Now the peculiar result of this investigation of the state of religion among the upper classes seems to me to be this: the curve of intensity of religious feeling which conjecture leads us to draw through the spiritual life of the ancients as a whole, that same curve, but more distinct and sharply accentuated, is found again in the relations of the upper classes to the popular faith. Towards the close of the fifth century it looks as if the cultured classes that formed the centre of Greek intellectual life were outgrowing the ancient religion. The reaction which set in with Socrates and Plato certainly checked this movement, but it did not stop it. Cynics, Peripatetics, Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, in spite of their widely differing points of view, were all entirely unable to share the religious ideas of their countrymen in the form in which they were cast in the national religion. However many allowances they made, their attitude towards the popular faith was critical, and on important points they denied it. It is against the background thus resulting from ancient philosophy’s treatment of ancient religion that we must view such phenomena as Polybius, Cicero, and Pliny the Elder, if we wish to understand their full significance. On the other hand, it is certain that this was not the view that conquered in the end among the educated classes in antiquity. The lower we come down in the Empire the more evident does the positive relation of the upper class to the gods of the popular faith become. Some few examples have already been mentioned in the preceding pages. In philosophy the whole movement finds its typical expression in demonology, which during the later Empire reigned undisputed in the one or two schools that still retained any vitality. It is significant that its source was the earlier Platonism, with its very conservative attitude towards popular belief, and that it was taken over by the later Stoic school, which inaugurated the general religious reaction in philosophy. And it is no less significant that demonology was swallowed whole by the monotheistic religion which superseded ancient paganism, and for more than a thousand years was the recognised explanation of the nature thereof.