Page:Four Dissertations - David Hume (1757).djvu/48

 divine creation or formation of the world; finding, that such an idea would not agree with the popular mythology, which he delivers, leaves it, in a manner, loose and detached from his system. Quisquis fuit ille Deorum : Whichever of the gods it was, says he, that dissipated the chaos, and introduced order into the universe. It could neither be Saturn, he knew, nor Jupiter, nor Neptune, nor any of the received deities of paganism. His theological system had taught him nothing upon that head, and he leaves the matter equally undetermined.

Diodorus Siculus, beginning his work with an enumeration of the most reasonable opinions concerning the origin of the world, makes no mention of a deity or intelligent mind; tho' it is evident from his history, that that author had a much greater proneness to superstition than to irreligion. And in another passage, talking of the Ichthyophages, a nation in India, he says, that there being so great difficulty in accounting for their descent, we must conclude them to be aborigines, without any beginning of their generation, propagating their race from all eternity;