are
given to mute and inanimate beings. The sentiments of his disciple
Aristo are not less erroneous. He thought it impossible to conceive the
form of the Deity, and asserts that the Gods are destitute of sense;
and he is entirely dubious whether the Deity is an animated being or
not.

Cleanthes, who next comes under my notice, a disciple of Zeno at the
same time with Aristo, in one place says that the world is God; in
another, he attributes divinity to the mind and spirit of universal
nature; then he asserts that the most remote, the highest, the
all-surrounding, the all-enclosing and embracing heat, which is called
the sky, is most certainly the Deity. In the books he wrote against
pleasure, in which he seems to be raving, he imagines the Gods to have
a certain form and shape; then he ascribes all divinity to the stars;
and, lastly, he thinks nothing more divine than reason. So that this
God, whom we know mentally and in the speculations of our minds, from
which traces we receive our impression, has at last actually no visible
form at all.

XV. Persaeus, another disciple of Zeno, says that they who have made
discoveries advantageous to the life of man should be esteemed as Gods;
and the very things, he says, which are healthful and beneficial have
derived their names from those of the Gods; so that he thinks it not
sufficient to call them the discoveries of Gods, but he urges that they
themselves should be deemed divine. What can be more absurd than to
ascribe divine honors to sordid and deformed things; or to place among
the Gods men who are dead and mixed with the dust, to whose memory all
the respect that could be paid would be but mourning for their loss?

Chrysippus, who is looked upon as the most subtle interpreter of the
dreams of the Stoics, has mustered up a numerous band of unknown Gods;
and so unknown that we are not able to form any idea about them, though
our mind seems capable of framing any image to itself in its thoughts.
For he says that the divine power is placed in reason, and in the
spirit and mind of universal nature; that the world, with a universal
effusion of its spirit, is God; that the superior part of that spirit,
which is the mind and reason, is the great principle of nature,
containing and preserving the chain of all things; that the divinity is
the power of fate, and the necessity of future events. He deifies fire
also, and what I before called the ethereal spirit, and those elements