be apprehended by others, made it the very food on which poetry would delight to feed. A connexion was at once established between the minutest and the vastest considerations. The simplest details of fact or feeling acquired an importance which nothing else could give. What to ordinary hearers might be an indifferent subject, to them became an awful one. What to others were metaphorical devices, the ordinary type and figure of poetic ingenuity, to themselves became sober assertions of a stupendous truth; the particular instances of one uni­versal rule, giving to all things in heaven and earth their significance and their worthlessness — their immeasurable value and their indescribable emptiness. But while the Poets themselves seem labouring with the burden of thoughts too big for utterance, revelling in the conscious possession of treasures too rich for every-day expenditure, to their imitators and admirers the pursuit of similar attainments is represented as fraught with certain labour and sacrifice, very uncertain success, and possible per­dition in this world and the next:* expressions too readily explained by the bold and impious tendencies of the opinions we have just examined.

The general influence of the Pantheistic theory upon the minds and morals of the many, is of course not to be estimated by its liability to abuse in the hands of the few. Though here too, it must be confessed — politically as well as scholastically — its effects would be, and were, of a chequered and questionable character. All that the great mass of mankind would have leisure or inclination to receive, would be the broad fact, that the objects of creation, in its every department, were so many portions of embodied divinity: a persuasion singularly calculated to refine and elevate the thoughts and feelings; to inspire men with high ideas of moral obligation, and warm emotions of fraternal regard for every part and parcel of animated life.* In this, in fact, as in every other instance of the moral impressions, whenever and wherever prevailing, we trace an intimate and inevitable con­nexion between opinion and the circumstances under which it is entertained. It is the creed of a people more conversant with the phenomena of nature, than with those of society; experiencing more the bounty than the rigour of the elements; free to explore the beauties of the earth, and appropriate a sufficient portion of her products, without being interrupted in their enjoyments by the conflicting claims of a dense and redundant popu­lation. On the other hand, the apathy and improvidence which unearned comfort never fails to engender (often to its own destruction) would draw from such a doctrine, as by them interpreted, a support and sanction to their own anti-social tendencies. Where all was deity, all must be right; to innovate would be impious, to improve impossible; the world and all its constituents must be left as they were found: thus all abuse becomes incurable, and most of all the abuse of power, already, in its own right, possessed of an imposing aspect. This is the passive injury, the active one is still more serious — <Greek> — all things are full of God; and therefore, by an insidious assumption, admirable or beneficial things particularly full. Any shape that delighted or appalled — any animal that assisted or astonished them, as it would be deemed the receptacle of a more than ordinary share of this universal presence, would be revered, protected, served, adored. All the political and religious diseases of Asia may have been deduced in their origin, and may still be encouraged in their continuance, by a principle, which, in turn however, may be said to prevent those diseases from proving fatal to society. Cherished and cultivated by the enlightened few, and made the foundation of maxims to which the idolatrous many blindly adhere, it may prove a substitute for those more sound and stable elements of union, which, at such times and places, have only a faint and imperfect existence. To argue its ten­dencies to good or ill for any other purposes than those of our own edification, — to discuss the expediency of maintaining or eradicating it, while those more settled institutions for which it officiates are still undefined and incomplete, — is utterly to mistake both the power and the province of political control. Till its place can be better supplied, its functions more perfectly performed, it neither can be nor ought to be suspended.

Neither the use nor the abuse of the theory, in these its wider applications, can be attributed to the Muhammedans, who, while on points of metaphysical dis­cussion they made it peculiarly their own, had the better fortune to be guided, on points of popular practice, by a science taken from the Greek, and a religion that imitated the scriptural. But from this extended view of the doc­trine as the product of local causes and social exigency — the temporary organ of functions indispensable to national economy — we may perceive that this, at least, the purely speculative portion of their philosophy, was indigenous to the Asiatic people: and hence one cause and one justifi­cation of the length at which it has been discussed. The same principle occupying an analogous though a less prominent position in the Grecian school, it is natural, in the first instance, to suppose that it was communicated to the Muhammedans, only as an ingredient in the drafts they were so constantly making on the latter. The con­clusion, however, is at variance not only with the nature of the doctrine, but the characteristics of the people, and the general analogy of nature. The aim and genius of the Greeks, as growing out of their political energy, lay, indeed, in every direction, but in the practical more than any. From the example of surrounding nations, they saw that every thing was at stake; that all depended on their discovering a remedy for the approaching abuses of the civil power. Their legislators and philosophers travelled,* so we are assured by themselves and their suc­cessors, to collect and mature principles, which they applied, on their return, in that brilliant series of political experiments from which the constitution of society dates afresh. Unless they had commenced at the outset with that preponderating bias to the speculative which the pre-existence of this doctrine explains, in the process of their national development there was nothing to generate it: the tendency lay all the other way. As part of the great Asiatic family, of course they originally shared in the great Asiatic persuasion. The very different lengths to which they pursued knowledge, and the very different results that attended their cultivation of it, make it only more indisputable that they must have bottomed upon some latent principle common to the whole: or how at a later period were their conclusions so easily incorporated with the rudimental science of the East? As the Asiatic nations could not have waited for these gallant borderers to initiate that, without which their corrupt society could not long be held together, so neither could the exacter notions of these last have proved reconcilable with Asiatic institutions, apparently so opposite, if the opposition had not been merged in some more elementary, and therefore less noticed, resemblance. In this very Treatise, it is easy to observe, that while the practical portion retains the form and pressure of the foreign school, the Pantheism transpires with a redundance peculiar to its native assertors. There is no constituting a whole out of parts that have not a natural and pre-constituted correspondence. For her physics and ethics western Asia is indebted to Greece, as what western country is not? Her metaphysics were her own, before they became another’s.

