at the views of an entire age are always decisively
conditioned by its knowledge and interpretation of the universe
surrounding it, and cannot in principle be emancipated therefrom.

Seen from this point of view, our brief sketch of the attitude of
posterity towards the religion of the pagan world will also not be without
interest. If, after isolated advances during the mighty awakening of the
Renaissance, it is not until the transition from the seventeenth to the
eighteenth century that we find the modern atheistic conception of the
nature of the gods of the ancients established in principle and
consistently applied, we can scarcely avoid connecting this fact with the
advance of natural science in the seventeenth century, and not least with
the victory of the heliocentric system. After the close of antiquity the
pagan gods had receded to a distance, practically speaking, because they
were not worshipped any more. No one troubled himself about them. But in
theory one had got no further, _i.e._ no advance had been made on the
ancients, and no advance could be made as long as supernaturalism was
adhered to in connexion with the ancient view of the universe. Through
monotheism the notions of the divinity of the sun, moon and planets had
certainly been got rid of, but not so the notion of the world--_i.e._ the
globe enclosed within the firmament--as filled with personal beings of a
higher order than man; and even the duty of turning the spheres to which
the heavenly bodies were believed to be fastened was--quite
consistently--assigned to some of these beings. As long as such notions
were in operation, not only were there no grounds for denying the reality
of the pagan gods, but there was every reason to assume it. So far we may
rightly say that it was Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Kepler and
Newton that did away with the traditional conception of ancient paganism.

Natural science, however, furnishes only the negative result that the gods
of polytheism are not what they are said to be: real beings of a higher
order than man. To reveal what they are, other knowledge is required. This
was not attained until long after the revival of natural science in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The vacillation in the eighteenth
century between various theories of the explanation of the nature of
ancient polytheism--theories which were all false, though not equally
false--is in this respect significant enough; likewise the