1. How far the historian of philosophical inquiries is concerned with these countries. Three countries are especially connected with Jewish history—Egypt, Phœnicia, Chaldæa. Each of these countries has left memorials of itself: those of the first are becoming even more interesting to this time than to any former time; the last is only beginning to discover its treasures to European enterprise. None of the three can be said in strictness to have produced any philosophers; but they have indirectly influenced the philosophy of other nations, in a manner too important to be overlooked. A few words on this subject seem a necessary sequel to the chapter on the Hebrews.
2. Egyptian wise men. The wise men, magicians, or soothsayers, of whom we read in the book of Exodus, were no doubt students of nature. They had observed something of its powers and mysteries, some of the influences which it exercises over man, some of the means which he possesses of directing its influences to advantage or to mischief. There can be no doubt that they believed such knowledge to have been communicated by some Divine power. We are not disposed to question their opinion. Their physical science not borrowed from the Hebrews. If they referred any observations which they might make respecting the course of the year, or the cultivation of the earth, to a celestial Teacher, they spoke, it seems to us, far more humbly, more truly, more in accordance with the spirit of the Hebrew books, than the Romanised Jew Josephus, who, in his foolish patriotism, or his desire to make his countrymen respectable in the eyes of their masters, pretends that Abraham, or Joseph, or Moses, instructed the Egyptians in astronomy. It is almost needless to say that no hint is given by the Hebrew legislator that his ancestors imparted any such wisdom, or possessed it; what he had himself must, if we believe the New Testament commentator upon his words, have been received first from the Egyptians, though his Divine Teacher, purging his mind from the idolatries and confusions with which their physical doctrines were surrounded, enabled him to give man his true place in creation. The Hebrew history does assert that Joseph, instructed by the Invisible King, communicated skill and foresight to Pharaoh. Acquaintance with the mechanical arts, and with all the powers of nature which are necessary to the invention of them, it never claims for Jews—it implicitly concedes to their tyrants.
3. Great memorials of Egyptian wisdom; small results of it. Here we discover the main characteristic difference between the development of the two people. Modern science may be allowed to claim for Egypt a long series of dynasties, clear indications of an organised hierarchy, of a civil order, with very great and probably very early achievements in stone and masonry. But the moral philosopher must ask, why all these great powers bore so little fruit for the world? How was their growth stunted and deformed? Why is it that unbounded skill and research have to be expended after all these generations, only to prove that the oldest nation in the world had a substantive existence in it?
4. Cause of the difference. The answer to this question seems to us to be this—if it be the wrong one, our inquiries respecting other nations will contradict it:—The Egyptian knowledge of the phenomena of the universe, and of its powers, was not balanced and sustained by any knowledge of the powers and destinies of man. Those who became acquainted with the things about them, could not but feel that they, the observers, were in some way superior to that which they observed. It is clear that they had that conviction, that they were even oppressed by it. But the objects which they saw, the facts which were revealed to them, soon became all in all. Effect of premature acquaintance with physics on the wise man, They nearly lost themselves in the things; their higher culture only helped to make the people the helpless servants of them. What he could tell of his discoveries, made his countrymen idolaters; what he reserved, made him feel his difference from them, and led him to affect new airs of superiority, to devise new arts for the purpose of keeping up the difference and the sense of it. Thus the sagacious man from being a true observer, passed into a diviner; thus he became the enslaver of those whom he should have emancipated, each new invention being, as it were, the creation of a new god. Such magicians are the great corrupters of kings, teaching them to rule by craft and not by righteousness, giving them animals for subjects, not human beings. and on his countrymen The healthy, patriarchal faith of the Hebrew boy infused a new life into the mind of a Pharaoh, taught him the difference between true judgment of the future, and cunning conjectures respecting it, introduced another element into Egyptian society, or rather made the elements that were already in it sound and coherent. But the government and the faith of the people ran again into their old rut; the soothsayers and magicians turned their physical knowledge to the service of falsehood and tyranny; the Pharaohs built their treasure-cities to their own glory, by the help of Jews. Then came the vindication of moral order, and the assertion of man as cared for by God, from the lips and the rod of Moses.
5. These indications respecting the Egyptian mind, from whatever period of its history we suppose them to have been taken, are a clue to interpret the later as well as the earlier stages of it. The contradictions of Egyptian life. Why its forms of idolatry should have been so various, so dependent upon local position; why its priests should seem to have possessed such stores of secret information, and why its people should have been so degraded; why Greeks should have listened to the teachers at Memphis with so much wonder, and yet should have felt so little sympathy with them; why the forms of their sculpture should be so gross and animal, and yet should imply so much reflection, and should suggest so many thoughts—may not be difficult to understand, if we patiently consider what must have been the effect of men being crushed and overwhelmed by natural images and impressions before they had any inner life with which to sustain them. Struggles for emancipation from idolatry. And hence we may understand what form the moral and metaphysical philosophy of the Egyptian must have taken, when he was stirred up to ask questions concerning himself, as well as concerning the things around him. To grope for a meaning in these things; to discover what relation there is between animal forms and man, what there is in their acts which shows forth and typifies his acts; this was the slow, painful, upward process by which the Egyptian must have sought to disengage himself from the degrading objects to which he had submitted, and to emerge into clearness and freedom. In all such efforts, if we could have any clear record of them, we should be bound to take the greatest interest, and to recognize the guidance of a Divine hand. Facts which are notorious give us a full right to believe that the intellect of the Egyptian was especially exercised in discovering the symbols of Nature, in detecting the higher and human meanings which lay beneath them. Influence of Egypt upon Greeks, Jews, and Christians. In this way the atmosphere exercised an influence over both Jews and Greeks, which we shall have to consider hereafter; still more strikingly over some of the teachers of the Christian church. But these moral inquiries had no power to leaven the polity of Egypt or to reach the heart of its people. They can only have been the struggles of a set of sages to escape from the webs which sages had first spun for themselves and their land. The history of Hindoo Philosophy will furnish us with more clearly-ascertained evidences of this kind of conflict. However certain we may be that it must have taken place in Egypt, we should have to resort to mere idle conjecture if we endeavoured to trace the course of it there.
