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$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter VI}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Foot Moore, George}
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$Subject{gods
god
soul
plato
world
life
things
socrates
knowledge
death}
$Date{1913}
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Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of Greece
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter VI

     The end of education is a practical wisdom, a knowledge of the good which
results in right action.  Knowledge and virtue are inseparable; right conduct
without right knowledge is inconceivable, and on the other hand no man does
evil knowing it to be evil.  More exactly, virtue is knowledge, "knowledge at
once of end and of means, irresistibly realising itself in act." The several
virtues, such as piety, justice, courage, temperance, are but the one virtue,
the good character, manifesting itself in different relations and
circumstances, just as wisdom is one, the knowledge of the good.  And,
consistently with the premises, the good is what is to the advantage of the
individual: utility is the measure of conduct and the foundation of moral rule
and legal enactment.  What Socrates aims at, therefore, is the reformation, or
regeneration, of the moral life through education, bringing to man the
knowledge of his own true interest.  To this he devoted his life, and for this
he laid it down.

     Socrates faithfully fulfilled all his duties as a citizen in war and
peace, but, in deference to the admonition of his inward monitor, abstained
from taking an active part in politics.  In religion, also, he conformed to
the customary observances, sacrificing to the gods and praying to them as
others did.  He had a special reverence for the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, by
which he had been called to his life work.  Of his sincerity there is no
question.  That, with the most truly religious spirits of his age, he thought
of the gods as wise and good, and therefore as above the weaknesses and
basenesses which the common belief, on the authority of the poets, attributed
to them, can as little be questioned. Plato puts into his mouth more than one
indignant criticism of the poets who thus malign the gods.

     When he prayed, he asked of the gods only to give what is good, since the
gods must know best what gifts are good; and he thought that those who prayed
for gold or silver or sovereign power were as foolish as men would be who
prayed for a game of dice, or a fight, or something else the outcome of which
could not be foreseen.  At the end of the Phaedrus, the Platonic Socrates
prays: "Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me
beauty of the inward soul, and may the outward and the inward man be at one."
In making his small offerings out of his slender means, he deemed that he was
doing no less than those who of their abundance offered many sacrifices; for
if the gods were better pleased by large offerings than by small, they would
frequently prefer the offerings of the wicked to those of the good, and then
life would not be worth living; the gods were best pleased with the homage
paid them by the most pious souls.  The vulgar notion that in offerings men
give to the gods what the gods want, and expect to receive in return the
things men desire, would reduce religion to a business transaction.

     In the Memorabilia (I, 4), Xenophon reports from his own hearing a
conversation of Socrates with a certain Aristodemus, of whom he had heard that
he neither sacrificed to the gods nor consulted divination, but ridiculed
those who did these things.  For the existence of the deity Socrates argues
from the evidences of design in nature, and especially in man himself.  When
Aristodemus objects that he does not see these intelligent and ordering
powers, Socrates pleasantly replies that he cannot see his own soul either, so
that with equal right it might be argued that his actions were not directed by
intelligence.  Aristodemus then shifts his ground: the deity must be far too
majestic to need his service, and he does not believe that the gods care
anything about men. Socrates adduces fresh evidences of the gods' peculiar
interest in man; the very upright carriage of man shows this, but above all
the soul of man, with its capacity for knowing and serving God; the signs and
portents the gods send to peoples and individuals also prove it.  As a man's
mind within his body directs it as it wills, so we must think that the
intelligence immanent in the universe orders the universe as it pleases. If a
man's eye can see things many stadia distant, it ought not to be thought
impossible that the eye of God should see all things at once; if a man's mind
can think not only of things near by but of things in Egypt or Sicily, it is
not incredible that the intelligence of God should care for all at once.

     If Socrates had been called on to say how this simple and antique faith
was to be reconciled with his sceptical premises, he would probably have
fallen back on the pragmatic principle.

