inty of Plato's opinion; for, in
his Timaeus, he denies the propriety of asserting that there is one
great father or creator of the world; and, in his book of Laws, he
thinks we ought not to make too strict an inquiry into the nature of
the Deity. And as for his statement when he asserts that God is a being
without any body--what the Greeks call [Greek: asomatos]--it is
certainly quite unintelligible how that theory can possibly be true;
for such a God must then necessarily be destitute of sense, prudence,
and pleasure; all which things are comprehended in our notion of the
Gods. He likewise asserts in his Timaeus, and in his Laws, that the
world, the heavens, the stars, the mind, and those Gods which are
delivered down to us from our ancestors, constitute the Deity. These
opinions, taken separately, are apparently false; and, together, are
directly inconsistent with each other.

Xenophon has committed almost the same mistakes, but in fewer words. In
those sayings which he has related of Socrates, he introduces him
disputing the lawfulness of inquiring into the form of the Deity, and
makes him assert the sun and the mind to be Deities: he represents him
likewise as affirming the being of one God only, and at another time of
many; which are errors of almost the same kind which I before took
notice of in Plato.

XIII. Antisthenes, in his book called the Natural Philosopher, says
that there are many national and one natural Deity; but by this saying
he destroys the power and nature of the Gods. Speusippus is not much
less in the wrong; who, following his uncle Plato, says that a certain
incorporeal power governs everything; by which he endeavors to root out
of our minds the knowledge of the Gods.

Aristotle, in his third book of Philosophy, confounds many things
together, as the rest have done; but he does not differ from his master
Plato. At one time he attributes all divinity to the mind, at another
he asserts that the world is God. Soon afterward he makes some other
essence preside over the world, and gives it those faculties by which,
with certain revolutions, he may govern and preserve the motion of it.
Then he asserts the heat of the firmament to be God; not perceiving the
firmament to be part of the world, which in another place he had
described as God. How can that divine sense of the firmament be
preserved in so rapid a motion? And where do the multitude of Gods
dwell, if heaven itself is a Deity? But when this