M. Martin has written a valuable dissertation on the opinions
entertained respecting the Island of Atlantis in ancient and
modern times. It is a curious chapter in the history of the human
mind. The tale of Atlantis is the fabric of a vision, but it has
never ceased to interest mankind. It was variously regarded by
the ancients themselves. The stronger heads among them, like
Strabo and Longinus, were as little disposed to believe in the
truth of it as the modern reader in Gulliver or Robinson Crusoe.
On the other hand there is no kind or degree of absurdity or
fancy in which the more foolish writers, both of antiquity and of
modern times, have not indulged respecting it. The
Neo-Platonists, loyal to their master, like some commentators on
the Christian Scriptures, sought to give an allegorical meaning
to what they also believed to be an historical fact. It was as if
some one in our own day were to convert the poems of Homer into
an allegory of the Christian religion, at the same time
maintaining them to be an exact and veritable history. In the
Middle Ages the legend seems to have been half-forgotten until
revived by the discovery of America. It helped to form the Utopia
of Sir Thomas More and the New Atlantis of Bacon, although
probably neither of those great men were at all imposed upon by
the fiction. It was most prolific in the seventeenth or in the
early part of the eighteenth century, when the human mind,
seeking for Utopias or inventing them, was glad to escape out of
the dulness of the present into the romance of the past or some
ideal of the future. The later forms of such narratives contained
features taken from the Edda, as well as from the Old and New
Testament; also from the tales of missionaries and the
experiences of travellers and of colonists.
The various opinions respecting the Island of Atlantis have no
interest for us except in so far as they illustrate the
extravagances of which men are capable. But this is a real
interest and a serious lesson, if we remember that now as
formerly the human mind is liable to be imposed upon by the
illusions of the past, which are ever assuming some new form.
When we have shaken off the rubbish of ages, there remain one or
two questions of which the investigation has a permanent value:—