     "Do you not see," he says to Aristodemus in the conversation quoted
above, "that the most venerable and the wisest of human institutions, cities
and nations, are the most religious, and that the most prudent ages of human
life are the most regardful of the gods." "As by rendering a service to men
you come to know those who are willing to serve you in turn, and by showing a
favour those who return favours, and by consulting together you know those who
are wise, so by serving the gods you may make experience of them, if they are
willing to give you advice concerning things concealed from men; you will know
that the deity is of such a nature that it sees all things at once and hears
all things, and is every where present, and that its providential care is over
all at once.  To me, therefore, it seems that intelligent men will abstain
from unholy and unjust and shameful deeds, not only when they are under the
eyes of men, but even if they were in solitude, for they would reflect that
not one of the things they might do would escape the notice of the gods." ^1

[Footnote 1: Xenophon, Memorabilia, l. c.]

     That is, in effect, if knowledge of the gods, like all other knowledge,
is unattainable, religion, which rests on the belief that the gods exist and
concern themselves about men, when translated into action proves to be the
theory that works best; it has the practical verification which is the only
verification possible.

     That Socrates, of all men, should have been prosecuted for
"irreligiousness," is strange, and stranger still that he should have been
convicted and put to death upon this charge.  The accusation was brought by
three members of the popular, or democratic, party, and it has with good
reason been suspected that their zeal for orthodoxy was not purely religious.
The indictment had two counts: First, Socrates does not believe in the gods
that the city believes in, but introduces other, new divinities; and, second,
he corrupts young men.  His defence, if Plato's Apology fairly represents its
tone, was thoroughly in character, but not of a style to propitiate Athenian
jurymen.  He was found guilty by a comparatively small majority in the large
jury.  On the second poll he was condemned to death.  He had no regrets.
Death, he is convinced, is not an evil, whether it be a dreamless sleep, or,
as some say, a migration to another world where all the dead are, and where he
may have converse with the heroes and the poets of past ages - whichever it
be, one thing is sure, that no evil can befall a good man, either in life or
death.

     In his ideal scheme of education in the Republic, Plato comes to speak of
the harm that is done to children by the tales that they are told in the
nursery and the myths they learn in school out of Homer and Hesiod - what
Ouranos did and what Kronos did to him.  A young man should not be told that
in committing unspeakable crimes he is doing nothing outrageous, and that if
his father does wrong he may punish him in whatever manner he chooses, for he
is only doing what the first and greatest gods did.  If we wish the future
guardians of the state to regard quarrelsomeness as dishonourable and
irreligious, they must not be brought up on stories of how gods fight with
gods and plot against them, and the enmities of gods and heroes to their
kindred and those of their own families.  That Hephaistos fettered his mother
Hera, or that Zeus threw Hephaistos out of heaven for trying to save his
mother from a beating, that the gods stood laughing about the couch in which
Hephaistos surprised Ares and Aphrodite - such myths must be forbidden,
whether they are supposed to be allegorical or not, for youth cannot be
expected to draw this distinction, and the stories themselves make an
indelible impression.

     They are to be forbidden, not merely because they are morally injurious,
but because they are false.  What Hesiod tells of Ouranos and Kronos is the
greatest of all lies in high places, and an immoral lie besides.  God is in
reality perfectly good, and must not be represented otherwise.  Being good, he
cannot be the author of anything harmful or morally evil, but only of good.
God is not, therefore, as men say, the cause of all things in human life, but
only of the good things; for the evils, which far outnumber them, some other
cause must be sought.  That when God desires utterly to ruin a house he plants
guilt among men, as Aeschylus says, is a doctrine that youth must not be
allowed to listen to. The sufferings of Niobe or of the house of Pelops must
either not be called the work of God at all, or it must be explained that God
did what was just and good, and that the chastisement was to benefit to the
sufferers.

     The gods are exempt from all human imperfections, their blissful calm is
not agitated by emotions, they neither laugh nor weep.  They are not subject
to change, for the very notion of change implies imperfection. The stories of
the deceptive metamorphoses of the gods are doubly distasteful to Plato as
involving both change - which must be for the worse - and the intent to
deceive.  God is no conjurer, either to assume in reality different forms or
to delude us with the false appearance of such transformations; he is ever the
same, and of all things least likely to depart from his own proper likeness.
He is "perfectly simple and true, both in deed and word; he changes not; he
deceives not, either by dream or waking vision, by sign or word."

