Let us observe, that it was upon the same territory that the spirit of freedom first took its rise in Europe-a spirit which we must not indeed confound with complete Materialism, but which is at all events closely related to it. For that strip of land in Lower Italy, and especially that in Sicily, where to-day blind superstition and mad fanaticism are at their height, was then the native home of enlightened minds and the cradle of the idea of toleration. Whether the Emperor Frederick II., the highly cultivated friend of the Saracens, the scientific protector of the positive sciences, really uttered the famous expression about the three impostors, Moses, Mohammed, and Christ,22 this time and place at least produced such opinions. Not without reason did Dante count by thousands the bold doubters who, resting in their fiery graves, ever preserve their contempt for hell. In that close contact of the different monotheistic religions-for at that time the Jews were there very numerous, and were in point of culture scarcely behind the Arabians-it was inevitable that, as soon as intellectual intercourse took place, the reverence for specific forms should be blunted; and yet it is in the specific that the force of religion lies, as the force of poetry lies in the individual. Hist., Vergleich der Sitten u. s. w. des Mittelalters mit d. unsr. Jahrh., ii. 413 foll. Daremberg, Hist. des Sciences Méd., i. 259 foll., shows that the importance of Salerno in medicine is older than the influence of the Arabians, and that here probably ancient traditions had survived. Yet the school certainly received a great impulse through the Emperor Frederick II. 22 The assertion that Averroes, or the Emperor Frederick II., or some other insolent freethinker, spoke of Mohammed, Christ, and Moses as the 'three impostors,' appears in the middle ages to have been merely unfounded calumny, and a means of drawing hatred and suspicion upon persons of How much Frederick II. was distrusted is shown by the accusation that he was in complicity with the Assassins, those murdering Jesuits of Mohammedanism, who are said to have had a secret doctrine which openly and freely expressed to the utmost a complete atheism, with all the logical consequences of an egoism seeking to gratify its lust of pleasure and power. If the tradition of the doctrines of the Assassins were true, we should have to pay this sect more respect than that of this incidental mention. The Assassins of the highest type would then represent the model of a Materialist such as the ignorant and fanatical partisans of our day love to imagine him in order to be. able to urge a successful contest with him. The Assassins would be the solitary historical example of a combination of Materialistic philosophy with cruelty, lust of power, and systematic crime. Let us not forget, however, that all our information as to this sect proceeds from their bitterest foes. It amounts to the highest degree of internal improbability that from the most harmless of all theories of the universe should have proceeded an energy so fearful that it demands the utmost strain of all the forces of the soul—an energy which in all other cases we find only in union with religious ideas. They are also, in their awful sublimity and transporting charm, the one element in the world's history to which we can pardon even the extremest abominations of fanaticism from the highest standpoint; and this is rooted deep in human nature. We would not venture, in the face of tradition, to build a conjecture upon purely internal grounds, that religious ideas were in the utmost activity amongst the Assassins, unless the sources of our knowledge of the Assassins afforded room for such consideration,23 That a high degree of freethinking may be 23 Hammer, in his book, based upon Oriental sources," The History of the Assassins," Stutt. and Tub. 1818, E. T. 1835, is entirely of the view which divides the Assassins into deluders and deluded, and in the highest grades finds nothing but cold-blooded calcu lation, absolute unbelief, and the most vicious egotism. Enough, indeed, to this effect can be found in combined with the fanatical conception of a religious idea, is proved by the case of the Jesuits, with whose whole being that of the Assassins has a striking similarity. To return to the natural science of the Arabians, we cannot, in conclusion, avoid quoting the bold expression of Humboldt, that the Arabians are to be considered the proper founders of the physical sciences, "in the signification of the term which we are now accustomed to give it." Experiment and measurement are the great instruments with the aid of which they made a path for progress, and raised themselves to a position which is to be placed between the achievements of the brief inductive period of Greece, and those of the more modern natural sciences. That Mohammedanism exhibits most of that furtherance of natural study which we assign to the Monotheistic principle, falls in with the talents of the Arabians with their historical and local relation to Greek traditions, without doubt, however, also with the circumstance that the Monotheism of Mohammed was the most absolute, and