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Untitled Article
mankind , reared in their infancy with peculiar care and tenderness by providence , sallied forth towards wilder regions under sterner skies ; and , equipped with a traditional knowledge of the most necessary arts of life , and of the elementary principles of religion and morality , acquired the power of artificially adapting themselves to those varieties of climate and situation , for which their natural weakness was totally unfit .
For any distinct information concerning these remote events it is vain to explore the mythological dreams and cosmogonies of the Indians , Phoenicians , or Egyptians . * The only historical document , ' Herder remarks , * to which we can , with any certainty , refer , is the written tradition , which we call the Mosaic . Apart from all prejudice , and without any attempt to determine its origin and author , we know for certain , that it is more than
three thousand years old , and is the most ancient work which gives any account of the infancy of the human race * A glance will show us all that we are to expect from its brief and simple narrative , since we regard it not as history but as tradition—or , rather , as an antique philosophy of the history of man ; and , for that reason , we may strip it at once of the poetical decorations of its oriental dress # . '
On the circumstances which distinguish Moses amongst those who have described the origin and primitive condition of the world , Herder makes the following just and pertinent observations : —* In his recitals he has omitted all that lies beyond the sphere of human vision and conception 5 and confined himself to that which we see with our eyes and can embrace in our thoughts . What question , for example , has excited more controversy than that concerning the age of the world , concerning the duration of
our earth and of the human race ? The chronological computations of the Asiatic traditions have been looked upon as remarkably profound ; and the Mosaic account has been ridiculed as exceedingly childish , because it is affirmed that , in opposition to all reason , and in defiance of the visible witness of the earth ' s structure , it hastens over the work of creation as a trifling event , and represents the human race as so recent . But , methinks , the historian is not fairly treated . If Moses were the collector , to say
the least , of these ancient traditions , he could not , versed as he was in the learning of the Egyptians , have been unacquainted with those ages of gods and demigods , with which that people , a 3 well as all the nations of Asia , commenced their histories of the world . Why then were these ages not woven into his narrative ?
Why , as if in defiance and contempt of them , did he employ a symbol of the shortest period of time to express the successive stages of the world ' s creation ? Clearly because he regarded them as unprofitable fables , which he wished to remove altogether from the minds of men . Herein he seems to me to h $ ve acted ? Book X ., cb . iv ., p , 273 ,
Untitled Article
The Philosophy of the History of Mankind . * 167
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1832, page 167, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1808/page/23/
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