     The gods are righteous, and they cannot be prevailed upon to connive at
wrong-doing.  Men grievously deceive themselves when they imagine that they
can propitiate the gods by worship; that by adulation and prayer-spells they
can secure impunity in the enjoyment of their fraudulently acquired wealth, or
that the gods grant indulgence to those who give them a share of the spoils of
injustice.  That is to make the gods out inferior to even average men, who
would never betray justice for the gifts which are made them by wicked men.
Of all impious men he who holds this opinion may most justly be judged the
most wicked and impious. The three fundamental propositions on which religion
rests are that gods exist, that they concern themselves with men, and that
they are inexorable in maintaining righteousness.

     In worship, all depends on the moral disposition of the worshipper. Only
those can please the gods who are like them, that is, pious, wise, and just.
God is good; the man who has not the image of God's goodness in himself has no
communion with him.

     In making goodness the dominant element in the conception of the godhead.
Plato goes a long step beyond those who tried to explain the dealings of God
with men from the point of view of justice.  A god who is not the author of
any kind of evil, and whose inflictions are justified, not by the mere fact
that they are deserved, but by the evidence that they are for the good of
those upon whom they are laid, stands high above a god who requites with
strict justice all the deeds of men.  Indeed, it may be said that the ethical
conception of God can go no farther than this. Plato, as we have seen, is well
aware that in absolving God of all responsibility for evil he has taken upon
himself to find "some other cause" for the vast mass of evil in the world.
These causes, as they appear in the subsequent development of his philosophy,
will engage our attention later.  But even if this problem remained insoluble,
Plato would stand by his faith in the perfect goodness of God, completely
moral.  He is the founder of theistic philosophy, or, we may as well say, of
philosophical theology; and all the theologies of the Western world, Jewish
and Moslem as well as Christian, derive in the end from him.

     Socrates had put aside inquiries into the making and the working of the
world and speculations on being and becoming, as futile in themselves and
fruitless for the great end of right living.  In his relentless examination of
his own ideas and other men's, his endeavour to attach exact meanings to
terms, he recognised the functions of general notions. He confined himself,
indeed, to the definition of ethical universals, but that was only his
one-sided ethical interest.  The method was, as Plato saw, applicable to the
whole range of concepts; it was, indeed, the method of all scientific
knowledge in distinction from untested opinion.  He saw, too, that the
universe is a problem, not for science alone, but for theology.  Socrates
himself, when he got into a discussion with a man who denied the existence of
God or of divine providence, employed the argument from design in nature, and
explained the orderly structure and operation of the universe by an immanent
directing intelligence, like the soul of man in his body.

     Plato, therefore, took up again the problems which had engaged thinkers
from Thales to Anaxagoras; but he took them up in the light of the new
questions the sophists had raised and of the discussions in other schools,
notably the Megarians, and with an extended application of the methods of
Socrates.  "The Ionian natural philosophy in its Heraclitic form, the Eleatic
doctrine of Being, the mathematical speculations and the animisms of the
Pythagoreans, furnished him important structural materials, but all these
ideas are subordinated to the Socratic ruling idea of moral knowledge, and
raised to a higher scientific level by the rigour of Socratic method."

     Plato's speculative theology is a part of his doctrine of ideas. Behind
the world of appearance, in which by sense-perception and representation we
are aware of the multitude of objects of diverse kinds, there is the noumenal
world, the world of ideas.  An idea is the perfect type of a natural kind, of
which all the individual members of the kind are imperfect copies; it is
eternal and unchangeable; an object, not of sense or imagination, but of
rational cognition.  To the idea alone belong the predicates applied by the
Eleatic school to Being: it alone has true reality.  The systematic unity of
Being is found in the Idea of the Good, which is at once the cause of
existence to all things that exist and of knowledge to all minds that know.
It is thus "beyond existence" and "above knowing," since it is that in which
both originate and by which they are united to each other as elements of one
whole.  This is God.  The Christian theologian, Origen, and the Neoplatonist
philosopher, Plotinus, will repeat the words "beyond knowing and being" in the
endeavour to find a formula for the absolute transcendence of God.

