expression in such things as the Linos dirges which the Greeks borrowed from their Asiatic neighbours;[13] but when primitive animism, which had seen conscious life everywhere, was gone, and polytheistic mythology, which had personified at least the more striking natural phenomena, was going, it must have seemed that there was nowhere any abiding reality. Nowadays we are accustomed, for good and for ill, to the notion of dead things, obedient, not to inner impulses, but solely to mechanical laws. But that is not the view of the natural man, and we may be sure that, when first it forced itself on him, it must have provoked a strong sense of dissatisfaction. Relief was only to be had from the reflexion that as nothing comes from nothing, nothing can pass away into nothing. There must, then, be something which always is, something fundamental which persists throughout all change, and ceases to exist in one form only that it may reappear in another. It is significant that this something is spoken of as “deathless” and “ageless.”[14] Footnote 12: Simonides, fr. 85, 2 Bergk. _Il._ vi. 146. Footnote 13: On Adonis-Thammuz, Lityerses, Linos, and Osiris, see Frazer, _Golden Bough_, vol. i. pp. 278 sqq. Footnote 14: The Epic phrase ἀθάνατος καὶ ἀγήρως seems to have suggested this. Anaximander applied both epithets to the primary substance (R. P. 17 and 17 a). Euripides, in describing the blessedness of the scientific life (fr. inc. 910), says ἀθανάτου ... φύσεως κόσμον ἀγήρω (R. P. 148 c fin.). [Sidenote: Φύσις]