Methodist Review (Volume 58 1876) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Art. III.?LUCRETIUS. The new phases of materialistic philosophy, and the persistent prominence given to it by its modern advocates, naturally turn our attention to the old philosophers and their theories with increased interest. With a somewhat comet-like regularity, or irregularity, these materialistic doctrines blaze out afresh along the sky of human history, and alarm for awhile the timid and the faithless, and then fade away until new conditions cause them to reappear. It may not be easy to calculate their cycles, but they seem to have a real periodicity, and illustrate the truism that there is nothing new under the sun. They are no new fires kindled among the everlasting stars of truth, but only the old embers fanned to fitful brightness by some unusually vigorous breath. From Democritus, the so-called father of the atomic philosophy, to its latest expositor, who does not hesitate to " prolong the vision backward across the boundary of experimental evidence," the lights of that philosophy have gone down in that unknown abyss which stretches beyond the horizon of demonstrable fact. They have paused awhile on the verge of experimental evidence, but have plunged at last into the shoreless gulf of speculative theory. Restless spirits, to whom mystery is intolerable, they have striven in every age to wrest from the Almighty the secret of creation. They have stretched out a long, eager arm into the darkness if haply they might touch the finger of God. Baffled in their blind groping, they turn fiercely upon that universal instinct that recognizes a divine hand in the origin of the world, and endeavor to banish the Deity from the universe. It is a significant fact that the limit of the materialistic philosophy has been one and the same in all ages. Its apostles have marched up ...