A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 02

Books are now multiplied to such a degree that it is impossible not only to read them all but even to know their number and their titles. Happily, one is not obliged to read all that is published, and Caramuel's plan for writing a hundred folio volumes and employing the spiritual and temporal power of princes to compel their subjects to read them, has not been put in execution. Ringelburg, too, had formed the design of composing about a thousand different volumes, but, even had he lived long enough to publish them he would have fallen far short of Hermes Trismegistus, who, according to Jamblicus, composed thirty-six thousand five hundred and twenty-five books. Supposing the truth of this fact, the ancients had no less reason than the moderns to complain of the multitude of books.

It is, indeed, generally agreed that a small number of choice books is sufficient. Some propose that we should confine ourselves to the Bible or Holy Scriptures, as the Turks limit themselves to the Koran. But there is a great difference between the feelings of reverence entertained by the Mahometans for their Koran and those of the Christians for the Scriptures. The veneration testified by the former when speaking of the Koran cannot be exceeded. It is, say they, the greatest of all miracles; nor are all the men in existence put together capable of anything at all approaching it; it is still more wonderful that the author had never studied, nor read any book. The Koran alone is worth sixty thousand miracles (the number of its verses, or thereabouts); one rising from the dead would not be a stronger proof of the truth of a religion than the composition of the Koran. It is so perfect that it ought not to be regarded as a work of creation.

The Christians do indeed say that their Scriptures were inspired by the Holy Ghost, yet not only is it acknowledged by Cardinal Cajetan and Bellarmine that errors have found their way into them through the negligence and ignorance of the book-sellers and the rabbis, who added the points, but they are considered as a book too dangerous for the hands of the majority of the faithful. This is expressed by the fifth rule of the Index, a congregation at Rome, whose office it is to examine what books are to be forbidden. It is as follows:

"Since it is evident that if the reading of the Bible, translated into the vulgar tongue, were permitted to every one indiscriminately the temerity of mankind would cause more evil than good to arise therefrom – we will that it be referred to the judgment of the bishop or inquisitor, who, with the advice of the curate or confessor, shall have power to grant permission to read the Bible rendered in the vulgar tongue by Catholic writers, to those to whom they shall judge that such reading will do no harm; they must have this permission in writing and shall not be absolved until they have returned their Bible into the hands of the ordinary. As for such book-sellers as shall sell Bibles in the vulgar tongue to those who have not this written permission, or in any other way put them into their hands, they shall lose the price of the books (which the bishop shall employ for pious purposes), and shall moreover be punished by arbitrary penalties. Nor shall regulars read or buy these books without the permission of their superiors."

Cardinal Duperron also asserted that the Scriptures, in the hands of the unlearned, were a two-edged knife which might wound them, to avoid which it was better that they should hear them from the mouth of the Church, with the solutions and interpretations of such passages as appear to the senses to be full of absurdity and contradiction, than that they should read them by themselves without any solution or interpretation. He afterwards made a long enumeration of these absurdities in terms so unqualified that Jurieu was not afraid to declare that he did not remember to have read anything so frightful or so scandalous in any Christian author.

Jurieu, who was so violent t in his invectives against Cardinal Duperron, had himself to sustain similar reproaches from the Catholics. "I heard that minister," says Pap, in speaking of him, "teaching the public that all the characteristics of the Holy Scriptures on which those pretended reformers had founded their persuasion of their divinity, did not appear to him to be sufficient. 'Let it not be inferred,' said Jurieu, 'that I wish to take from the light and strength of the characteristics of Scripture, but I will venture to affirm that there is not one of them which may not be eluded by the profane. There is not one of them that amounts to a proof; not one to which something may not be said in answer, and, considered altogether, although they have greater power than separately to work a moral conviction – that is, a proof on which to found a certainty excluding every doubt – I own that nothing seems to me to be more opposed to reason than to say that these characteristics are of themselves capable of producing such a certainty."

It is not then astonishing that the Jews and the first Christians, who, we find in the Acts of the Apostles, confined themselves in their meetings to the reading of the Bible, were, as will be seen in the article "Heresy," divided into different sects. For this reading was afterwards substituted that of various apocryphal works, or at least of extracts from them. The author of the "Synopsis of Scripture," which we find among the works of St. Athanasius, expressly avows that there are in the apocryphal books things most true and inspired by God which have been selected and extracted for the perusal of the faithful.

BOURGES

Our questions have but little to do with geography, but we shall, perhaps, be permitted to express in a few words our astonishment respecting the town of Bourges. The Trévoux Dictionary asserts that "it is one of the most ancient in Europe; that it was the seat of empire of the Gauls, and gave laws to the Celts."

