This variety of judgment in the heat of controversy was inevitable. The full importance of the history of ancient philosophy was then first seen when all rivalry was over, and it became possible to contemplate it as a whole, animated by a great law, often trembling on the verge of truth, and sometimes by a "bold venture" claiming the heritage of faith. Yet even now the rela- tions of the " two old covenants" — philosophy and the Hebrew Scriptures — to use the language of Clement — have been traced only imperfectly. What has been done may encourage labor, but it does not supersede it. In the porticos of Eastern churches Pythagoras and Plato are pictured among those who prepared the way for Christianity (Stanley, p. 41) ; but in the West, sib- yls, and not philosophers, are the chosen representatives of the divine element in Gentile teaching.
Philosophy, Hebrew. The term philosophy, as seen above, may be properly used in a wider and in a more restricted sense. In the former it is nearly synonymous with science, and embraces all departments of human knowledge capable of being scientifically classified — that is, where the facts are presented in their causes, where phenomena are referred to principles, and arranged un- der laws. In the latter it is confined to speculative knowledge, that which the mind has of its own opera- tions and laws, or which it acquires by reasoning from its own thoughts. We have no evidence that philoso- phy in the stricter sense was cultivated by the ancient Hebrews ; nor have we much reason to believe that sci- entific study, even as regards external phenomena, was much followed by them. Forming our estimate from what of their literature has been preserved to us in the Bible, we must conclude that the ancient Hebrew mind was not specially characterized by those tendencies, nor largely endowed with those faculties which give birth to speculative research. The analytical and the logical are but slightly perceptible in their mental products, while the imaginative, the synthetic, and the histori- cal largely predominate. AVe should be led to infer that they delighted rather in putting things together according to their analogies than in distributing them according to their differences. They were careful ob- servers of phenomena, and their minds sought scope in bold flights of imagination, or reposed in calm, pro- tracted, and profound reflection ; but it was as histori- ans and poets rather than as philosophers that they looked on the world both of being and event.
It thus appears that philosophy, if we limit the word strictly to describe the free pursuit of knowledge of
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which truth is the one complete end, is essentially of Western growth. In the East the .-<■.•ir.li after wisdom has always been connected with practice: it has re- mained then-, what it was iii Greece al iir-t. a pan of religion. The history ol the Jews offers no exception to this remark : there is no Jewish philosophy properly
SO railed. Vet ..n the other hand speculation and ac- tion inert in truth: and perhaps the mosl obvious les- son of the < >. T. lies in the gradual construction of a di\ ine philosophy by fact, and not by speculation. The method of Greece was to proceed from life to God; the method of Israel (so to speak) was to proceed from God to life. The axioms of one system are the conclusions of the other. The one led to the successive abandon- ment of the noblest domains of science which man had claimed originally as his own. till it left bare systems of morality: the other, in the fulness of time, prepared many to welcome the < Ihrist— the Truth.
From whal has been said, it follows that the philoso- phy of the Jeys, using the word in a large sense, is to be sought lor rather in the progress of the national life than in special books. These, indeed, furnish impor- tant illustrations of the growth of speculation, but the history is written more in acts than in thoughts. Step by step the idea of the family was raised into that of tb«' people; and the kingdom furnished the basis of those wider promises which included .all nations in one kingdom of heaven. The social, the political, the cos- mica] relations of man were traced out gradually in re- lation to God. See Jews; Judaism.
I. The Philosophy of Nature. — 1. Primitive Period. — With the Hebrews the original theory of the world was so simple that little occasion was given to them for spec- ulation on the mysteries of existence. Their conception of it was essentially and wholly monotheistic. They held the existence of one God, besides whom there was no other: and as the world had come into being by his simple fiat, so it wa> kept in being by his will, gov- erned by his immediate agency, and subordinated to the fulfilment of his designs. No trace is discoverable in the Bible of those pantheistic notions in which the think.rs and writers of other ancient nations seem so generally to have taken refuge from the perplexities
arising out of the relations of the finite to the infinite, and which at a later period took such hold of the Jewish mind, as is attested by their cabalistic books (Freystadt, Philosophia Cabbulistica <t Pantkeismus, 1832). The world and the things in the world were regarded bj them not a- emanations from God, nor as in anj sense God; they .are all the work ol' his hands, proceeding from him. but as distinct from him .as the