And yet in the exordium of the old Argonautic poem,
ascribed to Orpheus, it is said, that 'Love, whom mortals in later
times call Phanes, was the father of the eternally-begotten Night;'
who is generally represented by these mythological poets as being
herself the parent of all things; and who, in the 'Indigitamenta,'
or Orphic Hymns, is said to be the same with Cypris, or Love itself.
Moreover, in the body of this Argonautic poem, where the personated
Orpheus introduceth himself singing to his lyre in reply to Chiron,
he celebrateth 'the obscure memory of Chaos, and the natures which
it contained within itself in a state of perpetual vicissitude; how
the heaven had its boundary determined, the generation of the earth,
the depth of the ocean, and also the sapient Love, the most ancient,
the self-sufficient, with all the beings which he produced when he
separated one thing from another.' Which noble passage is more
directly to Aristotle's purpose in the first book of his metaphysics
than any of those which he has there quoted, to show that the
ancient poets and mythologists agreed with Empedocles, Anaxagoras,
and the other more sober philosophers, in that natural anticipation
and common notion of mankind concerning the necessity of mind and
reason to account for the connexion, motion, and good order of the
world.
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