I will not combat the antiquity of any town or of any family. But was there ever an empire of Gaul? had the Celts kings? This rage for antiquity is a malady which is not easily cured. In Gaul, in Germany, and in the North there is nothing ancient but the soil, the trees, and the animals. If you will have antiquities go to Asia, and even there they are hardly to be found. Man is ancient, but monuments are new; this has already been said in more articles than one.

If to be born within a certain stone or wooden limit more ancient than another were a real good it would be no more than reasonable to date the foundation of the town from the giants' war, but since this vanity is in no wise advantageous let it be renounced. This is all I have to say about Bourges.

BRACHMANS – BRAHMINS

Courteous reader, observe, in the first place, that Father Thomassin, one of the most learned men of modern Europe, derives the Brachmans from the Jewish word barac, by a c– supposing, of course, that the Jews had a c. This barac, says he, signified to fly; and the Brachmans fled from the towns – supposing that there were any towns.

Or, if you like it better, Brachmans comes from barak by a k, meaning to bless or to pray. But why might not the Biscayans name the Brahmins from the word bran? which expresses – I will not say what. They had as good a right as the Hebrews. Really, this is a strange sort of erudition. By rejecting it entirely, we should know less, but we should know it better.

Is it not likely that the Brahmins were the first legislators, the first philosophers, the first divines, of the earth? Do not the few remaining monuments of ancient history form a great presumption in their favor? since the first Greek philosophers went to them to learn mathematics; and the most ancient curiosities, those collected by the emperors of China, are all Indian, as is attested by the relations in Du Halde's collection.

Of the Shastah, we shall speak elsewhere. It is the first theological book of the Brahmins, written about fifteen hundred years before the Vedah, and anterior to all other books.

Their annals make no mention of any war undertaken by them at any time. The words "arms," "killing," "maiming," are to be found neither in the fragments of the Shastah that have reached us, nor in the Yajurvedah, nor in the Kormovedah. At least, I can affirm that I have not seen them in either of these two latter collections; and it is most singular that the Shastah, which speaks of a conspiracy in heaven, makes no mention of any war in the great peninsula between the Indus and Ganges.

The Hebrews, who were unknown until so late a period, never name the Brahmins; they knew nothing of India till after Alexander's conquests and their own settling in that Egypt of which they had spoken so ill. The name of India is to be found only in the book of Esther, and in that of Job, who was not a Hebrew. We find a singular contrast between the sacred books of the Hebrews and those of the Indians. The Indian books announce only peace and mildness; they forbid the killing of animals: but the Hebrew books speak of nothing but the slaughter and massacre of men and beasts; all are butchered in the name of the Lord; it is quite another order of things.

We are incontestably indebted to the Brahmins for the idea of the fall of celestial beings revolting against the Sovereign of Nature; and it was probably from them that the Greeks took the fable of the Titans; and lastly, from them it was that the Jews, in the first century of our era, took the idea of Lucifer's revolt.

How could these Indians suppose a rebellion in heaven without having seen one on earth? Such a leap from the human to the divine nature is difficult of comprehension. We usually step from what is known to what is unknown.

A war of giants would not be imagined, until some men more robust than the rest had been seen to tyrannize over their fellow-men. To imagine the like in heaven, the Brahmins must either have experienced violent discords among themselves, or at least have witnessed them among their neighbors.

Be that as it may, it is an astonishing phenomenon that a society of men who had never made war should have invented a sort of war carried on in imaginary space, or in a globe distant from our own, or in what is called the firmament – the empyrean. But let it be carefully observed, that in this revolt of the celestial beings against their Sovereign, there were no blows given, no celestial blood spilled, no mountains thrown at one another's heads, no angels deft in twain, as in Milton's sublime and grotesque poem.

According to the Shastah, it was only a formal disobedience of the orders of the Most High, which God punished by relegating the rebellious angels to a vast place of darkness called Onderah, for the term of a whole mononthour. A mononthour is a hundred and twenty-six millions of our years. But God vouchsafed to pardon the guilty at the end of five thousand years, and their Onderah was nothing more than a purgatory.

He turned them into Mhurd, or men, and placed them on our globe, on condition that they should not eat animals, nor cohabit with the males of their new species, on pain of returning to the Onderah.

These are the principal articles of the Brahmin faith, which has endured without intermission from time immemorial to the present day.

This is but a small part of the ancient cosmogony of the Brahmins. Their rites, their pagods, prove that among them all was allegorical. They still represent Virtue in the form of a woman with ten arms, combating ten mortal sins typified by monsters. Our missionaries were acute enough to take this image of Virtue for that of the devil, and affirm that the devil is worshipped in India. We have never visited that people but to enrich ourselves and calumniate them.

