ception of the
gods was actually borrowed and applied, not to some philosophical
abstraction, but to individual and concrete natural objects. The
anthropomorphic gods of the Epicureans point in the same direction. In
spite of their profound difference from the beings that were worshipped
and believed in by the ordinary Greek, they are in complete harmony with
the opinion on which all polytheism is based: that there are individual
beings of a higher order than man. And though the Stoics in theory
confined their acknowledgment of this doctrine to the heavenly bodies, in
practice--even if we disregard demonology--they consistently brought it to
bear upon the anthropomorphic gods, in direct continuation of the Socratic
reaction against the atheistic tendencies of Sophistic.

If now we ask ourselves what may be the cause of this peculiar dualism in
the relationship of ancient thought to religion, though admitting the
highly complex nature of the problem, we can scarcely avoid recognising a
certain principle. Ancient thought outgrew the ancient popular faith; that
is beyond doubt. Hence its critical attitude. But it never outgrew that
supernaturalist view which was the foundation of the popular faith. Hence
its concessions to the popular faith, even when it was most critical, and
its final surrender thereunto. And that it never outgrew the foundation of
the popular faith is connected with its whole conception of nature and
especially with its conception of the universe. We cannot indeed deny that
the ancients had a certain feeling that nature was regulated by laws, but
they only made imperfect attempts at a mechanical theory of nature in
which this regulation of the world by law was carried through in
principle, and with one brilliant exception they adhered implicitly to the
geocentric conception of the universe. We may, I think, venture to assert
with good reason that on such assumptions the philosophers of antiquity
could not advance further than they did. In other words, on the given
hypotheses the supernaturalist view was the correct one, the one that was
most probable, and therefore that on which people finally agreed. A few
chosen spirits may at any time by intuition, without any strictly
scientific foundation, emancipate themselves entirely from religious
errors; this also happened among the ancients, and on the first occasion
was not unconnected with an enormous advance in the conception of nature.
But it is certain th