It is usual to burden the merits of Muhammedan science, as well adoptive as indigenous, with the demerits of Muhammedan politics; — to argue that if the people had possessed sound knowledge, they would have been sure to apply it, in the first place, to the proper adjustment of their own internal relations, — in other words, that if the best use is not made of a given advantage, its existence cannot be admitted. A certain vague and general presumption this argument might be sufficient to raise, in cases where the knowledge in question could be fairly held to subsist in the people, and not in a very limited portion of them. But as nations do not commence their careers together, but alternate with each other in opposite epochs of pros­perity and decline, it must always happen, that some are at the height of knowledge, while others are in its com­mencement. Thus there will be a portion of exotic knowledge, always in advance of their own, which rising states will continually adopt from those already risen. But how — through what channels — by whose means? Obviously through the enlightened and observant classes, which, in nations so circumstanced, (not being commercial ones,) are both few and scanty; priests and statesmen being all upon the list. To these, or rather to the most intelligent portion of these, the improvements are long restricted. On the general mass, then occupied only with the material objects of want and desire, and averse from pursuing any speculations, most of all such as originate with foreigners, the influence is slow in extending, and partial when it extends. A continually increasing hoard of intelligence lies dormant at the extremity of the body politic, until the time arrives when the general system becomes capable of absorbing it. Now this time never has arrived with the Muhammedans, or with any other nation of modern Asia. With them, and with all people, its arrival depends upon other con­tingencies. Knowledge, though the great instrument, is not properly the element of political strength, which must have obtained a foregone existence, before the other can be welcomed or applied. Where knowledge is entirely of home production, its prevalence will, indeed, always argue a proportionate soundness and security in the grosser elements, on which its use, and therefore its cultivation, depends. But where, as with the practical portion of the science we are now considering, it happens to be a foreign exotic, it can no more supply the room of political powers, proper so called, than medicine can create the organs it is intended to regulate, or any exercise of mental faculty can alter or remedy a con­stitutional failure in the body through which it acts.

Yet, if any improvement short of complete political regeneration may be admitted as evidencing the presence of an ameliorating principle to which the Asiatic nations had previously been strangers, such may with certainty be inferred from their rivalry so long and closely main­tained against the more favoured and durable institutions of Christendom. National energy, as it is the infallible consequence, must also be the sure evidence and test of an analogous step in the scale of social worth: the first being, in fact, only the sum of units which the latter supplies. Systems may indeed be adduced, like those of ancient Sparta, where, by a partial and mis­directed cultivation of its elements, such worth was drawn from sources, which, ere long, gave birth to hos­tile products: and then both the unit and the aggregate were necessarily short-lived. But, as long as either may endure, it argues the existence of the other. Tried by this test, the question is merely this: Had the chivalry of feudal Europe immeasurably degenerated, in both respects from the standard of the Greek and Roman pagans; or had that of Muhammedan Asia immeasurably advanced beyond the standard of the old Asiatic barbarians, whom the contemporary soldiery of Europe despised? Even supposing the first of these suppositions to be to a certain extent affirmed, it will never be maintained that the vast difference in the ratios of equality can be attributed wholly to an inferiority in all modern to fractions of ancient Europe; and if not, then to whatever extent this infe­riority may be denied, to the same extent the superiority of modern to ancient Asia must be affirmed: superiority dating only from the forcible assertion of the Muham­medan faith, and maintained under a careful cultivation of Muhammedan science.

But even if the inefficacy or worthlessness of their science were as clearly established, as they have here been disproved, neither the one nor the other, we have already seen, would militate against the peculiar value attributed to this its solitary specimen. It is not for the information it contains, but for that which it affords, that it is now offered to the attention of the learned; as an accurate index of views and feelings little understood, — a comment on some of the greatest revolutions that the world has ever seen, — a repository of novel and authentic charac­teristics, often interesting and always important. Among our obligations to it in the last particular, let us reckon our acquaintance with the better qualities of a class so bold as to maintain these principles, and so ill-fated as to see them constantly outraged. The defects of social science or of social system, to whatever degree prevailing, (and in the latter instance the degree was great,) seem to shed an equivalent lustre on the character of a priesthood constantly engaged in unavailing attempts to improve the one and reclaim the other. The social feeling of men in immature society, may indeed, as before remarked, be generally of a freer and warmer order than that prevailing in a civilized community; but only because it is less strongly tried. The moment that keener incitements to abuse arise, the defects of their institutions are betrayed; and the community must either amend its systems of self-control, or lose, by the action of vicious indulgence, the opportunities of amelioration which time and fortune may present. The consolidation of political authority is the first form in which this great national trial is induced. The power which is given for the good of the whole is too often applied to the enjoyment of a few. Intelligence and determination in the mass are the true and only correctives of this abuse; and where these were nationally wanting, those who could realize them in their own bosoms, scat­tering, not all in vain, the seeds of popular regeneration, — pleading, not always unsuccessfully, at the bar of arbi­trary power, the cause of a public that deserted its own; — and this too, in spite of thanklessness from the client and danger from the judge; — the men who could so act are surely entitled to rank among the disinterested bene­factors of the human race. Such a piece of pleading is the following Treatise: crude and extravagant perhaps in its doctrines, as compared with the productions of more favoured countries, but embodying at least some prin­ciples sacred to the interests of right; — capable in most of being reduced to the purer standards we ourselves enjoy; — and, above all, teeming with that ardent enthu­siasm for the cause of right (however dimly apprehended) which gives to wrong itself some of the best attributes of virtue.