after the exemplar of men--being neither, like them, invested with human
passions, nor supposed, like them, to have power beyond the phaenomena
which are the special department of each, there was no fear of offending
them by the attempt to foresee and define their action, or by the
supposition that it took place according to fixed laws. The popular
tribunal which condemned Anaxagoras had evidently not risen to the
metaphysical point of view. Hippocrates, who was concerned only with a
select and instructed class, could say with impunity, speaking of what
were called the god-inflicted diseases, that to his mind they were
neither more nor less god-inflicted than all others. The doctrine of
abstract entities was a kind of instinctive conciliation between the
observed uniformity of the facts of nature, and their dependence on
arbitrary volition; since it was easier to conceive a single volition as
setting a machinery to work, which afterwards went on of itself, than to
suppose an inflexible constancy in so capricious and changeable a thing
as volition must then have appeared. But though the régime of
abstractions was in strictness compatible with Polytheism, it demanded
Monotheism as the condition of its free development. The received
Polytheism being only the first remove from Fetichism, its gods were too
closely mixed up in the daily details of phaenomena, and the habit of
propitiating them and ascertaining their will before any important
action of life was too inveterate, to admit, without the strongest shock
to the received system, the notion that they did not habitually rule by
special interpositions, but left phaenomena in all ordinary cases to the
operation of the essences or peculiar natures which they had first
implanted in them. Any modification of Polytheism which would have made
it fully compatible with the Metaphysical conception of the world, would
have been more difficult to effect than the transition to Monotheism, as
Monotheism was at first conceived.