6. Phœnicia. Commerce not in itself favourable to philosophy. We are so much in the habit of connecting the idea of commerce with human progress, that it may seem strange we have so little to report of the nation which had Tyre for its capital. The Phœnicians must no doubt have gathered many observations together in the course of their long voyages; but they were observations for others to reflect upon rather than themselves. Their own genius seems to have been exclusively active. However important an element in human life the love of variety, the eagerness for new objects, may be, there must something of silence and repose mingle with it before men can steadily ask themselves “What is wisdom?” or can care for an answer. A Phœnician colony in Africa could produce a Hannibal; a contemplative sage could hardly be looked for either in the mother or daughter city. The temper of the Phœnician, however, joined with other more stable qualities to form the mind of the Greek. He was to prove that the sea, which is the symbol and witness to man of his freedom, does not merely tempt him to seek for the outward and visible treasures which so commonly enslave it. But before Phœnicia had added anything to the traditions or the studies of the West, it had been brought into contact with the Hebrew kingdom. It was not a Joseph—a fugitive shepherd-boy—who represented the Jewish life to Hiram and his successors. Solomon showed them that the divine polity which he administered, though it had its beginning in the tent life of the patriarchs, and seemed in its legal stage devised for tillers of the ground, could expand to meet and sustain the conditions and temptations of a mercantile people; because a deeper wisdom than that which earth or ocean supplies had laid the foundation of it, and was still upholding it.
7. Difference between the wisdom of Egypt and Chaldæa. In Chaldæa, as the Hebrew Scriptures present it to us, we meet again with wise men such as we heard of in Egypt; but here they are especially spoken of as astrologers. The study of the heavenly bodies prevailed no doubt among the priests of Thebes and Memphis: the first systematic observations respecting the course of the year may be rightly ascribed to them. On this knowledge their claims to superior intellect respecting human events will in part have rested. Because they knew more of nature than others, they will have been able to divine what would probably happen to the fields or the crops. It is another step indicating a different order of thought and feeling to connect the stars directly with human life, and to believe that the course of the one is influenced or regulated by that of the other.
8. Astrology. Wide plains, still and beautiful nights, are favourable to the development of such a faith: perhaps only in such circumstances has it ever taken deep root. The hunting stage of society. For in such circumstances we meet with a hunting rather than an agricultural people, with men whose speculations turn more upon the success of their efforts to procure food for themselves, than upon the chances that the earth will produce it for them. Physical knowledge in this condition of society is not to be looked for. Tyranny, the rule of a man claiming dominion over the beasts of the field and over the creatures of his own race by the same right, will have here an earlier commencement. The Babel polity, spoken of in Scripture, is of this character; its founder is said to have been a mighty hunter before the Lord. In such a polity the human form will be more reverenced, the forms and symbols of nature far less; a difference which every one will be conscious of who compares the sculptures recently brought from Nineveh with the Egyptian remains. Assyrian art. In these very early and remarkable efforts of art, we perceive a reverence for animals, not in proportion to their usefulness to man, but to the strength of their talons or the quickness of their flight. The forms of such creatures combine with the human countenance to express the notion of that which is Divine. Not that they will have sufficed for this purpose; the earlier Sabaean worship will have continued side by side with these images of man’s power and dominion. But this worship will itself have been moulded by the character of the people who adopted it. Its relation to the Sabæan worship. The stars among this race of conquerors will have become dynasts or rulers over man’s life. Subjects feeling themselves at a hopeless difference from their sovereigns, regarding them as beings of another kind, will have had no difficulty in looking upon these cold and distant, and brilliant orbs, as the Kings of kings and Lords of lords. The wise men who hoped for something better from the world than that which they saw, will have asked these witnesses of calmness and order when a brighter day should come, when the world should be ruled with less of fantasy and caprice. The passion for knowing the future will have become indissolubly connected with the contemplation of the stars. A scheme of relations between them and the dwellers upon earth will have been wrought out. Guilty monarchs will have been perplexed with signs in the heavens; they will eagerly have fled to the science of the astrologers for relief. In general they will have converted them into the ministers of their purposes, the props of their authority.
9. The Jewish prophets in Babylon. These hints will not be useless with a view to the subsequent history. They are closely connected with that which has gone before. For the Hebrew books represent the prophets in Babylon as bearing witness especially against astrological divination, by declaring that the unseen King and Lord of their land did reveal the future through the present and the past, that all events are connected by a moral law, that the hopes for a more righteous government of the earth were not vain and deceitful hopes, that the crises and revolutions of empires are pre-ordained, and that they are all tending to the satisfaction of the questions, What is wisdom? Where is it to be found?