feeling among the Greeks. Those who invert the historical order transfer to the religious condition of primitive humanity that which is only postulated by their own mind, and ascribe to the primeval man a religious tendency which in themselves was the result of laborious abstract speculations. But all the contents of the human mind, like those of the material world, are subject to a constant evolution, or progressive change of form into something more perfect; and so Polytheism has an inherent tendency to further development, being indeed itself the result of a similar development of mythology. This tendency paves the way for the approach of Monotheism; for this it is to which the polytheistic stages of religion tend in their further development. We may see in the human mind, equally on a large and on a small scale, the inclination to the unification of whatever is similar in kind though hitherto divided into many individuals; abstraction and formation of general ideas are the climax of his power of thought. So is it in politics, and so also in the conception of nature. The same unifying mental action, operating on the development of religion, creates in Polytheism an active tendency towards Monotheism. Even in those ethnological races for whom, in contradistinction to the Semitic race, Renan vindicates a polytheistic instinct, this tendency is active; and in any sphere which exhibits a complete and finished chain of religious evolution, we always find at the beginning Polytheism and at the end the Unitarian idea of God, whether in the form of Pantheistic Monism or of abstract personal Monotheism; whether coupled with the ideas of the Transcendency, or that of the Immanency, of God; whether excited by religious contemplation and absorption as with the Hebrew prophets, or by philosophical speculation as with the Greek sages. A mode of transition from Polytheism to Monotheism is found in the religious system which, while assuming a multitude of gods, distinguishes one of them as the most powerful, as the ruler not only of the world, but of the company of gods also. This system, to which Homer’s conception of Zeus as πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε belongs, possesses quite as much of Monotheism as of Polytheism, and expresses powerfully the monotheistic inclination concealed in Polytheism. Max Müller justly makes a distinction between Monotheism and Henotheism. A penetrating investigation of the Greek and the Indian literatures, the chief representatives of what Renan calls the polytheistic instinct, would prove the gradual formation of strata of monotheistic transformation, which attached themselves to Aryan polytheism and drew it in the monotheistic direction. Classical philologians have not neglected the study of the religious spirit on this subject, which prevails in the Greek tragedians and historians, not to mention the philosophical writers.