The Metempsychosis of the Brahmins.

The doctrine of the metempsychosis comes from an ancient law of feeding on cow's milk as well as on vegetables, fruits, and rice. It seemed horrible to the Brahmins to kill and eat their feeder; and they had soon the same respect for goats, sheep, and all other animals: they believed them to be animated by the rebellious angels, who were completing their purification in the bodies of beasts as well as in those of men. The nature of the climate seconded, or rather originated this law. A burning atmosphere creates a necessity for refreshing food, and inspires horror for our custom of stowing carcasses in our stomachs.

The opinion that beasts have souls was general throughout the East, and we find vestiges of it in the ancient sacred writings. In the book of Genesis, God forbids men to eat "their flesh with their blood and their soul." Such is the import of the Hebrew text. "I will avenge," says he, "the blood of your souls on the claws of beasts and the hands of men." In Leviticus he says, "The soul of the flesh is in the blood." He does more; he makes a solemn compact with man and with all animals, which supposes an intelligence in the latter.

In much later times, Ecclesiasticus formally says, "God shows that man is like to the beasts; for men die like beasts; their condition is equal; as man dies, so also dies the beast. They breathe alike. There is nothing in man more than in the beast." Jonah, when he went to preach at Nineveh, made both men and beasts fast.

All ancient authors, sacred books as well as profane, attribute knowledge to the beasts; and several make them speak. It is not then to be wondered at that the Brahmins, and after them the Pythagoreans, believed that souls passed successively into the bodies of beasts and of men; consequently they persuaded themselves, or at least they said, that the souls of the guilty angels, in order to finish their purgation, belonged sometimes to beasts, sometimes to men. This is a part of the romance of the Jesuit Bougeant, who imagined that the devils are spirits sent into the bodies of animals. Thus, in our day, and at the extremity of the west, a Jesuit unconsciously revives an article of the faith of the most ancient Oriental priests.

The Self-burning of Men and Women among the Brahmins.

The Brahmins of the present day, who do all that the ancient Brahmins did, have, we know, retained this horrible custom. Whence is it that, among a people who have never shed the blood of men or of animals, the finest act of devotion is a public self-burning? Superstition, the great uniter of contraries, is the only source of these frightful sacrifices, the custom of which is much more ancient than the laws of any known people.

The Brahmins assert that their great prophet Brahma, the son of God, descended among men, and had seyeral wives; and that after his death, the wife who loved him the most burned herself on his funeral pile, that she might join him in heaven. Did this woman really burn herself, as it is said that Portia, the wife of Brutus, swallowed burning coals, in order to be reunited to her husband? or is this a fable invented by the priests? Was there a Brahma, who really gave himself out as a prophet and son of God? It is likely that there was a Brahma, as there afterwards were a Zoroaster and a Bacchus. Fable seized upon their history, as she has everywhere constantly done.

No sooner does the wife of the son of God burn herself, than ladies of meaner condition must burn themselves likewise. But how are they to find their husbands again, who are become horses, elephants, hawks, etc.? How are they to distinguish the precise beast, which the defunct animates? how recognize him and be still his wife? This difficulty does not in the least embarrass the Hindoo theologians; they easily find a distinguo– a solution in sensu composito—in sensu diviso. The metempsychosis is only for common people; for other souls they have a sublimer doctrine. These souls, being those of the once rebel angels, go about purifying themselves; those of the women who immolate themselves are beatified, and find their husbands ready-purified. In short, the priests are right, and the women burn themselves.

This dreadful fanaticism has existed for more than four thousand years, amongst a mild people, who would fear to kill a grasshopper. The priests cannot force a widow to burn herself; for the invariable law is, that the self-devotion must be absolutely voluntary. The longest married of the wives of the deceased has the first refusal of the honor of mounting the funeral-pile; if she is not inclined, the second presents herself; and so of the rest. It is said, that on one occasion seventeen burned themselves at once on the pile of a rajah: but these sacrifices are now very rare; the faith has become weaker since the Mahometans have governed a great part of the country, and the Europeans traded with the rest.

Still, there is scarcely a governor of Madras or Pondicherry who has not seen some Indian woman voluntarily perish in the flames. Mr. Holwell relates that a young widow of nineteen, of singular beauty, and the mother of three children, burned herself in the presence of Mrs. Russell, wife of the admiral then in the Madras roads. She resisted the tears and the prayers of all present; Mrs. Russell conjured her, in the name of her children, not to leave them orphans. The Indian woman answered, "God, who has given them birth, will take care of them." She then arranged everything herself, set fire to the pile with her own hand, and consummated her sacrifice with as much serenity as one of our nuns lights the tapers.

