224 THE NATURE OF THE GODS.themselves should be deemed divine. What can be more absurd than to ascribe divine honors to sordid and deformed things ; or to place among the Gods men who are dead and mixed with the dust, to whose memory all the respect that could be paid would be but mourning for their loss ? Chrysippus, who is looked upon as the most subtle in terpreter of the dreams of the Stoics, has mustered up a numerous band of unknown Gods; and so unknown that we are not able to form any idea about them, though our mind seems capable of framing any image to itself in its thoughts. For he says that the divine power is placed in reason, and in the spirit and mind of universal nature ; that the world, with a universal effusion of its spirit, is God ; that the superior pai't of that spirit, which is the mind and reason, is the great principle of nature, containing and pre serving the chain of all things; that the divinity is the power of fate, and the necessity of future events. He dei fies fire also, and what I before called the ethereal spirit, and those elements which naturally proceed from it wa ter, earth, and air. He attributes divinity to the sun, moon, stars, and universal space, the grand container of all things, and to those men likewise who have obtained immortality. He maintains the sky to be what men call Jupiter; the air, which pervades the sea, to be Neptune; and the earth, Ceres. In like manner he goes through the names of the other Deities. He says that Jupiter is that immutable and eternal law which guides and directs us in our manners; and this he calls fatal necessity, the everlasting verity of future events. But none of these are of such a nature as to seem to carry any indication of divine virtue in them. These are the doctrines contained in his first book of the Nature of the Gods. In the second, he endeavors to ac commodate the fables of Orpheus, Musseus, Hesiod, and Homer to what he has advanced in the first, in order that the most ancient poets, who never dreamed of these tilings, may seem to have been Stoics. Diogenes the Bab ylonian was a follower of the doctrine of Chrysippus ; and in that book which he wrote, entitled "A Treatise concern ing Minerva," he separates the account of Jupiter's bring- ing-forth, and the birth of that virgin, from the fabulous,

and reduces it to a natural construction.