Chap. 2. PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOVERIES.

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Theories of this kind have been invented, and amendedagain and again, with great labour and expence of thought;but still when they came to compare them with nature, howwide has been the difference! — ibi omnis cffusus labor. If welook back into the state of philosophy in the different ages,we shall learn from the history of every period, that as far asphilosophers consulted nature, and proceeded on observation,they made some progress in true knowledge ; but as far asthey pretended to carry on their schemes without this, theyonly multiplied disputes.

The beginnings of learning, as of other things, are uncer-tain and obscured with sables : we collect, however, fromseveral testimonies, that the oldest and most celebrated philo-sophers of Phœnicia and Greece made a vacuum and atoms ,and the gravity of atoms, the first principles of their philo-sophy * ; whether these were suggested to them from theirearly observations of nature, before her plain appearances wereobscured by the imaginary schemes and the disputes of Ipecu-lative men, or were derived from some other origin. After-wards various systems appeared, but some traces of those an-tient principles are for a long time to be discovered amongstthe doctrines of succeeding philosophers, tho’ interwoven withtheir own particular tenets ; and what appears to be mostuniform in the variety of their opinions seems to be derived

* According to Pojidonius the stoick, as cited by Strabo and Sextus Empiricus ,the doctrine of Atoms was more antient than the times of the Trojan war, havingbeen taught by Moschur a Phœnician, the fame probably meant by Iamblichus , whenhe tells us that Pythagoras conversed at Sidon with the prophets, the successors ofMochus the physiologer. In those early times the characters of lawgiver and philo-sopher were united, and this Mochus is supposed by many to have been the famewith Moses the legislator of the Jews.

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