at work which throws some light on the illusions of the Platonic
school.

We must bear in mind that the spontaneous and even the reflective
intellectual faculty gradually assimilated special and independent myths
into comprehensive types, which referred to all natural objects. Next,
the incarnation of spirits produced the earliest forms of polytheism,
and these were slowly classified into more concentric circles, and
finally into a single hierarchical system. Owing to the attitude and
ethnic temperament of the Greeks, the glorious anthropomorphism of their
Olympus arose in a more vivid form than elsewhere, and it was
impersonated in the all-powerful and all-seeing Zeus, ruler of the
world, of gods and men. This process, modified in a thousand ways, was
carried on in all races. Hence it resulted that every object had a type,
its god; everything was typically individuated in an anthropomorphic
entity in such a way that there arose a natural dualism between the
phenomena, facts, and cosmic orders on the one side, and on the other
the hierarchy of gods who represented them and over whom they presided.
The Hellenic philosophies prior to Plato, both physical and
intellectual, and also the psychological morality of Socrates, had
already accomplished the first evolution of this typical stage of
universal polytheism, substituting for anthropomorphic representations
physical and intellectual principles and powers. Thought was educated in
its inward exercise, as well as in the observation of facts and ideal
representations. But--and this constituted the first evolution of
anthropomorphism in general--these powers all expressed the thing in its
general and phenomenal form; it was endowed with merely zoomorphic
force, and the world was regarded as physiologically living.

Plato, impelled by the foregoing evolution, and by the large and
exquisitely aesthetic character of his genius, accomplished the second
and altogether intellectual stage of evolution by inverting the problem;
he affirmed that the final and intrinsic result of the exercise of
thought was its earlier and eternal essence, extrinsic and objective.
The types which were first fetishes and then polytheistic were
transformed into the physical and intellectual principles of the world,
divested of all mythical and extrinsic form as far as their material
organization was concerned. Plato held that such types were really
ideal, as in fact they had unconsciously been from the