Did some echo of ancient wisdom, Druidic, survive in Britain from Pre-roman days?  It is a question that has been much fought over; and one that, nowadays, the learned among my countrymen answer very rabidly in the negative.  You have but to propound it in a whisper, to make them foam heartily at the mouth.  Bless you, they know that it didn’t, and can prove it over and over; because—­because—­it couldn’t have, and you are a fool for thinking it could.  Here is the position taken by modern scholarship (as a rule):  we know nothing about the philosophy of the Druids, and do not believe they had one.  They could not have had one; and the classical writers who said they had simply knew nothing about it.  It may be useful to quote what some of these classical writers say.

“They (the Druids) speak the language of the Gods,” says Diodorus Siculus (v, 31, 4); who describes them also as “exhorting combatants to peace, and taming them like wild beasts by enchantment” (v, 31, 5).  They taught men, says Diogenes Laertius, “to worship the Gods, to do no evil, and to exercise courage” (6).  They taught “many things regarding the stars and their motions, the extent of the universe and the earth, and the nature of things, and the power and might of the immortal Gods,” says Caesar (iv, 14.); and Strabo speaks of their teaching in moral science (iv, 4, 4).  “And ye, ye Druids,” says Lucan, “to you only is given knowledge or ignorance (whichever it be) of the Gods and the powers of heaven. . . .  From you we learn that the borne of man’s ghost is not the senseless grave, not the pale realm of the monarch below.” (i, 451 sq,) “The Druids wish to impress this in particular:  that souls do not perish, but pass from one to another after death.” (Caesar, iv, 14) Diodorus testifies that “among them the doctrine of Pythagoras prevailed, that the souls of men are immortal, and after completing their term of existence, live again, the soul passing into another body” (v, 28).  Says Valerius Maximus:  “They would fain make us believe that the souls of men are immortal.  I would be tempted to call these breeches-warers fools, if their doctrine were not the same as that of the mantle-clad Pythagoras”; and he goes on to speak of the Celtic custom of lending money to be repaid in a future life (vi, 6, 10).  Timagenes, Strabo, and mela also bear witness to their teaching the immortality of the soul.

I may say at once that I copy all these quotations from a book written largely to prove that the Druids were savage medicine-men with no philosophy at all:  it is, The Religion of the Ancient Celts, by Canon MacCulloch.  The argument used by this learned divine is very simple.  The Druids were savage medicine-men, and could have known nothing about Pythagoras’ teachings or Pythagoras himself.  Therefore they didn’t.  All the classical writers were exaggerating, or inventing, or copying from one another.—­It never occurs to our Canon to remember Iamblichus’ statement that the Druids did not borrow or learn from Pythagoras, but Pythagoras from them.  He quotes with no sign of doubt the things said by the classical writers about barbaric Druid rites; never dreaming that in respect to these there may have been invention, exaggeration, or copying one from another—­ and that other chiefly the gentle Julius who—­but I have mentioned his exploit before.