ith which we ourselves were imbued in youth, we might
well find his attitude inconceivable. But he had nothing of the kind. He
only knew that in war, in hunting, in fishing, in farming, he was
confronted with powers which passed his comprehension; and tradition
permeated him with the expectation that such powers would be propitiated
by his worship of the images set up in their names. There was therefore
no reasoned creed, such as those of the Catholic and Reformed Churches,
but only a vague sentiment brought to a focus by the associations of the
shrine. From such a view of polytheism it is easy to understand how
most, if not all, of the old speculative philosophers could allow the
existence of the traditional gods, even while in reasoned contemplation
they saw that all deities were subordinate to and merged in one
universal God.

[Sidenote: Possible Influence of Oriental Pantheism.]

How far this unstable religious position was subject to the influence of
the oriental mysticism at which we have glanced already, is, at any
rate, so far as concerns the classical age of Greek philosophy, a matter
of conjecture. But the resurrection of a prehistoric and almost
forgotten civilization from the buried cities of Crete has brought to
light many evidences of frequent intercourse, two or three thousand
years before the Christian era, between European and Egyptian, or
Asiatic, centres of life. Therefore, we may well believe that during the
earliest stages of the evolution of thought in East and West, it was as
impossible as at the present time for any local school of thinkers to be
absolutely original or independent. Thus, later Greek philosophers,
whether themselves within sound of the echoes of Hindoo teaching or not,
may very well have grown up in an atmosphere impregnated with mythic
germs, whose origin they did not know. But however that may be, Greek
Pantheism, while it had many points of contact with Eastern speculation,
was more purely intellectual and less essentially religious than the
Pantheism of the Vedas, or the solemn dream that haunted Egyptian
temples. For while the aspiration of Hindoo Pantheists was to find and
assume the right attitude toward "the glory of the sum of things," the
Greeks, as St. Paul long afterward said, "sought after wisdom," and were
fascinated by the idea of tracing all the bewildering variety of Nature
up to some one "principle" ([Greek: arche]), beginning, origin.

[Sidenote: Thales, about