THE NATURE OF THE GODS. 221Diogenes of Apollonia looks upon the air to be a Deity.

But what sense can the air have ? or what divine form can be attributed to it? It would be tedious to show the uncertainty of Plato's opinion ; for, in his Timaeus, he denies the propriety of as serting that there is one great father or creator of the world ; and, in his book of Laws, he thinks we ought not to make too strict an inquiry into the nature of the Deity. And as for his statement when he asserts that God is a being without any body what the Greeks call ao-w^uaroc it is certainly o f uit<^umQteUigible how-.that-.the_Qr)Lgan pos- for such a God must then necessarily be destitute of sen-o, prudence, and pleasure j all which things preTieiided in our notion of the Gods. lie like wise asserts in his Timanis, and in his Laws, that the world, the heavens, the stars, the mind, and those Gods which are delivered down to us from our ancestors, constitute the Deity. These opinions, taken separately, are apparently false; and, together, are directly inconsistent with each other. Xenophon has committed almost the same mistakes, but in fewer words. In those sayings which he has related of Socrates, he introduces him disputing the lawfulness of inquiring into the form of the Deity, and makes him assert the sun and the mind to be Deities: he represents him likewise as affirming the being of one God only, and at an other time of many ; which are errors of almost the same kind which I before took notice of in Plato. XIII. Antisthenes, in his book called the Natural Phi losopher, says that there are many national and one nat ural Deity ; but by this saying he destroys the power and nature of the Gods. Speusippus is not much less in the wrong ; who, following his uncle Plato, says that a certain incorporeal power governs everything ; by which he en deavors to root out of our minds the knowledge of the Gods. Aristotle, in his third book of Philosophy, confounds many things together, as the rest have done ; but he does not differ from his master Plato. At one time he attrib utes all divinity to the mind, at another he asserts that the

world is God. Soon afterward he makes some other es-