owing the world with creatures
that really satisfied human aspirations, such as at any moment they
might be. The gods possessed longevity, beauty, magic celerity of
movement, leisure, splendour of life, indefinite strength, and practical
omniscience. When the gods were also expressions for natural forces,
this function somewhat prejudiced their ideality, and they failed to
correspond perfectly to what their worshippers would have most
esteemed; but religious reformers tended to expunge naturalism from
theology and to represent the gods as entirely admirable. The Greek
gods, to be sure, always continued to have genealogies, and the fact of
having been born is a bad augury for immortality; but other religions,
and finally the Greek philosophers themselves, conceived unbegotten
gods, in whom the human rebellion against mutability was expressed
absolutely.

Thus a place was found in nature for the constant and perpetual element
which crude experience seems to contain or at least to suggest.
Unfortunately the immortal and the human were in this mythology wholly
divorced, so that while immortality was vindicated for something in the
universe it was emphatically denied to man and to his works.
Contemplation, to be satisfied with this situation, had to be heroically
unselfish and resigned; the gods' greatness and glory had to furnish
sufficient solace for all mortal defeats. At the same time all criticism
had to be deprecated, for reflection would at once have pointed out that
the divine life in question was either a personification of natural
processes and thus really in flux and full of oblivion and imperfection,
or else a hypostasis of certain mental functions and ideals, which could
not really be conceived apart from the natural human life which they
informed and from which they had been violently abstracted.

[Sidenote: Or to a divine principle in all beings.]

Another expedient was accordingly found, especially by mystics and
critical philosophers, for uniting the mortal and immortal in existence
while still distinguishing them in essence. _Cur Deus Homo_ might be
said to be the theme of all such speculations. Plato had already found
the eternal in the form which the temporal puts on, or, if the phrase be
preferred, had seen in the temporal and existential nothing but an
individuated case of the ideal. The soul was immortal, unbegotten,
impassible; the bodies it successively inhabited and the experience it
gathered ser