Mr. Charnock, an English merchant, one day seeing one of these astonishing victims, young and lovely, on her way to the funeral-pile, dragged her away by force when she was about to set fire to it, and, with the assistance of some of his countrymen, carried her of! and married her. The people regarded this act as the most horrible sacrilege.

Why do husbands never burn themselves, that they may join their wives? Why has a sex, naturally weak and timid, always had this frantic resolution? Is it because tradition does not say that a man ever married a daughter of Brahma, while it does affirm that an Indian woman was married to a son of that divinity? Is it because women are more superstitious than men? Or is it because their imaginations are weaker, more tender, and more easily governed?

The ancient Brahmins sometimes burned themselves to prevent the pains and the languor of old age; but, above all, to make themselves admired. Calanus would not, perhaps, have placed himself on the pile, but for the purpose of being gazed at by Alexander. The Christian renegade Peregrinus burned himself in public, for the same reason that a madman goes about the streets dressed like an Armenian, to attract the notice of the populace.

Is there not also an unfortunate mixture of vanity in this terrible sacrifice of the Indian women? Perhaps, if a law were passed that the burning should take place in the presence of one waiting woman only, this abominable custom would be forever destroyed.

One word more: A few hundreds of Indian women, at most, have furnished this horrid spectacle; but our inquisitions, our atrocious madmen calling themselves judges, have put to death in the flames more than a hundred thousand of our brethren – men, women, and children – for things which no one has understood. Let us pity and condemn the Brahmins; but let us not forget our miserable selves!

Truly, we have forgotten one very essential point in this short article on the Brahmins, which is, that their sacred books are full of contradictions; but the people know nothing of them, and the doctors have solutions ready – senses figured and figurative, allegories, types, express declarations of Birma, Brahma, and Vishnu, sufficient to shut the mouth of any reasoner.

BREAD-TREE

The bread-tree grows in the Philippine islands, and principally in those of Guam and Tinian, as the cocoa-tree grows in the Indies. These two trees, alone, if they could be multiplied in our climate, would furnish food and drink sufficient for all mankind.

The bread-tree is taller and more bulky than our common apple-trees; its leaves are black, its fruit is yellow, and equal in dimensions to the largest apple. The rind is hard; and the cuticle is a sort of soft, white paste, which has the taste of the best French rolls; but it must be eaten fresh, as it keeps only twenty-four hours, after which it becomes dry, sour and disagreeable; but, as a compensation, the trees are loaded with them eight months of the year. The natives of the islands have no other food; they are all tall, stout, well made, sufficiently fleshy, and in the vigorous health which is necessarily produced by the use of one wholesome aliment alone: and it is to negroes that nature has made this present.

Corn is assuredly not the food of the greater part of the world. Maize and cassava are the food of all America. We have whole provinces in which the peasants eat none but chestnut bread, which is more nourishing and of better flavor than the rye or barley bread on which so many feed, and is much better than the rations given to the soldiers. Bread is unknown in all southern Africa. The immense Indian Archipelago, Siam, Laos, Pegu, Cochin-China, Tonquin, part of China, the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, and the banks of the Ganges, produce rice, which is easier of cultivation, and for which wheat is neglected. Corn is absolutely unknown for the space of five hundred leagues on the coast of the Icy Sea.

The missionaries have sometimes been in great tribulation, in countries where neither bread nor wine is to be found. The inhabitants told them by interpreters: "You would baptize us with a few drops of water, in a burning climate, where we are obliged to plunge every day into the rivers; you would confess us, yet you understand not our language; you would have us communicate, yet you want the two necessary ingredients, bread and wine. It is therefore evident that your universal religion cannot have been made for us." The missionaries replied, very justly, that good will is the one thing needful; that they should be plunged into the water without any scruple; that bread and wine should be brought from Goa; and that, as for the language, the missionaries would learn it in a few years.

BUFFOONERY – BURLESQUE – LOW COMEDY

He was a very subtle schoolman, who first said that we owe the origin of the word "buffoon" to a little Athenian sacrificer called Bupho, who, being tired of his employment, absconded, and never returned. The Areopagus, as they could not punish the priest, proceeded against his hatchet. This farce, which was played every year in the temple of Jupiter, is said to have been called "buffoonery." This story is not entitled to much credit Buffoon was not a proper name; bouphonos signifies an immolator of oxen. The Greeks never called any jest bouphonia. This ceremony, frivolous as it appears, might have an origin wise and humane, worthy of true Athenians.