     Since man can cognise this ideal world, his intelligence, the rational
soul, must be in its nature akin to the ideas.  At one period Plato explained
the general notions, which are antecedent to all experience, by the theory of
reminiscence: the soul brought with it into this earthly life the notion, say,
of beauty or of justice, which is assumed when we say that an object is
beautiful or an action just; the imperfect beauty of the sensible object
awakens in the soul the memory of the idea of beauty which in intellectual
vision it had seen in the suprasensible world, an indistinct reminiscence
which it is the business of dialectic to clear up and define.  The
preexistence of the soul opened the door to the Orphic-Pythagorean mythology
of transmigration which figures largely in Plato's eschatology.

     The soul not only brings with it vague memories of the ideal world but a
native love for it.  And just as the memories are called into consciousness by
the qualities of sensible objects, so the emotions which physical beauty
kindles, and the desire to possess it, may unveil the vision, long obscured by
sense, of the ideal beauty and goodness, and arouse in the soul the yearning
to mount up again to that world.  Love is the master passion: in the soul that
is sunk in sense it may be mere brute lust, plunging ever deeper into the
mire; in the philosopher it has for its object the ideally beautiful and the
good, it is the craving to possess and enjoy for ever the supreme and eternal
values.  In this passion for eternal good is involved not only the demand of
the soul for immortality but its assurance.  The origin of the fundamental
impulse of the soul is the pledge of its fulfilment.

     The conception of an immaterial and the corresponding conception of an
immaterial God have their origin in Plato. ^1 He is also the first to
undertake to prove the immortality of the soul, as we understand those words,
in distinction from the survival of a ghostly double, or shade. This he does
in numerous dialogues from different periods of his life, in different
connections and with diverse arguments.  The frequency with which he recurs to
the subject is an indication of the importance it had in his thinking.  It is
not possible to analyse these arguments, which are many, and, as may be
supposed, not always consistent.  Besides that which is derived from the
doctrine of ideas, the character of which has been indicated above, mention
must be made of one other, drawn from the conception of the soul as the
unmoved mover (Phaedrus, 245), the resemblance of which to the Aristotelian
idea of God as primum movens is obvious.  Embracing, as they do, the arguments
from the universality of the belief in existence after death, from the moral
necessity of retribution beyond this life, from the aspirations of the soul,
and from its essential nature, the Dialogues of Plato contain explicitly or
implicitly pretty much all that has ever been said on the subject, and have
been the armoury from which the theologians of revealed religions as well as
philosophers of many schools have drawn their weapons.

[Footnote 1: It is, perhaps, not superfluous to remind theologians that
neither in the Old Testament nor in the New is "spirit" equivalent to
"immaterial."]

     In his later years Plato felt moved to complete his system of belief by a
philosophy of nature, and this, like the pre-Socratic natural philosophies,
took the shape of cosmology, an account of the origin of the world.  He had
never, like the Eleatics, denied to the phenomenal world all reality; he
allowed it a kind of reality, but of a lower order than that of the noumenal
world.  In order to explain its existence, he had now to modify his Eleatic
conception of the ideal world, and to ascribe to it not only life and
intelligence but transeunt activities.  Thus conceived, the Idea of the Good,
that is, God, creates the visible world by shaping matter after the pattern of
the ideas.  Matter itself he did not create; in a formless state, indefinite
and infinite, it always existed, a second eternal principle besides the
creator. ^1 This dualism served to explain the imperfections of the phenomenal
world: God is perfect, and the ideas are perfect types, but the matter on
which these forms are impressed, or of which their likeness is fashioned, is
not completely plastic to the creator's purpose; it is an inadequate medium
for the concrete expression of the idea.  The imperfection, the evil, is not,
therefore, due to any shortcoming of the divine wisdom or goodwill, but to the
nature of the primordial matter with which God had to work.

