in the latter was especially dangerous
because they were _visible_ gods, and as to the person who did not believe
in their divinity the obvious conclusion would be that he believed still
less in the invisible gods.

That this inference was drawn will appear before long. But the epithet
"atheist" was very rarely attached to the ancient naturalists; only a few
of the later (and those the least important) were given the nickname
_atheos_. Altogether we hear very little of the relation of these
philosophers to the popular belief, and this very silence is surely
significant. No doubt, most of them bestowed but a scant attention on this
aspect of the matter; they were engrossed in speculations which did not
bring them into conflict with the popular belief, and even their
scientific treatment of the "divine" natural phenomena did not make them
doubt the _existence_ of the gods. This is connected with a peculiarity in
their conception of existence. Tradition tells us of several of them, and
it applies presumably also to those of whom it is not recorded, that they
designated their primary substance or substances as gods; sometimes they
also applied this designation to the world or worlds originating in the
primary substance. This view is deeply rooted in the Greek popular belief
and harmonises with its fundamental view of existence. To these ancient
thinkers the primary substance is at once a living and a superhuman power;
and any living power which transcended that of man was divine to the
Greeks. Hylozoism (the theory that matter is alive) consequently, when it
allies itself with popular belief, leads straight to pantheism, whereas it
excludes monotheism, which presupposes a distinction between god and
matter. Now it is a matter of experience that, while monotheism is the
hereditary foe of polytheism, polytheism and pantheism go very well
together. The universe being divine, there is no reason to doubt that
beings of a higher order than man exist, nor any reason to refuse to
bestow on them the predicate "divine"; and with this we find ourselves in
principle on the standpoint of polytheistic popular belief. There is
nothing surprising, then, in the tradition that Thales identified God with
the mind of the universe and believed the universe to be animated, and
filled with "demons." The first statement is in this form probably
influenced by later ideas and hardly a correct expression of the view of
Thales; the rest bears the very