Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/399

Rh Philosophers, whose poetical imagination suggested a personification of the Cause of the Universe, seem, nevertheless, to have dispensed with the agency of the Devil. Democritus, Epicurus, Theodorus, and perhaps even Aristotle, indeed abstained from introducing a living and thinking Agent, analogous to the human mind, as the author or superintendent of the world. Plato, following his master, Socrates, who had been struck with the beauty and novelty of the theistical hypothesis, as first delivered by the tutor of Pericles, supposed the existence of a God, and accommodated a moral system of the most universal character, including the past, the present, and the future condition of man, to the popular supposition of the moral superintendence of this one intellectual cause. It is needless to pursue the modifications of this doctrine as it extended among the succeeding sects. This hypothesis, though rude enough, is in no respect very absurd and contradictory. The refined speculations concerning the existence of external objects, by which the idea of matter is suggested, to which Plato has the merit of having first directed the attention of the thinking part of mankind… A partial interpretation of it has gradually afforded the least unrefined portion of our popular religion.

But the Greek Philosophers abstained from introducing the Devil. They accounted for evil by supposing that what is called matter is eternal, and that God, in making the world, made not the best that he, or even inferior intelligence could conceive; but that he moulded the reluctant and stubborn materials ready to his hand, into the nearest arrangement possible to the perfect archetype existing in his contemplation:—in the