The Druids would advance still further in their contemplations this way, and conclude, that it became the supreme, and was therefore necessary, for him to exert his power in all possible ways and modes of acting; that he was not content in producing a single divine person or emanation from himself, from the infinite fund of his own fecundity; that he was pleas’d to proceed to that other mode of acting, which we call divine procession; or a third divine person to proceed from the first and second. This person the ancients had knowledge of, and styled him _anima mundi_, “that spirit of the LORD which filleth the world,” _Wisdom_ i. 7. and made him a distinct person from God, or the supreme: but, more immediately, he was the author of life to all living things. And this he disseminated throughout the whole macrocosm. I need only quote _Virgil_, for many more, in his fine poem, _Georg._ IV. _Esse apibus partem divinæ mentis & haustus Æthereos dixere. Deum namque ire per omnes Terrasque tractusque maris, cælumque profundum. Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum, Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas; Scilicet huc reddi deinde & resoluta referri, Omnia.——————_ This divine mind, or _anima mundi_, the ancients pictur’d out by the circle and wings, meaning the holy spirit in symbolical language, or the spirit proceeding from the fountain of divinity. And we see it innumerable times on _Egyptian_, and other ancient monuments. _Plutarch_, in his _platonic questions_, asks, “Why should _Plato_ in his _Phædro_ say, the nature of a wing, which mounts heavy things upward, is chiefly participant of those that are about the body of the deity?” But thus the Druids would reason. There are three modes of divine origin and existence, quite different from creation: they are these: the self-existent, unoriginated first cause; divine generation; and divine procession: all equal in nature, self-origination excepted, and equally necessarily existent. When the supreme produces his likeness, it must be divine filiation; or the son of God is produc’d. Divine procession must be from them two: but it cannot possibly be filiation: for besides that, in these acts of the divinity, we must separate all ideas like that of human production, it would be absurd to call this generation; because, as it is done prior to all notion of time, or eternity itself; it is making the son to be son and father in the same act. Therefore there remains no other word for this, than procession from the father and son. Whether these abstract and metaphysical notions would occur to a mind wholly unacquainted with any doctrine of this sort, may be matter of doubt; but when propos’d to a serious and contemplative genius, they would be embraced and improved, as agreeable to reason; and as an advance towards the most sublime and most useful knowledge of all others, that of the nature of the deity.