he elements of nature, and had reached the entification and
subjectivity of ideas, which was also attained by natural science, after
passing through its mythical envelopment. We have noted the causes,
which in the case of the earlier philosophers happened to be objective,
while they were in Plato's case subjective, owing to the character and
temperament of his mind; both conduced to the development and aesthetic
splendour of this teaching among the Greeks. The teaching of Plato,
which had more or less influence on all the earlier civilized peoples,
of his own and subsequent times, and which was also involved in the
mythical representations of later savages, assumed an aspect which
varied with the special history, the ethnic temperament, the
geographical and extrinsic conditions of different peoples; but
considered in itself, it is always the same, and is the necessary result
of the evolution of myth and of thought. Since the evolution of myth
leads to the gradual genesis of science, which becomes more rational as
myth is transformed from the material to the ideal, ideas are
substituted for myths, and laws, as Vico well observes, for the canons
of poetry.

This noble and more rational theory of eternal and causative Ideas
resembles anthropomorphic polytheism in concentrating into one supreme
Idea the intellectual Zeus, the Being of beings, according to another
mythical and scientific representation by Aristotle, and it was
afterwards combined with the Semitic idea of the Absolute. This was
fused with the Logos, the Platonic demiurgos of Messianic ideas, and
afterwards produced the universal philosophy and religion of
Catholicism, which dominated and still dominates over thought with
vigorous tenacity, and extends into all the civilized world inhabited by
European races. We do not only trace the same thought, modified,
classified, and perfected in the Fourth Gospel, in the Councils, the
Fathers, and the schoolmen, but also in independent philosophies. In
our own time it has assumed new forms, derived from the rapid progress
made in cosmic and experimental sciences, even in those which are
apparently the most rationalizing. It is manifest in Hegel, Fichte, and
Schelling, nor is it difficult to trace it in the latest and artificial
theories of the schools of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. In all these cases
the entification of logical conceptions is evident; in all there is an
arbitrary personification of a conception or of a f