1. Three countries are especially connected with Jewish history: Egypt, Phœnicia and Chaldæa. Each has left memorials of itself. Those of Egypt are becoming more interesting to our time than to any earlier one, and Chaldæa is only now beginning to yield its treasures to European enterprise. Strictly speaking, none of the three produced any philosophers. But they indirectly influenced the philosophy of other nations in ways too important to overlook, and a few words on them seem a necessary sequel to the chapter on the Hebrews.
2. The wise men, magicians and soothsayers we read of in Exodus were no doubt students of nature. They had observed something of its powers and mysteries, of its influences over man, and of the means he has to turn those influences to good or harm. They surely believed this knowledge came from some Divine power, and I do not question their belief. If they traced their observations on the course of the year or the cultivation of the earth to a heavenly Teacher, they spoke more humbly, more truly, and more in the spirit of the Hebrew books than Josephus did. That Romanised Jew, out of foolish patriotism or a wish to make his countrymen respectable to their masters, pretends that Abraham, Joseph or Moses taught the Egyptians astronomy. The Hebrew legislator gives no hint that his ancestors imparted or possessed any such wisdom. What he himself had, if we believe the New Testament commentator on his words, he must first have received from the Egyptians. But his Divine Teacher purged his mind of the idolatries and confusions that surrounded their physical doctrines, and enabled him to give man his true place in creation. The Hebrew history does say that Joseph, instructed by the Invisible King, gave Pharaoh skill and foresight. But it never claims for the Jews acquaintance with the mechanical arts, or with the powers of nature needed to invent them. It implicitly concedes these to their tyrants.
3. Here we find the main difference in development between the two peoples. Modern science may credit Egypt with a long series of dynasties, clear signs of an organised priesthood and civil order, and 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 must unbounded skill and research be spent, after all these generations, merely to prove that the oldest nation in the world actually existed?
4. This is the answer I propose; if it is wrong, our inquiries into other nations will contradict it. The Egyptians’ knowledge of the universe and its powers was not balanced by any knowledge of the powers and destinies of man. Those who came to know the things around them could not help feeling that they, the observers, were somehow superior to what they observed. They clearly had that conviction and were even oppressed by it. But the objects they saw and the facts revealed to them soon became everything. They nearly lost themselves in the things, and their higher culture only made the people more helpless servants of them. What the sage told of his discoveries made his countrymen idolaters; what he held back made him feel his difference from them, and led him to affect airs of superiority and devise new arts to keep up that difference. So the sagacious man, from being a true observer, became a diviner, and enslaved those he should have freed, each new invention being as it were the creation of a new god. Such magicians are the great corrupters of kings. They teach them to rule by craft instead of righteousness, and give them animals for subjects instead of human beings. The healthy, patriarchal faith of the Hebrew boy put new life into a Pharaoh. It taught him the difference between true judgment of the future and cunning conjecture about it, and it made the elements already in Egyptian society sound and coherent. But the government and the people’s faith slid back into the old rut. The soothsayers and magicians again put their physical knowledge to the service of falsehood and tyranny, and the Pharaohs built their treasure-cities to their own glory with the help of Jews. Then came the vindication of moral order, and the assertion that man is cared for by God, from the lips and the rod of Moses.
5. These indications of the Egyptian mind, from whatever period they come, are a clue to its later as well as its earlier stages. Consider the effect of men being crushed and overwhelmed by natural images and impressions before they had any inner life to sustain them. Then it may not be hard to understand why Egyptian idolatry took such various forms, depending on local position. It may explain why the priests seem to have had such stores of secret information while the people were so degraded; why the Greeks listened to the teachers at Memphis with wonder yet felt so little sympathy with them; and why Egyptian sculpture is so gross and animal, yet implies so much reflection and suggests so many thoughts. We may also understand what form the Egyptian’s moral and metaphysical philosophy must have taken when he was stirred to ask questions about himself as well as about the things around him. He must have groped for a meaning in them, seeking the relation between animal forms and man and what in their acts typifies his own. This was the slow, painful, upward process by which he tried to free himself from the degrading objects he had submitted to. If we had a clear record of such efforts we should take the greatest interest in them and recognise the guidance of a Divine hand. Notorious facts give us full right to believe that the Egyptian intellect was especially exercised in discovering the symbols of Nature and detecting the higher, human meanings beneath them. In this way the Egyptian atmosphere influenced both Jews and Greeks, as we shall consider later, and still more strikingly some teachers of the Christian church. But these moral inquiries had no power to leaven the polity of Egypt or reach the heart of its people. They can only have been the struggles of a set of sages to escape webs which sages had first spun for themselves and their land. The history of Hindoo philosophy will give us more clearly ascertained evidence of this kind of conflict. However certain we may be that it took place in Egypt, we would have to resort to idle conjecture if we tried to trace its course there.
