riable alone, therefore, is transcendent
animation attributed. Not the seasonal variation of the sun's heat, but
the joy and the sorrow of which his heat is the occasion made him
divine. When the gods appear, to take the place of the immanent spirits
immediately present in things, they appear, therefore, as already
transcendent, with habitations just beyond the well-known: on high
mountains, in the skies, in dark forests, in caves, in all regions
feared or unexplored. But chiefly the gods inhabit those spaces whence
issue the power of darkness and destruction, particularly the heaven, a
word whose meaning is now, as it was primitively, identical with
divinity. The savage becomes a pagan by giving concrete personality to
the dreadful unknown. Thence it is that the ancient poet assigns the
gods a lineage of fear; and fear may truly be said to have made the
gods, in so far as the gods personify the fear which made them.

The moral level of these figments alters with the level of their
habitation; their power varies with their remoteness; Zeus lives in the
highest heaven and is arbiter of the destiny of both gods and man. To
him and to his like there cannot be the relation of equality which is
sustained between men and spirits of the lower order. His very love is
blasting; interchange of commodities, good for good and evil for evil is
not possible where he is concerned. Gods of the higher order he
exemplifies, even all the gods of Olympus, of the Himalayas, of
Valhalla, are literally beings invoked and implored, as well as dwellers
in heaven. To them man pays a toll on all excellence he gains or finds;
libations and burnt-offerings, the fat and the first fruits: he exists
by their sufferance and serves their caprice. He is their toy, born for
their pleasure, and living by their need.

But just because men conceive themselves to be play-things of the gods,
they define in the gods the ideals of mankind. For the divine power is
power to live forever, and the sum of human desire is just the desire to
maintain its humanity in freedom and happiness endlessly. And exactly
those capacities and instruments of self-maintenance,--all that is
beauty, or truth, or goodness, the very essence of value in any of its
forms,--the gods are conceived to possess and to control: these they may
grant, withhold, destroy. They are as eternal as their habitations, the
mountains; as ruthless as their element, the sea; as omnipresent as the
heavens,