trine of providence; but, on
the other hand, asserted a belief in gods whose essential
characteristics are immortality and perfect happiness (to insure which
they must care nothing for the world or for men), and whose existence
was held to be proven on the basis of the common consent of all men
("_Argumentum e Consensu Gentium_"). This argument is the result of a
"natural idea" or "pre-notion," which Epicurus called {prolepsis};--"that
is, an antecedent conception of the fact in the mind, without which
nothing can be understood, inquired after, or discoursed on."[22]

The Stoics, on the other hand, with their strong conviction of
providence working in the world, were rather inclined to deny the
validity of this argument from common consent, and rested their belief
in the gods, as Cicero makes his Stoic do in _De Natura Deorum_,[23] on
the evidence of design and purpose in the universe, but by this process
succeeded only in proving to their own satisfaction that the world is
divine--a fatalistic pantheism which roused the ire of the Epicurean and
Sceptic alike, and which even Cicero seemed hardly to be able to accept.

From this necessarily brief review of the development of the argument
for the existence of a Divinity in Greek and Roman thought, it will be
seen that, at one time or another, in a more or less fully developed
form, each one of the principal types of the theistic argument received
the chief emphasis and had its method enunciated. The pre-Socratic
natural philosophers, on the basis of the maxim as old as philosophy
itself--{Adynaton ginesthai ti ek medenos prouparchontos}--pointed to an
{Arche}--a real behind phenomena, a permanent behind the change--and thus
pointed to the so-called Aetiological argument founded on the principle
of causality. Socrates, with his pre-eminently practical disposition and
ethical point of view, saw above all things intention in nature, and so
from the consideration of this choice and adaptation of means to their
end, and the resultant Final Cause he constructs a very complete
Teleological argument for the existence of some intelligence behind the
visible world. Plato's Ideas, as we have seen, determine the method by
which he arrives at his abstract divinity, namely, by the "Idealogical"
form of argument based upon a process of generalization. Aristotle,
struck by the phenomena of motion in the universe, lays most stress on
the course of reasoning which would lead back to the Pr