that confusion in which matter lay when newly produced out of nothing at the beginning of the world, before God, by his almighty word, had put it into the order and condition which it assumed after the six days creation. Chaos is represented by the ancients as the first principle, ovum, or seed of nature and the world. All the sophists, sages, naturalists, philosophers, theologues, and poets, held that chaos was the eldest and first principle, ἀρχὴ τοῦ κόσμου. The Barbarians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Persians, and many other nations, all refer the origin of the world to a rude, mixed, confused mass of matter. The Greeks, Orpheus, Hesiod, Menander, Aristophanes, Euripides, and the writers of the Cyclic Poems, all speak of the first chaos; while the Ionic and Platonic philosophers built the world out of it. The Stoics held, that as the world was first made of a chaos, it shall at last be reduced to a chaos; and that its periods and revolutions in the mean time are only transitions from one chaos to another. Lastly, the Latins, as Ennius, Varro, Ovid, Lucretius, Statius, &c. were all of the same opinion. Nor is there any sect or nation whatsoever that does not derive their ἀρχὴ τοῦ κόσμου, the structure of the world, from a chaos.

The opinion first arose among the Barbarians, from whom it spread to the Greeks, and from the Greeks to the Romans and other nations. Dr Burnet observes, that besides Aristotle and a few pseudo-Pythagoreans, nobody ever asserted that our world was always from eternity of the same nature, form, and structure, as at present; but that it had been the standing opinion of the wise men of all ages, that what we now call the earth was originally an unformed, indigested mass of heterogeneous matter called chaos, and no more than the rudiments and materials of the present world.

It does not appear who first broached the notion of a chaos. Moses, the eldest of all writers, derives the origin of this world from a confusion of matter, dark, void, deep, without form, which he calls tohu bohu, which is precisely the chaos of the Greek and Barbarian philosophers. Moses goes no farther than the chaos, nor tells us whence it took its origin, or whence arose its confused state; and where Moses stops, there precisely do all the rest. Dr Burnet endeavours to show, that as the ancient philosophers who wrote of the cosmogony acknowledged a chaos as the principle of the world, so the divines, or writers of the theogony, derive the origin or generation of their fabled gods from the same principle.