Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/391

 NO OTHER LEARNING EXCEPT THE MYTHES. 359 Voluntary agents, visible and invisible, impel and govern every, thing. Moreover this point of view is universal throughout the community, adopted with equal fervor, and carried out with equal consistency, by the loftiest minds and by the lowest. The great man of that day is he who, penetrated like others with the general faith, and never once imagining any other system of na- ture than the agency of these voluntary Beings, can clothe them in suitable circumstances and details, and exhibit in living body and action those types which his hearers dimly prefigure. Such men were the authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey ; embodying in themselves the whole measure of intellectual excellence which their age was capable of feeling: to us, the first of poets but to their own public, religious teachers, historians, and philoso- phers besides inasmuch as all that then represented history and philosophy was derived from those epical effusions and from others homogeneous with them. Herodotus recognizes Homer and Hesiod as the main authors of Grecian belief respecting the names and generations, the attributes and agency, the forms and the worship of the gods. 1 History, philosophy, etc., properly so called and conforming to our ideas (of which the subsequent Greeks were the first crea- tors), never belonged to more than a comparatively small num- ber of thinking men, though their influence indirectly affected more or less the whole national mind. But when positive science and criticism, and the idea of an invariable sequence of events, came to supplant in the more vigorous intellects the old mythical creed of omnipresent personification, an inevitable scission was produced between the instructed few and the remaining commu- nity. The opposition between the scientific and the religious point of view was not slow in manifesting itself: in general lan- guage, indeed, both might seem to stand together, but in every particular case the admission of one involved the rejection of the other. According to the theory which then became predom- inant, the course of nature was held to move invariably on, by powers and attributes of its own, unless the gods chose to inter- fere and reverse it ; but they had the power of interfering as often and to as great an extent as they thought fit. Here the 1 Herodot. ii. 53.