Taken from ‘Theologiae christianae fundamenta et elementa; Vol. 1; (Lausannae)’
The reverend Alexandre César Chavannes, born at Montreux on 30 July 1731 and translated to glory at Lausanne on 2 May 1800, sprang from steadfast Huguenot stock and bore the yoke of Christ and learning with singular constancy. Schooled in philosophy and divinity at the Academy of Lausanne, he was ordained in 1753, served beside his father, and from 1766 until death held the chairs of professor, rector, and librarian, compiling the academy’s first catalogue and its earliest history. During his Basel pastorate he cultivated fellowship with the Bernoulli savants while preaching the evangelical Word to the French Reformed congregation. His magnum opus, Anthropologie ou Science générale de l’homme—a 1788 printed abstract of a vast thirteen-volume manuscript—sought to wed bodily anatomy with the science of the soul, and there he first coined for the French tongue the term ethnologie, charting the study of the nations. In that “new science of man” he forged a pedagogic schema meant to marshal every branch of knowledge toward the cultivation of intellect and virtue. More than three hundred essays for the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon flowed from his tireless pen, trimming the lamps of the Helvetic Enlightenment. Remaining a bachelor, he walked humbly yet cut a broad channel through which modern anthropology still courses, esteeming him a father of its first principles.
Table of Contents:
The first foundation of religion is the existence of God. Verily, somewhat hath existed from eternity. That which is eternal cannot, without contradiction, be set in an endless chain of effects without a primary cause, which itself is no effect. Therefore, there is given a primary cause of all things, which of itself and by necessity doth exist.
Yet no necessity is found in the world, for therein both matter and motion, and the laws thereof, the number, form, quantity, place, and order of things—all, in a word—are contingent and changeable. Therefore, there is a necessary Being distinct from this universe.
In this universe are observed these things: firstly, an exceeding great multitude and variety of things; secondly, the wondrous inward constitution thereof; thirdly, the outward disposition thereof as to place, order, and motions subject unto steadfast laws; fourthly, an universal bond whereby all things and each have their efficient cause, from which they are straightway brought forth, and their final cause, insofar as they serve certain ends as means, and are ordered one to another according to their worthiness. These things are easily seen by him that diligently considereth what is or cometh to pass in the heavens, about, above, and within the earth—minerals, plants, living creatures, and chiefly the body of man.
But the frame of things, wherein such clear tokens of understanding and wisdom are found, is not an effect that may be ascribed unto a brute cause, void of counsel. Therefore, it must be ascribed unto a Being not only necessary and distinct from the universe, but also furnished with understanding and power sufficient, which we call God.
The existence of the same we gather from the consideration of these things: firstly, our soul, which, seeing it existeth not of itself, nor from matter and motion, nor from the counsel of parents, cannot but have its cause in a Being of like nature, the primary parent of souls; secondly, the union of the soul with the body, which it governeth by a power wholly unknown unto it and not sprung therefrom; thirdly, the excellent faculties thereof, yea, and the works thereof, such as the inventions and ordinances of men; fourthly, the striving of all men, though in divers manners and with divers success, toward the chief end, and the connection of moral actions one with another and with their consequences, be they blessed or cursed, whence arise human obligations—a manifest work of a Being most wise! Fifthly, and above all, the power of conscience, which not darkly proclaimeth the existence and counsel of a lawgiver and judge; sixthly, and at the last, the universal consent of nations, which is to be drawn from naught else but the evidence of the thing itself.
Yet there have not lacked impious atheists who have sought, directly or indirectly, to overthrow this fundamental truth of religion. Among them are numbered these: firstly, skeptics; secondly, materialists, who ascribe all things unto matter—either working of necessity through forms and qualities, as the Hylopathians would have it; or stirred from eternity by an essential motion spread evenly through atoms, whose chance and happy meeting at the last brought forth this frame of things, as the Atomists or Epicureans taught; or exercising some plastic virtue without reason, sense, or life, fashioning all things, as the Stoics set forth; or, at the last, living and active, yet without counsel, begetting all things, as the Hylozoists and Stratonics decreed; thirdly, pantheists, who confound the first understanding with the universe into one substance, both spread abroad and thinking, unto which all beings, both spread abroad and thinking, are referred as unto one and the same being, both doing and suffering by the necessity of its nature. This opinion Hobbes and Spinoza did revive, and a certain late one, driven by wicked madness, in the book called The System of Nature, hath patched together with other rotten devices of ancient atheists under the guise of a system.
Atheists are confounded by the things afore said, and by this: that nothing more absurd can be conceived than the suppositions whereby they establish these things: firstly, that matter is necessary and worketh of necessity; secondly, that motion is essential unto matter; thirdly, that mechanical powers and laws are unchangeable; fourthly, that from these, without any mover or ruler, could arise the gathering of matter into spheres, the motion of spheres so ordered in their paths that the squares of their times of circling be as the cubes of their distances, divers motions in this globe, steadfast and regular, whence such wondrous sights are beheld, the seeds and growing of plants, the beginnings of living creatures and their unfolding through begetting, increase, and nourishment, and, at the last, the minds of men; fifthly, that all things diverse are one, that souls distinct by their own consciousness are the same soul, at once willing and unwilling, blessed and unblessed, and so forth.