comparatively the freest from mythical adulterations. Finally, let us place among the new elements of culture. which might react upon a Materialistic theory of nature the sources; and yet we must not forget that this is the usual way in which victorious orthodoxy deals with defeated sects. It is really here, apart from the frequent instances of malicious misrepresentation, just as it is with our judgment of so-called 'hypocrites' in private life. Unusual piety is in the popular eyes either genuine saintship or a wicked cloak of all that is vile. For the psychological subtlety of the mixture of genuine religious emotions with coarse selfishness and vicious habits the ordinary mind has no appreciation. Hammer sets forth his own view of the psychological explanation of the Assassin movement in the following words (S. 20, E. T. p. 13):-"Of all the passions which have ever called into action the tongue, the pen, or the sword, which have overturned the throne, and shaken the altar to its base, ambition is the first and mightiest. It uses crime as a means, virtue as a mask. It respects nothing sacred, and yet it has recourse to that which is most beloved, because the most secure, that of all held most sacred by man-religion. Hence the history of religion is never more tempestuous and sanguinary than when the tiara, united to the diadem, imparts and receives an increased power." But when was there ever a priesthood which was not ambitious; and how can religion be the most sacred element of humanity if its first servants find in it only a means to satisfy their ambition? And why is ambition so common and so dangerous a passion, this further one, which is handled at length by Humboldt in the second volume of his Kosmos-the development of the aesthetical contemplation of nature under the influence of Monotheism and of Semitic culture. The ancients had carried personification to the utmost pitch, and seldom got so far as to regard or to represent nature simply as nature. A man crowned with reeds represented the ocean, a nymph the fountain, a faun or Pan the plain and the grove. When the landscape was robbed of its gods, then began the true observation of nature, and joy at the mere greatness and beauty of natural phenomena. "It is a characteristic," says Humboldt,*" of the poetry of the Hebrews, that, as a reflex of Monotheism, it always embraces the universe in its unity, comprising both terrestrial life and the luminous realms of space. It dwells but rarely on the individual phenomenon, preferring the contemplation of great masses. . . . It might be said that one single psalm (Ps. civ.) represents the image of the whole kosmos: The Lord, who coverest thyself with light as with a garment; who stretchest out the heavens like a since for the most part it only leads, by a very thorny and extremely uncertain way, to that life of pleasure which is regarded as the object of every selfish man? There is obviously acting, often at least, and almost always in the great events of worldhistory, in connection with ambition, an ideal which is partly in itself overprized, but partly passes into a one-sided relation to the particular person regarded as its special bearer. And this is the reason why it is religious ambition especially that is so frequent, for the cases in which religion is employed by an ambitious but not religious person as a valuable means must be very rare in history. These considerations apply also to the Jesuits, who at certain periods of their history have certainly come very near to the Assassins, as Hammer represents them; while, at the same time, they would scarcely have been able to establish their power in the souls of believers without the help of genuine fanaticism. Hammer often adduces them, and certainly with justice, as a parallel to the case of the Assassins (S. 337, et passim, E.T. 216); but when he thinks the regicides of the French Revolution worthy to have been satellites of the old man of the mountain,' this shows how easily such generalisations may lead to a misapprehension of peculiar historical phenomena. It is certain that the political fanaticism of the French 'men of terror' was, on the whole, very sincere, and by no means hypocritical. * Kosmos, E. T., Bohn's ed., ii. 412, 413. curtain; who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever. He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills: thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn not again to cover the earth. They give drink to every beast of the field. By them shall the fowls of the air have their habitation, which sing among the branches. The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon which he hath planted, where the birds make their nests; as for the stork, the fir-trees are her house.'" To the times of the Christian anchorites belongs a letter of Basil the Great, which in Humboldt's translation affords a magnificent and feeling description of the lonely forest in which stood the hermit's hut. So the sources flowed on all sides to form the mighty stream of modern intellectual life, in which, under numerous modifications, we have again to seek for the object of our inquiry, Materialism. |