[Footnote 1: The material principle of Plato, according to the express
testimony of Aristotle, was identical with space, conceived, of course, as
most of his predecessors conceived it, as a plenum, not as the void.]

     The world, being in the image of God, is a living, visible god, and has a
soul, the principle of order and motion, in which intelligence is, as in man,
united with a corporeal element.  The peopling of the world began with the
creation of the gods, among whom, in the first rank, stand the heavenly
bodies, which, like the earth, are living beings, visible gods; after these
come the gods of the popular religion.  The gods and the souls of men only
were created by the supreme God, the other classes of creatures in the air, on
the earth, and in the waters, as well as the bodies of living beings, were
fashioned by the subordinate gods.  Thus philosophical monotheism makes room
for religious polytheism, but with reformed gods such as Plato describes in
his earlier writings.

     With the rational soul are joined two lower elements, one the seat of the
nobler human passions, the other of the animal appetites and lusts which man
shares with the brutes; these form a connecting link between the immaterial
soul and the material body.  This association is fraught with great danger, if
reason, instead of asserting and steadfastly maintaining its supremacy and
establishing a harmony, allows itself to be drawn down by unruled passion or
base desire.  Such souls are re-embodied in lower forms of life, and may sink
deeper at every stage; while the soul that has held true to its own higher
nature and destiny, and has subdued spirit and body to the ends of the soul,
mounts up at death to the star which was its pure abode before it descended to
earth.  The soul is thus a stranger and a sojourner on earth: its end must be
to prove itself worthy to return to its house above.  This task is hard, but
not beyond the powers of the soul, unless they have been impaired by yielding
to evil.

     Plato's proposals for the expurgation of mythology extend to the Homeric
Hades.  Achilles shall not be allowed to say: "I had rather be attached to the
soil as the serf of a landless man with a scanty living than be king over all
the wasted dead." All the passages that describe the dismal state of the dead,
"Cocytus and Styx, ghosts under the earth and sapless shades," must be
rejected.  These appalling pictures may be useful for another purpose, he
significantly adds, but the young men who are to be the defenders of their
country are not to hear of them, for no man can be absolutely fearless of
death who believes in Hades and its terrors.

     When Plato himself pursues "another purpose," he pictures hell in all the
colours which the Orphic imagination lent. ^1 At death, the soul is conducted
by its daimon into the presence of the infernal judges, Aeacus, Rhadamanthus,
and Minos.  There, stripped of all disguises and hypocrisies, it stands naked,
in all its imperfections and the scars of its sins, the thing it really is.
The condemned are led by an opening in the ground on the left hand of the
tribunal to the place of their punishment.  Those who are not irredeemably bad
endure sufferings which are both expiatory and remedial; purified and
corrected, they return in due time to earth to inhabit another body.  The
incurable sinners are cast into hell, where they are tormented without end,
their sufferings serving as exemplary warnings to others.  In the Vision of
Er, some of the damned try to escape; at their approach the mouth of hell gave
a great roar, wild, flaming figures seized them, bound them hand and foot,
flayed them with scourges, dragged them by the roadside, carding them on
teasels like wool, proclaiming to the passers-by their crimes and that they
were being taken to be cast into hell.

[Footnote 1: For Plato's eschatology, see Phaedrus, 246 ff.; Gorgias, 523 ff.;
Phaedo, 109 ff.; Republic, X, 613 ff.; cf. also Timaeus, 41 ff.; see further,
Axiochus, 371, which, though not by Plato, is in the same vein.]

     The great weight of Plato's influence was thus given to the
Orphic-Pythagorean eschatology, which, taken out of its sectarian context and
embodied in a lofty ethical philosophy, gained a currency among educated men
which we can hardly imagine it otherwise attaining.  The early Christian
visions of hell borrow their gruesome pictures of ingenious tortures chiefly
from the same Greek sources, not from Jewish or Persian notions.  The eternal
torments of the damned in hell was no new Christian doctrine, they had the
authority of the greatest of Greek philosophers.

