beings of a higher order than man exist, nor any reason to refuse to bestow on them the predicate “divine”; and with this we find ourselves in principle on the standpoint of polytheistic popular belief. There is nothing surprising, then, in the tradition that Thales identified God with the mind of the universe and believed the universe to be animated, and filled with “demons.” The first statement is in this form probably influenced by later ideas and hardly a correct expression of the view of Thales; the rest bears the very stamp of genuineness, and similar ideas recur, more or less completely and variously refracted, in the succeeding philosophers. To follow these variations in detail is outside the scope of this investigation; but it may be of interest to see the form they take in one of the latest and most advanced representatives of Ionian naturalism. In Democritus’s conception of the universe, personal gods would seem excluded _a priori_. He works with but three premises: the atoms, their movements, and empty space. From this everything is derived according to strict causality. Such phenomena also as thunder and lightning, comets and eclipses, which were generally ascribed to the gods, are according to his opinion due to natural causes, whereas people in the olden days were afraid of them because they believed they were due to the gods. Nevertheless, he seems, in the first place, to have designated Fire, which he at the same time recognised as a “soul-substance,” as divine, the cosmic fire being the soul of the world; and secondly, he thought that there was something real underlying the popular conception of the gods. He was led to this from a consideration of dreams, which he thought were images of real objects which entered into the sleeper through the pores of the body. Now, since gods might be seen in dreams, they must be real beings. He did actually say that the gods had more senses than the ordinary five. When he who of all the Greek philosophers went furthest in a purely mechanical conception of nature took up such an attitude to the religion of his people, one cannot expect the others, who were less advanced, to discard it. Nevertheless, there is a certain probability that some of the later Ionian naturalists went further in their criticism of the gods of popular belief. One of them actually came into conflict with popular religion; it will be natural to begin with him.