guests are
kindled with a desire to be capable of doing right. "There is no harm in
drinking with reasonable moderation[10]; and we may honour the guest
who, warmed by wine, talks of such noble deeds and instances of virtue
as his memory may suggest. But let him not tell of Titan battles, or
those of the giants or centaurs, the fictions of bygone days, nor yet of
factious quarrels, nor gossip, that can serve no good end. Rather let
us ever keep a good conscience towards the gods."[11]

[Sidenote: Empedocles, Middle of Fifth Century B.C.]

[Sidenote: Not Properly a Pantheist]

Having given so much space to an ancient who seems to me specially
interesting as a prophet of the ultimate apotheosis of earthly
religions, I must be content to indicate, in a very few lines, the
course of the Pantheistic tradition among the Greeks after his day. The
arithmetical mysticism of Pythagoras has no bearing upon our subject.
Empedocles of Agrigentum, living about the middle of the fifth century
B.C., and thus, perhaps, in the second generation after Xenophanes, was,
in many respects, a much more imposing figure--clothed in purple,
wielding political power, possessing medical skill, and even working
miraculous cures, such as are apparently easy to men of personal
impressiveness, sympathy, and "magnetism." But he does not appear to
have so nearly anticipated modern Pantheism as did his humbler
predecessor. For though the fragments of Empedocles, much larger in
volume than those of Xenophanes, certainly hint at some kind of
everlasting oneness in things, and expressly tell us that there is no
creation nor annihilation, but only perpetual changes of arrangement,
yet they present other phases of thought, apparently irreconcileable
with the doctrine that there is nothing other than God. Thus he teaches
that there are four elements--earth, air, water and fire--out of which
all things are generated. He also anticipates Lucretius in his
pessimistic view of humanity's lot; and insists on the apparently
independent existence of a principle of discord or strife in the
Universe. It would be a forced interpretation to suppose him to have set
forth precociously the Darwinian theory of the struggle for life. For
his notion seems much more akin to the Zoroastrian imagination of
Ahriman. Again, he sings melodiously, but most unphilosophically, of a
former golden age, in which the lion and the lamb would seem to have
lain down together in peace; and t