     The good leave the judgment seat by a way to the right, to a beautiful
and blessed abode, where they enjoy the reward of their virtues till their
time comes to return to the life on earth again.  Plato lets Socrates, in the
hour of his death, thus picture this abode: "Those who have led holy lives are
released from this earthly prison, and go to their pure home which is above,
and dwell in the purer earth; and those who have duly purified themselves with
philosophy live henceforth altogether without body, in mansions fairer far
than these, which may not be described, and of which time would fail me to
tell." ^1

[Footnote 1: Jowett's translation.]

     When the souls of the just and unjust come to return to the earthly life,
they choose their own lot in the light of their former experience - sad and
laughable and strange is the spectacle of their election!  Only philosophic
insight and philosophic virtue enables a soul to make a wise choice.  This
significant variation of the doctrine of transmigration puts the
responsibility for man's fortune and character on himself; it is not by chance
or necessity or the arbitrary will of the gods that each is what he is, for
better or for worse.  Yet, in fact, the choice is predetermined.

     The philosophy of Plato is a religion for philosophers, a way of
salvation.  Not only all the idealistic metaphysics of the West, but all its
speculative theologies and every ethic which sets for the spirit of man a
transcendent goal, have their roots in Plato.  For this reason a fuller
exposition of his thought has been given.

     "Vidi il maestro di color che sanno" - thus Dante acclaims Aristotle,
whom he finds sitting at the head of the philosophic school, wondered at by
all.  Aristotle's place in the history of thought could not be better defined
than in the simple words, "the master of those who know." He was born in
Macedonia, where his father was a physician to the king, and came of the line
of Asclepiad physicians who, according to Galen, taught their sons anatomy by
dissection.  From his father Aristotle probably imbibed the interest in
natural science which so strikingly distinguishes him from Plato, and the
principles of empirical method.  In the catalogue of Aristotle's works, the
most numerous titles are writings on natural history.  His zoology (Historia
Animalium) included the results of investigations for which his royal patron
aided by a subsidy; in his school Theophrastus was trained, whose botanical
treatises were the most important contributions to that science until late in
the Middle Ages, and for some highly interesting regions remained almost to
the present time the only source; the scientific men attached to the staff of
Alexander's expedition were his pupils; it is plain that he first conceived
the idea of organised research which has been so fruitful in modern times.
Science did not mean for him mere observation and description, but explanation
of processes and causes; and he was the first to inquire into the nature of
scientific proof, the induction from particulars to a general principle, or
law, and the valid deduction from it.  Each science has its own fundamental
principles, and above these are the fundamental principles of all science.

     Aristotle was for nearly twenty years a member of the Academy in Athens,
at first as a student, later also as teacher and investigator. The circle of
his interests was widened by the inclusion of ethics and politics, and his
attention directed to the problems of metaphysics.  He heard Plato's lectures,
which in his later years were much occupied with numbers as principles, after
Pythagorean precedents, and studied the master's published works. ^1 The most
recent advances in astronomical science were open to him there in the work of
Eudoxos and of Kallippos; the arts of discourse, which Isocrates had raised to
a higher plane than the rhetoric of the sophists, were treated with scientific
method; he made himself master of the history and literature of philosophy.
From Plato he learned much, and he was not lacking in recognition of his
indebtedness; but as he came to his intellectual independence, he found
himself in disagreement with Plato at fundamental points.

[Footnote 1: All the works of Plato which have come down to us, except the
Laws, were written before Aristotle came to him.]

