Butler's Lectures on Ancient Philosophy [pp. 261-279]

1858.] Butler's Lectures on Ancient Philosophy.
The insufficiency of a pantheistic philosophy to meet the wants
and cravings of the human soul have been abundantly manifest
in China. Though it professes to be the development of a system
which had its origin forty centuries ago, harmonizing the wisdom of ancient sages, yet the Chinese unsatisfied with its teachings, have resorted to other systems to find some guide about
death as well as life, some knowledge of spirits as well as men.
Morality has been found a poor substitute for religion; and
Atheism has followed up the disowning of God with deifying its
founder; while the unsatisfied cravings of the multitude have
gone after gods many, seeking in Taouism and Budhism what
they have not found in Confucianism.
ART. III.-Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy.
By I WILLIAM ARCHER BUTLER, M. A., late Professor of
Moral Philosophy in the University of Dublin. Edited from
the Author's Manuscripts, with Notes, by William Hepworth
Thompson, M. A., Fellow of Trinity College, and Regius
Professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge. In two
volumes. Philadelphia: Parry & McMillan. 1857.
THESE two volumes of Lectures on Ancient Philosophy by
Professor Butler show him to have been one of the most gifted
men of his day. With all the disadvantages of posthumous
publication, many of them having been not only not designed
for publication, but prepared in haste to meet the immediate
emergencies of his class, they betray rich learning, and keen
philosophic insight, brightened by a certain poetic glow, and a
rhetorical magnificence-often too gorgeous and diffuse for
topics which rather demand a severe simplicity of style. This
defect, however, may attract a class of readers to the great
subjects of which he treats, who would be repelled by the dry
light of exact and concise philosophic diction. At the same
time it interferes with the clear and direct evolution of abstract
truths, and often hinders the reader's ready apprehension of the
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