GREEK NATURE WORSHIP. 31 



own fancy with deities, whose imaginary doings were part 

 and parcel of his life, and which controlled his every 

 action. Every phenomenon of nature to him was the 

 work, voluntary or involuntary, of a personal agent. If the 

 earth quaked, imprisoned giants were struggling against 

 the bonds of the higher gods ; Zeus wept in the rain-drops, 

 and the tears of Niobe fell in the snowflakes. Every 

 wood and every stream had for him its divinities. They 

 ushered in the dawn and at night he saw them wandering 

 through the sky. All nature was alive all things were 

 conscious things. There was no distinction between his 

 mythology and theology, none between the latter and his 

 system of religion, no question which the fictions of his 

 brain could not answer, and no doubt which his imagina- 

 tion could not solve. If limits to his speculative faculty 

 existed, they were to be reached only when it wearied of 

 its own exuberance a logical impossibility, perhaps, 

 when the creator was the worshiper of his own creations. 

 Equally were there no bounds to the theories which might 

 be evolved to account for natural facts, provided each fact 

 were fitted with its own theory, and the supernatural were 

 open to constant invocation; but when it came to traveling 

 outside of the ratiocinative circle, and to knowing things 

 in themselves and formulating theories which would stand 

 the test of explaining exactly ascertained facts, such con- 

 ceptions in the mind of the Greek who lived six centuries 

 before our era, had no more place than they have in that 

 of the child who dwells in the happy world of the fairy 

 books. 1 



The Egyptian of the same period claimed a national 

 existence extending back for millenniums. His religion 

 was of double aspect: a strict monotheism combined with 

 a speculative philosophy on the two great subjects of the 

 nature of God and the destiny of man, and a gross and 

 multitudinous polytheism. 2 The intelligent, the learned 



1 Cox : History of Greece, cit. sup., 127. 



2 Rawlinson : History of Egypt, i., 505. 