     Reality for him resided, not in a suprasensible realm of ideas, whether
hypostatised universals or archetypal forms of natural kinds, but in
individual things.  Science has to do, however, not with individuals as such,
but with species.  All the members of a species have certain characters in
common which, taken together, are distinctive of it.  But a species is more
than a group of individuals which have these characters in common; it is a
permanent kind, and in organic nature perpetuates self from generation to
generation.  The oak bears an acorn, and the acorn develops into an oak, never
into another kind of tree.  Besides the matter of which it is made, there is,
therefore, in every individual something which determines its kind, and this
determining factor is just as much a fact as the existence of the individual.
It is, moreover, a fact of a higher order and logically prior.  Aristotle
calls this the "form", meaning not the outward appearance but the sum of
specific determinants by virtue of which a thing is what it is, e.g., a tree.
The matter of which the thing is composed possesses only the potentiality of
becoming, say, a tree; that it is actually a tree is due to the "form," the
immaterial principle which makes a thing what it is.  Individuals come into
being and dissolve and pass out of existence, but the type persists - "forms"
are eternal.

     A problem of a different kind was presented by the heavenly bodies and
their movements.  Aristotle approaches this from the point of view of
contemporary astronomy.  A number of concentric spheres rotate around the
earth.  The cause of their motion is a primum movens, itself unmoved, beyond
the outermost sphere.  This prime mover is immaterial, and it moves, not by an
outgoing physical force, but by a spiritual attraction.  It is Mind; its
activity is pure thought, consciously thinking itself.  This infinite active
mind is God.  God is perfect; he has life, continuity of existence, eternity
of existence.

     Man is a kind of being intermediate between other corporeal existences
and God, partaking of the nature of both.  He has in common with the plants
and animals a nutritive soul, the principle of life; in common with the
animals he has also a sensitive, appetitive, motive soul; man alone has an
intellective soul.  Aristotle distinguishes the passive intellect, which
receives from the senses their impressions, and an active intellect in which
originate the forms of thought for the interpretation of the sensible
impressions.  The latter alone can exist apart from the soul and the body;
when it so exists, independent of external objects, having no inessential
attributes, essentially operant, it is eternal, for it then possesses the
attributes of the eternal Mind, God.

     Thus Aristotle's system is in the end more completely dualistic than
Plato's; his God is more absolutely transcendent.  He has no difficulty in
admitting the existence of other gods - the heavenly bodies, for example - and
there is nothing in his system to exclude such beings.  In a lost work, of his
earlier years, he explained the origin of the universal belief in gods by two
principal causes: First, psychical phenomena, such as dreams, enthusiasm,
prophecy; and, second, the impression made by the heavenly bodies and their
regular and harmonious movements.  But he did not think that in explaining the
belief he had explained away religion. Like his predecessors, he rejects the
anthropomorphic mythology; he goes beyond them when he attributes to natural
causes the beneficent activities which the multitude ascribe to the gods,
"When Zeus rains, it is not in order to make the grain grow, but of
necessity," that is, by natural law. Positively, he has little to say about
the gods whom the people worshipped; "divine natures are beyond our
observation," he says somewhere.  Yet he left directions in his will for the
erection of a statue to Zeus Soter and one of Athena Soteira in his native
city.  The accusation of impiety which drove him from Athens shortly before
his death was politically inspired; he was denounced on the charge of deifying
his quondam patron, the tyrant Hermias of Assos.

     On the lot of man after death which so much interested Plato, Aristotle
has nothing to say.  The Orphic-Pythagorean eschatology, with its great
assize, its bodily torments of the disembodied, and its transmigration of
souls, probably seemed to him an objectionable kind of infernal mythology.
Personal immortality has no room in his system; the rational soul is eternal,
but not as individual soul.

     Of Aristotle's ethics it must suffice here to say that he endeavoured to
put ethics also on a scientific basis.  Abandoning Plato's transcendental
goal, he finds the chief end in man's well-being.  This well-being lies in the
proper functioning of the distinctively human faculties, the attainment of the
specifically human excellences.  Virtue is not a knowledge which may be
imparted, but a habit which must be cultivated.  Moral excellence, or virtue,
is the steady guidance and control of the appetitive part of the soul by the
practical reason; the intellectual excellences are the practical wisdom
exercising this control, and speculative wisdom, the proper virtue of the pure
intellect.  In this activity is the highest human happiness.