Have
followed the lead of the first daring inventor of the mis-statement.
Hallam has had the courage, in the supplement to his History of the
Middle Ages, p. 398, to acknowledge an error of this sort that he has
been led into.
But the particular instance of barrel-organism that is present to our
minds just now is the Darwinian theory of the development of species
by natural selection, of which we hear so much. This is nothing new,
but a rechauffee of the old story that his namesake, Dr. Darwin,
served up in the end of the last century to Priestley and his
admirers, and Lord Monboddo had cooked in the beginning of the same
century. We have all heard of his theory that man was developed
directly from the monkey, and that we all lost our tails by sitting
too much upon that appendage.
We learn from that same great and cautious writer Hallam in his
History of Literature that there are traces of this theory and of
other popular theories of the present day in the works of Giordano
Bruno, the Neapolitan who was burnt at Rome by the Inquisition in
1600. It is curious to read the titles of his works and to think of
Dugald Stewart's remark about barrel-organs. For instance he wrote
on "The Plurality of Worlds," and on the universal "Monad," a name
familiar enough to the readers of Vestiges of Creation. He was a
Pantheist, and, as Hallam says, borrowed all his theories from the
eclectic philosophers, from Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, and
ultimately they were no doubt of Oriental origin. This is just what
has been shown again and again to be the history of German Pantheism;
it is a mere barrel-organ repetition of the Brahman metaphysics found
in Hindu cosmogonies. Bruno's theory regarding development of
species was in Hallam's words: "There is nothing so small or so
unimportant but that a portion of spirit dwells in it; and this
spiritual substance requires a proper subject to become a plant or an
animal"; and Hallam in a note on this passage observes how the modern
theories of equivocal generation correspond with Bruno's.
No doubt Hallam is right in saying that they are all of Oriental
origin. Pythagoras borrowed from thence his kindred theory of the
metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls. But he was more
consistent than modern philosophers; he recognised a downward
development as well as an upward, and made morality and immorality
the crisis and turning-point of change - a bold lion developed into a
brave warrior, a drunken sot developed into a wallowing pig, and
Darwin's slave-making ants, p. 219, would have been formerly
Virginian cotton and tobacco growers.
Perhaps Prometheus was the first Darwin of antiquity, for he is said
to have begun his creation from below, and after passing from the
invertebrate to the sub-vertebrate, from thence to the backbone, from
the backbone to the mammalia, and from the mammalia to the manco-
cerebral, he compounded man of each and all:-
Fertur Prometheus addere principi
Limo coactus particulam undique
Desectam et insani leonis
Vim stomacho apposuisse nostro.
