see three thousand mendicants, who are as certain that thou wilt go to the gulf which is under the narrow bridge, as that they will all go to the first heaven!

Stop, miserable Malabar widow, believe not the fool who persuades thee that thou shalt be re-united to thy husband, in all the delights of another world, if thou burnest thyself on his funeral pile !-No, I persist in burning myself, because I am certain of living in felicity with my husband: : my brahmin told me so.

Let us attend to less frightful certainties, and which have a little more appearance of truth.

What is the age of your friend Christopher? Twentyeight years. I have seen his marriage contract, and his baptismal register: I knew him in his infancy; he is twenty-eight-I am certain of it.

Scarcely have I heard the answer of this man, so sure of what he said, and of twenty others who confirmed the same thing, when I learn that for secret reasons, and by a singular circumstance, the baptismal register of Christopher has been antedated. Those to whom I had spoken as yet know nothing of it, yet they have still the same certainty of that which is not.

If you had asked the whole earth, before the time of Copernicus, Has the sun risen? has it set to-day? All men would have answered, We are quite certain of it. They were certain, and they were in error.

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Witchcraft, divinations, and possessions, were for a long time the most certain things in the world, in the eyes of society. What an innumerable crowd of people who have seen all these fine things, and who have been certain of them! At present, this certainty is a little shaken.

A young man who is beginning to study geometry, comes to me; he is only at the definition of triangles. Are you not certain, said I to him, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles? He answered, that not only was he not certain of it, but that he had not the slightest idea of the proposition. I demonstrated it to him. He then became very certain of it, and will remain so all his life.

This is a certainty very different from the others; they were only probabilities, and these probabilities when examined have turned out errors; but mathematical certainty is immutable and eternal.

I exist, I think, I feel grief-is all that as certain as a geometrical truth? Yes, sceptical as I am, I avow it. Why? It is that these truths are proved by the same principle that it is impossible for a thing to exist and not exist at the same time. I cannot at the same time feel and not feel. A triangle cannot at the same time contain a hundred and eighty degrees, which are the sum of two right angles, and not contain them.

The physical certainty of my existence, of my identity, is of the same value as mathematical certainty, although it is of a different kind.

It is not the same with the certainty founded on appearances, or on the unanimous testimony of mankind.

But how, you will say to me-are you not certain that Pekin exists? Have you not merchandise from Pekin? People of different countries and different opinions have vehemently written against one another, while preaching the truth at Pekin; then are you not assured of the existence of this town? I answer, that it is extremely probable that there may be a city of Pekin, but I would not wager my life that such a town exists; and I would at any time wager my life, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.

In the Dictionnaire Encyclopédique a very pleasant thing appears. It is there maintained, that a man ought to be as certain that marshal Saxe rose from the dead, if all Paris tells him so, as he is sure that marshal Saxe gained the battle of Fontenoy, upon the same testimony.

Pray observe the beauty of this reasoning: as I believe all Paris when it tells me a thing morally possible, I ought to believe all Paris when it tells me a thing morally and physically impossible.

Apparently, the author of this article has a disposition to be risible; as to ourselves, who have only undertaken this little dictionary to ask a few questions,

VOL. II.

M

we are very far from possessing this very extensive certainty.

CHAIN OF CREATED BEINGS.

THE gradation of beings, rising from the lowest to the Great Supreme-the scale of infinity-is an idea that fills us with admiration; but when steadily regarded, this phantom disappears, as apparitions were wont to vanish in the morning at the crowing of the cock.

The imagination is pleased with the imperceptible transition from brute matter to organized matter-from plants to zoophytes-from zoophytes to animals-from animals to men- -from men to genii-from these genii clad in a light aërial body, to immaterial substances of a thousand different orders, rising from beauty to perfection, up to God himself. This hierarchy is very pleasing to young men, who look upon it as upon the pope and cardinals, followed by the archbishops and bishops, after whom are the vicars, curates, and priests, the deacons and sub-deacons, then come the monks, and the capuchins bring up the rear.

