ures from such as are first, though they should speak
without demonstration. For this kind of discourse is not demonstrative,
but entheastic, or the progeny of divine inspiration; and was invented by
the ancients, not through necessity, but for the sake of persuasion, not
regarding naked discipline, but sympathy with things themselves. But if
you are willing to speculate not only the causes of fables, but of other
theological dogmas, you will find that some of them are scattered in the
Platonic dialogues for the sake of ethical, and others for the sake of
physical considerations. For in the Philebus, Plato discourses concerning
bound and infinity, for the sake of pleasure, and a life according to
intellect. For I think the latter are species of the former. In the
Timaeus the discourse about the intelligible gods is assumed for the sake
of the proposed physiology. On which account, it is every where necessary
that images should be known from paradigms, but that the paradigms of
material things should be immaterial, of sensibles, intelligible, and of
physical forms, separate from nature. But in the Phaedrus, Plato
celebrates the supercelestial place, the subcelestial profundity, and
every genus under this for the sake of amatory mania; the manner in which
the reminiscence of souls takes place; and the passage to these from
hence. Every where, however, the leading end, as I may say, is either
physical or political, while the conceptions about divine natures are
introduced either for the sake of invention or perfection. How, therefore,
can such a theory as yours be any longer venerable and supernatural, and
worthy to be studied beyond every thing, when it is neither able to
evince the whole in itself, nor the perfect, nor that which is
precedaneous in the writings of Plato, but is destitute of all these, is
violent and not spontaneous, and does not possess a genuine, but an
adventitious order, as in a drama? And such are the particulars which may
be urged against our design.

"To this objection I shall make a just and perspicuous reply. I say then
that Plato every where discourses about the gods agreeably to ancient
opinions and the nature of things. And sometimes indeed, for the sake of
the cause of the things proposed, he reduces them to the principles of
the dogmas, and thence, as from an exalted place of survey, contemplates
the nature of the thing proposed. But some times he establishes the
theological science as the le