little, if any, further on its way.[41] Our legend, however, received fuller development in another school of Hellenic thought. Simultaneously with the mythology of the Greeks, and on one side distinct from it, though on the other side closely connected with it, existed a tradition of a more essentially religious character; religion being distinguished from philosophical speculation on the one hand, and myth and legend on the other. Hence, apparently, proceeded the Neo-platonising tendency in Greek philosophy--to adopt the familiar and convenient name, though the thing is older than the Neo-Platonists, or than Plato himself--the tendency to regard the old myths as a repository of the ‘Wisdom of the Ancients,’ and to disengage from the husk of fable the moral and scientific truths which it was supposed to contain. In so doing, the philosophic schools were not merely attempting to read their own notions into the traditions of antiquity, but were also, to some extent, endeavouring to develop germs which already existed in the best and most serious thought of their own and earlier times. This side of the Hellenic religion would appear to have existed in its purest and most highly developed form in the Mysteries, especially those practised at Eleusis, and at other places in which the Eleusinian rites prevailed. Most questions relating to the Greek mysteries, their place of origin, the date of their introduction, the relation of one school to another, the rites practised therein, and the nature of the instruction imparted to the neophytes, have given rise to many debates, and some of them can hardly yet be regarded as entirely settled. Happily, our subject does not call for discussion of these contested points, all that we are concerned with being the significance of the mysteries to the spiritual life of Greece at the time of their highest development. The general result of investigation would seem to make it probable that the Greeks, from a very early period, practised certain rites in honour of Demeter, and that these rites were connected with agriculture, and with the means whereby the unseen powers presiding over it might be rendered propitious. These rites, as in many barbarous nations, were held to confer certain privileges upon the participants, who could only obtain access thereto by a secret initiation; and when the ideas of death and renovation, which arose naturally out of the subject, proceeded by an easy transition--partly by an inherent principle of growth, and partly through the introduction of foreign elements[42]--to questionings concerning man’s fate after death, the same rites were regarded as efficacious in ameliorating his condition in the unseen world. At the same time, as the doctrine of the effect of conduct upon the future life gained ground, this side of the question likewise came within the purview of the mystical schools, and an ethical as well as a theurgic efficacy was ascribed to the initiation rite.