ods, exist only in
the human imagination.

Aristotle's successors offer little of interest to our inquiry.
Theophrastus was charged with impiety, but the charge broke down
completely. His theological standpoint was certainly the same as
Aristotle's. Of Strato, the most independent of the Peripatetics, we know
that in his view of nature he laid greater stress on the material causes
than Aristotle did, and so arrived at a different conception of the
supreme deity. Aristotle had severed the deity from Nature and placed it
outside the latter as an incorporeal being whose chief determining factor
was reason. In Strato's view the deity was identical with Nature and, like
the latter, was without consciousness; consciousness was only found in
organic nature. Consequently we cannot suppose him to have believed in the
divinity of the heavenly bodies in Aristotle's sense, though no direct
statement on this subject has come down to us. About his attitude towards
popular belief we hear nothing. A denial of the popular gods is not
necessarily implied in Strato's theory, but seems reasonable in itself and
is further rendered probable by the fact that all writers seem to take it
for granted that Strato knew no god other than the whole of Nature.

We designated Socratic philosophy, in its relation to popular belief, as a
reaction against the radical free-thought of the sophistic movement. It
may seem peculiar that with Aristotle it develops into a view which we can
only describe as atheism. There is, however, an important difference
between the standpoints of the sophists and of Aristotle. Radical as the
latter is at bottom, it is not, however, openly opposed to popular
belief--on the contrary, to any one who did not examine it more closely it
must have had the appearance of accepting popular belief. The very
assumption that the heavenly bodies were divine would contribute to that
effect; this, as we have seen, was a point on which the popular view laid
great stress. If we add to this that Aristotle never made the existence of
the popular gods matter of debate; that he expressly acknowledged the
established worship; and that he consistently made use of certain
fundamental notions of popular belief in his philosophy--we can hardly
avoid the conclusion that, notwithstanding his personal emancipation from
the existing religion, he is a true representative of the Socratic
reaction against sophistic. But we see, too, that there is a reservat