But there is, perhaps, a somewhat greater distance between God and his most perfect creatures, than between the Holy Father and the dean of the sacred college. The dean may become pope; but can the most perfect of the genii created by the Supreme Being become God? Is there not infinity between them?

Nor does this chain, this pretended gradation, any more exist in vegetables and animals; the proof is, that some species of plants and animals have been entirely destroyed-We have no murer*-The Jews were forbidden to eat griffin and ixion: these two species, whatever Bochart may say, have probably disappeared from the earth. Where, then, is the chain?

Supposing that we had not lost some species, it is evident that they may be destroyed. Lions and rhinoceroses are becoming very scarce; and if the rest of

* The shell fish, from which the ancients derived their celebrated purple dye.

the nations had imitated the English, there would not now have been a wolf left.

It is probable that there have been races of men who are no longer to be found. Why should they not have existed, as well as the whites, the blacks, the Caffres to whom nature has given an apron of their own skin, hanging from the belly to the middle of the thigh; the Samoyeds, whose women have nipples of a beautiful jet, &c.

Is there not a manifest void between the ape and man? Is it not easy to imagine a two-legged animal without feathers, having intelligence, without our shape or the use of speech-one which we could tame, which would answer our signs, and serve us? And again, between this species and man, cannot we imagine

others?

Beyond man, divine Plato, you place in heaven a string of celestial substances, in some of which we believe, because the faith so teaches us. But what reason had you to believe in them? It does not appear that you had spoken with the genius of Socrates; and though Heres, good man, rose again on purpose to tell you the secrets of the other world, he told you nothing of these substances.

In the sensible universe, the pretended chain is no less interrupted.

What gradation, I pray you, is there among the planets? The moon is forty times smaller than our globe. Travelling from the moon through space, you find Venus, about as large as the earth. From thence you go to Mercury, which revolves in an ellipsis very different from the circular orbit of Venus; it is twentyseven times smaller than the earth, the sun is a million of times larger, and Mars is five times smaller. The latter goes his round in two years, his neighbour Jupiter in twelve, and Saturn in thirty; yet Saturn, the most distant of all, is not so large as Jupiter. Where is the pretended gradation?

And then, how, in so many empty spaces, do you extend a chain connecting the whole? There can,

certainly, be no other than that which Newton discovered that which makes all the globes of the planetary world gravitate one towards another in the immense void.

Oh, much admired Plato! I fear that thou hast told us nothing but fables, that thou hast spoken to us only as a sophist! Oh, Plato! thou hast done more mischief than thou art aware of. How so? you will ask. I will not tell you.

CHAIN OR GENERATION OF EVENTS.

THE present, we say, is pregnant with the future; events are linked one with another by an invincible fatality. This is the Fate which, in Homer, is supe rior to Jupiter himself. The master of gods and men expressly declares, that he cannot prevent his son Sarpedon from dying at the time appointed. Sarpedon was born at the moment when it was necessary that he should be born, and could not be born at any other; he could not die elsewhere than before Troy; he could not be buried elsewhere than in Lycia; his body must, in the appointed time, produce vegetables, which must change into the substance of some of the Lycians; his heirs must establish a new order of things in his states; that new order must influence neighbouring kingdoms; thence must result a new arrangement in war and in peace with the neighbours of Lycia. So that, from link to link, the destiny of the whole earth depended on the death of Sarpedon, which depended on the elopement of Helen, which had a necessary connection with the marriage of Hecuba, which, ascending to higher events, was connected with the origin of things.

Had any one of these occurrences been ordered otherwise, the result would have been a different universe. Now, it was not possible for the actual universe not to exist; therefore it was not possible for Jupiter, Jove as he was, to save the life of his son.

We are told that this doctrine of necessity and fatality has been invented in our own times, by Leibnitz,