Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/128



This is not a scientific book. It is, in fact, wholly uncritical, and hopelessly so, inasmuch as the author seems quite unable to distinguish between possibility, probability, and fact. Hence he has no difficulty in making out Zoroaster—about whom nothing is known for certain, and whose very existence is subject to grave historic doubts—to be "the greatest universal genius of antiquity" in one section of his book, while in another he ascribes to him the origin of any doctrine which he can find remotely paralleled in the Avestic writings, and so can speak of "the common root of Christianity and Philosophy in Zoroaster's doctrine demonstrated for the first time" (and, it is to be hoped, also for the last!). With such methods, it is not astonishing that one finds (p. 237) a discussion of the question whether Zoroaster was more of a Lamarckian or of a Darwinian, or (p. 246) a charge that Plato plagiarized his doctrine of Ideas from the Zoroastrian fervers (equivalent to the 'genius,' ka or 'double' of the anthropologists). And as even Dr. Brodbeck does not venture to ascribe to Plato a direct acquaintance with Zoroaster, the latter's doctrines are supposed to have been imported into Greece by the Phenicians, i.e., by those very hard-headed and hard-hearted business men who made up for their normal lack of spiritual religion by occasional indulgence in the rites of a cruel and obscene superstition! Could improbability and extravagance go farther?

Nor is the author a safer guide in matters philosophical than in matters historical. He accepts, e.g., as original the heretical doctrine of Zrvana Akarana, the Infinite Time, as the ground of all things and as the ultimate source of Ormuzd and Ahriman, and praises it as a monism that overcomes the (characteristic) dualism of the Zoroastrian religion. In this he has not only the best authorities, but also internal evidence against him. For the Zrvana Akarana does not appear in the oldest parts of the Zendavesta, the Gâthâs, which alone can be with any plausibility ascribed to Zoroaster. And from the point of view of general philosophic probability this doctrine seems equally dubious. It looks very much like a hypostasization of Time such as might easily suggest itself to later reflection, when the original spirit of Zoroastrianism had become obscured. For, in so far as it mitigates the antagonism of Ormuzd and Ahriman, it does so at the expense of the sharpness of moral discrimination, which Dr. Brodbeck so admires, and substitutes an ethical inconsistency for a metaphysical incoherence. But, from a religious standpoint, the former is far less venial than the latter,