chaotic mixture of all the elements or
atoms, extended and self-moved, or monads, or to pan, or uncreated mind,
and that conclusion harmonized with the ancient standards of religious
faith--well; if not, philosophy must present some method of
conciliation. The conflicts of faith and reason; the stragglings of
traditional authority to maintain supremacy; the accommodations and
conciliations attempted in those primitive times, would furnish a
chapter of peculiar interest, could it now be written.

The poets who appeared in the dim twilight of Grecian
civilization--Orpheus, Musaeus, Homer, Hesiod--seem to have occupied the
same relation to the popular mind in Greece which the Bible now sustains
to Christian communities.[387] Not that we regard them as standing on
equal ground of authority, or in any sense a revelation. But, in the eye
of the wondering Greek, they were invested with the highest sacredness
and the supremest authority. The high poetic inspiration which pervaded
them was a supernatural gift. Their sublime utterances were accepted as
proceeding from a divine afflatus. They were the product of an age in
which it was believed by all that the gods assumed a human form,[388]
and held a real intercourse with gifted men. This universal faith is
regarded by some as being a relic of still more distant times, a faint
remembrance of the glory of patriarchal days. The more natural opinion
is, that it was begotten of that universal longing of the human heart
for some knowledge of that unseen world of real being, which man
instinctively felt must lie beyond the world of fleeting change and
delusive appearances. It was a prolepsis of the soul, reaching upward
towards its source and goal. The poet felt within him some native
affinities therewith, and longed for some stirring breath of heaven to
sweep the harp-strings of the soul. He invoked the inspiration of the
Goddess of Song, and waited for, no doubt believed in, some "deific
impulse" descending on him. And the people eagerly accepted his
utterance as the teaching of the gods. They were too eager for some
knowledge from that unseen world to question their credentials. Orpheus,
Hesiod, Homer, were the theologoi--the theologians of that age.[389]

[Footnote 387: "Homer was, in a certain sense, the Bible of the
Greeks."--Whewell, "Platonic Dialogues," p. 283.]

[Footnote 388: The universality of this belief is asserted by Cicero:
"Vetus opinio est, jam usque ab heroicis du