Directory_and_Chronicle_1841 — Page 689

1841.

Biographical Notice of P. Prémare.

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nions completely of the unjust allegations, of which they had been the object. It is seen, in reading those very books, that they contain numerous vestiges of opinions that had their origin in the west, and must have been carried to China in very remote times. But one sees too, at the same time, that the opinions and doctrines in which Prémare believed he saw the fragments of sacred traditions or antici- pations of Christianity, appertain to that oriental theology from which Pythagoras, Plato, and the entire school of Neoplatonists, have borrowed so much. Prémare, Bouvet, Fouquet, and many others, there- fore, had as good a right to seek for ideas and dogmas, analogous to those of Christianity, in the Single, the Yih King, the Chung Yung, and in the writings of Chwang tsze, of Laou tsze, and Hwaenan tsze, as had Eusebius, Lactantius and St. Clement of Alexandria, to see prophecies in the books of the false Orpheus or Mercurius Trismegistus. We see that these opinions which have been ascribed to a weakness of mind or whimsicalness, show on the contrary in those who have set them forth, vast erudition and a profound acquaint- ance with the philosophical works of the Chinese. The facts col- lected by Prémare were exact; his manner of explaining them was affected by the influence under which his researches were under- taken. There is room to believe that, after this explanation, we shall read with less disrelish the very interesting fragment from the same author, entitled Recherches sur le temps antérieurs á ceux dont parle le Shoo King, et sur la mythologie Chinoise, and inserted, by De Guignes, at the head of the Shoo King translated by Gaubil, in the form of a preliminary discourse. Amiot has treated this work with great severity; the only one, with the short extracts given by Des- hautesrayes, where persons who do not know Chinese, can find any quotations from the most ancient books on the fabulous traditions of China. He aims especially at the numerous citations by which these researches are sustained. We see, according to him, at a single glance, that two or three by no means voluminous writers could have furnished them all.

This innocent fraud it is indeed easy to discover by much the same marks, in the memoirs of several missionaries, and particularly in those of Cibot, and of Amiot himself; but Prémare had no occa- sion to resort to it. His extensive reading, and indeed his variety of learning, in the Chinese whether ancient or modern, are well at- tested from other quarters. There is no need of other proof than his Notitia Linguæ Sinicæ, the most remarkable and most important of all his works; the best, without contradiction, of all those that Eu-

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