Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/84

30 ing those sanguine prospects of future improvement, which stimulate curiosity, and invigorate the inventive powers. It afforded to the common sense, even of the illiterate, a palpable and incontrovertible proof, that the ancients had not exhausted the stock of possible discoveries; and that, in matters of science, the creed of the Romish church was not infallible. In the conclusion of one of Kepler’s works, we perceive the influence of these prospects on his mind. “Hæc et cetera hujusmodi latent in pandectis ævi sequentis, non antea discenda, quam librum hunc Deus arbiter seculorum recluserit mortalibus.”

I have hitherto taken no notice of the effects of the revival of letters on Metaphysical, Moral, or Political science. The truth is, that little deserving of our attention occurs in any of these departments prior to the seventeenth century; and nothing which bears the most remote analogy to the rapid strides made, during the sixteenth, in mathematics, astronomy, and physics. The influence, indeed, of the Reformation on the practical doctrines of ethics appears to have been great and immediate. We may judge of this from a passage in Melanchthon, where he combats the pernicious and impious tenets of those theologians who maintained, that moral distinctions are created entirely by the arbitrary and revealed will of God. In opposition to this heresy he expresses himself in these memorable words:—“Wherefore our decision is this; that those precepts which learned men have committed to writing, transcribing them from the common reason and common feelings of human nature, are to be accounted as not less divine, than those contained in the tables given to Moses; and that it could not be the intention of our Maker to supersede, by a law graven upon stone, that which is written with his own finger on the table of the heart.” —This language was, undoubtedly, a most important step towards a just system of Moral Philosophy; but still, like the other steps of the reformers, it was only a return to common sense, and to the genuine spirit of Christianity, from the dogmas imposed on the credulity of mankind by an ambitious priesthood. Many years were yet to elapse, before any at-