"When a poet holds such language concerning the gods, we shall be angry with him, and refuse him a chorus. Neither shall we allow our teachers to use his writings for the instruction of the young, if we would have our guards grow up to be as god-like and god-fearing as it is possible for men to be."[148] We are thus constrained by the statements of the heathens themselves, as well as by the dictates of common sense, to look beyond the external drapery and the material forms of Polytheism for some deeper and truer meaning that shall be more in harmony with the facts of the universal religious consciousness of our race. The religion of ancient Greece consisted in something more than the fables of Jupiter and Juno, of Apollo and Minerva, of Venus and Bacchus. "Through the rank and poisonous vegetation of mythic phraseology, we may always catch a glimpse of an original stem round which it creeps and winds itself, and without which it can not enjoy that parasitical existence which has been mistaken for independent vitality."[149] [Footnote 146: "Republic," bk. ii. ch. xix.] [Footnote 147: "Republic," bk. ii. ch. xx. Much more to the same effect may be seen in ch. ii.] [Footnote 148: "Republic," bk. ii. ch. xxi.] [Footnote 149: Max Müller, "Science of Language," 2d series, p. 433.] It is an obvious truth, attested by the voice of universal consciousness as revealed in history, that the human mind can never rest satisfied within the sphere of sensible phenomena. Man is impelled by an inward necessity to pass, in thought, beyond the boundary-line of sense, and inquire after causes and entities which his reason assures him must lie beneath all sensible appearances. He must and will interpret nature according to the forms of his own personality, or according to the fundamental ideas of his own reason. In the childlike subjectivity of the undisciplined mind he will either transfer to nature the phenomena of his own personality, regarding the world as a living organism which has within it an informing soul, and thus attain a _pantheistic_ conception of the universe; or else he will fix upon some extraordinary and inexplicable phenomenon of nature, and, investing it with _super_natural significance, will rise from thence to a religious and _theocratic_ conception of nature as a whole. An intelligence--a mind _within_ nature, and inseparable from nature, or else _above_ nature and governing nature, is, for man, an inevitable thought.