personal qualities. Neither Time nor History existed
before Homer; when Time came, History began.

The three male children of Time were Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades;
representing the three dimensions of space. Height, Breadth, and Depth;
Heaven, Ocean, and Hell. They also represented the threefold progress of
the human soul: its aspiration and ascent to what is noble and good, its
descent to what is profound, and its sympathy with all that is various: in
other words, its religion, its intelligence, and its affection.

The fable of Time devouring his children, and then reproducing them,
evidently means the vicissitudes of customs and the departure and return
of fashions. Whatever is born must die; but what has been will be again.
That Eros, Love, should be at the origin of things from chaos, indicates
the primeval attraction with which the order of the universe begins. The
mutilation of Uranos, Heaven, so that he ceased to produce children,
suggests the change of the system of emanation, by which the gods descend
from the infinite, into that of evolution, by which they arise out of the
finite. It is, in fact, the end of Asia, and the beginning of Europe; for
emanation is the law of the theologies of Asia, evolution that of Europe.
Aphrodite, Beauty, was the last child of the Heavens, and yet born from
the Ocean. Beauty is not the daughter of the Heavens and the Earth, but of
the Heavens and the Ocean. The lights and shadows of the sky, the tints of
dawn, the tenderness of clouds, unite with the toss and curve of the wave
in creating Beauty. The beauty of outline appears in the sea, that of
light and color in the sky.[227]

Sec. 4. The Gods of the Poets.

Herodotus says (II. 53), "I am of opinion that Hesiod and Homer lived four
hundred years before my time, and not more, and these were they who framed
a theogony for the Greeks, and gave names to the gods, and assigned to
them honors and arts, and declared their several forms. But the poets,
said to be before them, in my opinion, were after them."

That two poets should create a theology and a worship for a great people,
and so unite its separate tribes into a commonwealth of united states,
seems to modern minds an absurdity. But the poets of Greece were its
prophets. They received, intensified, concentrated, the tendencies of
thought already in the air. All the drift was toward Pan-Hellenic worship
and to a humanized theology, when the Homeric writers sang their so