+719+. Along with the deities described above there is a class of higher gods with well-defined personalities, standing quite outside physical nature and man, with definite characters, and humanized in the higher sense. In contrast with the bizarre or barbarous anthropomorphic forms of the earlier deities these have the shape of refined humanity, capable of taking part in the life of the best men; they are the embodiment of a reflective conception of the relations between men and the great world. Inchoate divine forms of this sort may be recognized among certain half-civilized communities, but in their full form they are found only among civilized peoples, being indeed the product of civilization; and among such peoples they exist in varying degrees of approach to completeness. +720+. The process of growth from the clan deities and the nature gods up to these higher forms may be traced with some definiteness in the great civilized nations of antiquity. We can see that there has been a scientific movement of separation of gods from phenomena. There is the distinct recognition not only of the difference between man and physical nature, but also of the difference between phenomena and the powers that control them.[1243] At the same time there is an increasing belief in the predominance of reason in the government of the world, and along with this a larger conception of the greatness of the world and finally of its unity. Artistic feeling coöperates in the change of the character of divine beings--the necessity of giving symmetry and clearness to their persons, whereby they more and more assume the form of the highest human ideals. Necessarily the ethical element advances hand in hand with the intellectual and artistic; it becomes more and more difficult to conceive of gods as controlled by motives lower than those recognized by the best men. +721+. This general progress of thought is in some cases embodied in the conception of a succession of dynasties--one set of gods is overthrown or succeeded by another set; the most extreme form of the overthrow appears in the conception of the death of a whole community of gods, but this occurs not in the form of natural development, but only when one stadium or phase of religion is overmastered and expelled by another.