6. We so habitually connect commerce with human progress that it may seem strange how little there is to report of the nation whose capital was Tyre. The Phœnicians must have gathered many observations on their long voyages, but these were for others to reflect upon rather than themselves. Their own genius seems to have been exclusively active. The love of variety and the eagerness for new objects are an important element in human life. But some silence and repose must mingle with them before men can steadily ask “What is wisdom?” or care for an answer. A Phœnician colony in Africa could produce a Hannibal, but a contemplative sage could hardly be looked for in either the mother or the daughter city. Yet the Phœnician temper, joined with other more stable qualities, helped form the mind of the Greek. He was to prove that the sea, which is the symbol and witness of man’s freedom, does not merely tempt him to seek the outward and visible treasures that so commonly enslave it. But before Phœnicia had added anything to the traditions or studies of the West, it had met the Hebrew kingdom. To Hiram and his successors, Jewish life was not represented by a Joseph, a fugitive shepherd-boy. Solomon showed them that the divine polity he administered could expand to meet the conditions and temptations of a mercantile people. It had begun in the tent life of the patriarchs and seemed, in its legal stage, devised for tillers of the ground. But a deeper wisdom than earth or ocean supplies had laid its foundation and was still upholding it.
7. In Chaldæa, as the Hebrew Scriptures present it, we meet again wise men like those of Egypt, but here they are especially called astrologers. The study of the heavenly bodies no doubt prevailed among the priests of Thebes and Memphis, and the first systematic observations of the course of the year may rightly be ascribed to them. Their claim to superior insight into human events will partly have rested on this knowledge: because they knew more of nature than others, they could divine what would probably happen to fields and crops. It is another step, and one that indicates 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 the other.
8. Wide plains and still, beautiful nights favour the growth of such a faith; perhaps only in such circumstances has it ever taken deep root. There we find a hunting rather than an agricultural people, whose speculations turn more on whether their efforts to get food will succeed than on whether the earth will produce it. Physical knowledge is not to be expected in this condition of society. Tyranny, the rule of a man who claims dominion over the beasts of the field and over his own kind by the same right, will begin earlier here. The Babel polity of 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 is more reverenced and the forms and symbols of nature far less, as anyone will feel who compares the sculptures recently brought from Nineveh with the Egyptian remains. In these very early and remarkable works of art we see reverence for animals in proportion not 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 the Divine. They will not have sufficed for this alone; the earlier Sabæan worship will have continued alongside these images of man’s power and dominion. But that worship was itself moulded by the character of the people who adopted it. Among a race of conquerors the stars will have become dynasts ruling over man’s life. Subjects who felt a hopeless gulf between themselves and their sovereigns, and regarded them as beings of another kind, would have no difficulty seeing these cold, distant, brilliant orbs as the Kings of kings and Lords of lords. Wise men who hoped for something better from the world than they saw will have asked these witnesses of calm and order when a brighter day would come, when the world would be ruled with less fantasy and caprice. The passion for knowing the future will have become inseparably tied to contemplating the stars, and a scheme of relations between them and the dwellers on earth will have been worked out. Guilty monarchs, perplexed by signs in the heavens, will eagerly have fled to the astrologers’ science for relief. In general they will have made the astrologers ministers of their purposes and props of their authority.
9. These hints will be useful for the history that follows, and they are closely connected with what has gone before. For the Hebrew books show the prophets in Babylon bearing witness especially against astrological divination. They declared that the unseen King and Lord of their land does reveal the future through the present and the past; that all events are connected by a moral law; that the hope of a more righteous government of the earth was not vain and deceitful; and that the crises and revolutions of empires are pre-ordained and all tending to answer the questions, What is wisdom? Where is it to be found?