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Silk, cotton, coffee, oranges, lemons, pomegranates, sugar, came with them from the East, as also carpets, silk tissues, gauzes, damascene work and gunpowder. With them also came the decimal numeration algebra, alchemy, chemistry, medicine, cosmology and rhymed poetry.
His head became the mountains, his breath the wind and clouds, his voice the thunder, his limbs the four quarters of the earth, his blood the rivers, his flesh the soil, his beard the constellations, his skin and hair the herbs and trees, his teeth, bones, and marrow the metals, rocks, and precious stones, his sweat the rain, and the insects creeping over his body human beings, who thus had a lowlier origin even than the tears of Khepera in Egyptian cosmology.
The former, called metaphysics, is divided into a general part, which treats of being in general whether it be of a corporeal or a spiritual nature, and three special parts, according to their principal subjects, the world, the soul, and God, hence into ontology, cosmology, psychology, and theology. The introduction to the two principal parts is furnished by formal logic.
However this may be, the point of importance for our purposes is to detect the extension of religious ideas into the domain of science, and, on the other hand, to note the reaction of scientific theories on the development of religious thought. The cosmology of the Babylonians results from the continued play of these two factors.
A universal religion must interpret the whole world. Double appeal of Christianity. Hebrew metaphors become Greek myths. Hebrew philosophy of history identified with Platonic cosmology. The resulting orthodox system. The brief drama of things. Need of paganising Christianity. Catholic piety more human than the liturgy. Natural pieties. Refuge taken in the supernatural.
As human speech consists of incorporeal ideas, which produce an effect upon the minds of others, so the Divine speech is a pattern of incorporeal ideas which impress themselves upon a formless void, and so create the material world. In this way Philo associates his cosmology with his theology.
A cosmology grotesque enough in the light of later knowledge, yet wrought out no less carefully than the physical theories of Lucretius, is employed in the service of a theology cumbrous in its obsolete details, but resting upon fundamental truths which mankind can never safely lose sight of.
The emotional elements play a large part in some cases, in the fanatical creeds of the Dervish and Mahdist and in the "revivals" under nearer observation. In Greek cosmology and worship, aesthetics figured to a large degree.
The compilers of such discourses regarded the gods as mere embellishments, as gargoyles and quaint figures in the cathedral porch, not as saints above the altar. The mythology and cosmology associated with early Buddhism are really extraneous. The Buddha's teaching is simply the four truths and some kindred ethical and psychological matter.
Instead of placing his cosmology at the beginning of his system and proceeding from that as a basis to the other parts of his work, the psychology and the ethics, Levi ben Gerson, whose "Milhamot Hashem" is not so much a systematic work as an aggregation of discussions, reversed the process.
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