he common weal; for these gods
are said to have human shape or resemble certain other beings
(animals), and they say other things which follow from this and
are of a similar kind to those already mentioned. But if we
disregard all this and restrict ourselves to the first point, that
they thought that the first substances were gods, we must
acknowledge that it is a divinely inspired saying. And as, in all
probability, every art and science has been discovered many times,
as far as it is possible, and has perished again, so these
notions, too, may have been preserved till now as relics of those
times. To this extent only can we have any idea of the opinion
which was held by our fathers and has come down from the beginning
of things."

The last sentences, expressing Aristotle's idea of a life-cycle and
periods of civilisation which repeat themselves, have only been included
in the quotation for the sake of completeness. If we disregard them, the
passage plainly enough states the view that the only element of truth in
the traditional notions about the gods was the divinity of the sky and the
heavenly bodies; the rest is myth. Aristotle has nowhere else expressed
himself with such distinctness and in such length, but then the passage in
question has a place of its own. It comes in his _Metaphysics_ directly
after the exposition of his philosophical conception of God--a position
marked by profound earnestness and as it were irradiated by a quiet inner
fervour. We feel that we are here approaching the _sanctum sanctorum_ of
the thinker. In this connexion, and only here, he wished for once to state
his opinion about the religion of his time without reserve. What he says
here is a precise formulation of the result arrived at by the best Greek
thinkers as regards the religion of the Greek people. It was not, they
thought, pure fabrication. It contained an element of truth of the
greatest value. But most of it consisted of human inventions without any
reality behind them.

A point of view like that of Aristotle would, I suppose, hardly have been
called atheism among the ancients, if only because the heavenly bodies
were acknowledged as divine. But according to our definition it is
atheism. The "sky"-gods of Aristotle have nothing in common with the gods
of popular belief, not even their names, for Aristotle never names them.
And the rest, the whole crowd of Greek anthropomorphic g