ay in Asia Minor. This seems
to have been a fabrication, and at any rate has nothing to do with
atheism. In the writings of Aristotle, as they were then generally known,
it would assuredly have been impossible to find any ground for a charge of
atheism.

Nevertheless, Aristotle is one of the philosophers about whose faith in
the gods of popular religion well-founded doubts may be raised. Like
Plato, he acknowledged the divinity of the heavenly bodies on the ground
that they must have a soul since they had independent motion. Further, he
has a kind of supreme god who, himself unmoved, is the cause of all
movement, and whose constituent quality is reason. As regards the gods of
popular belief, in his _Ethics_ and his _Politics_ he assumes public
worship to be a necessary constituent of the life of the individual and
the community. He gave no grounds for this assumption--on the contrary, he
expressly declared that it was a question which ought not to be discussed
at all: he who stirs up doubts whether honour should be paid to the gods
is in need not of teaching but of punishment. (That he himself took part
in worship is evident from his will.) Further, in his ethical works he
used the conceptions of the gods almost in the same way as we have assumed
that Socrates did, _i.e._ as the ethical ideal and determining the limits
of the human. He never entered upon any elaborate criticism of the lower
elements of popular religion such as Plato gave. So far everything is in
admirable order. But if we look more closely at things there is
nevertheless nearly always a little "but" in Aristotle's utterances about
the gods. Where he operates with popular notions he prefers to speak
hypothetically or to refer to what is generally assumed; or he is content
to use only definitions which will also agree with his own philosophical
conception of God. But he goes further; in a few places in his writings
there are utterances which it seems can only be interpreted as a radical
denial of the popular religion. The most important of them deserves to be
quoted _in extenso_:

"A tradition has been handed down from the ancients and from the
most primitive times, and left to later ages in the form of myth,
that these substances (_i.e._ sky and heavenly bodies) are gods
and that the divine embraces all nature. The rest consists in
legendary additions intended to impress the multitude and serve
the purposes of legislation and t