We have noted two kinds of impulse which usually promote a monotheistic revolution from Polytheism: religious absorption and contemplation on the one hand, and philosophical speculation on the other. Another powerful force must be mentioned in this connexion—the form of political institutions. This also exercises no small influence on the formation of the idea of God. If man has ascribed to the Deity the attribute of might and sovereignty, which is very natural to him, he will then apply to the gods the idea of power which he has gained by experience of human rulers, and will estimate their power according to the quality which he perceives every day in his earthly sovereigns; for the picture of these forms his sole conception of beings endowed with might and dominion. Only in the Immortals, he extends into infinity whatever he observes in his earthly rulers as something finite; since that which excites religious feeling in man is the impulse ‘to advance beyond what is given him, beyond what he finds existing, and to push forward from the limited to the illimitable and absolutely perfect.’ But this advance beyond what we have here is more than ‘in itself a valuation of what we have, a measuring of it against the infinite,’ as Steinthal admirably describes it in his fine lecture on ‘Myth and Religion.’[647] It also connects the valuation of the infinite, and the quality attributed to it, with what we have here and know from daily experience. Hence the tendency of religious ideas is directly dependent on the ideas which are embodied in political and social life. Thus it was said by so early a writer as Aristotle, ‘that all men say that the gods are under regal rule, because they themselves, some even now, and others in ancient times, have been so ruled; for men conceive not only the forms but the lives also of the gods as similar to their own.’[648] And similarly Schelling says, briefly, ‘It seems hardly necessary to point out how closely magisterial power, legislature, morals, and even occupations are bound up with conceptions of the gods in all nations.’[649] What, for instance, are the inhabitants of the Hellenic Olympus? A powerful and conscious Aristocracy, at the head of which stands the most powerful among them—not all-powerful, for he is dependent on a mightier Fate, which prevents his accomplishing all that his will has determined, and even on the surrounding aristocracy of the other gods, who once bound their powerful ruler! He owes his dominion to this very aristocracy: when Zeus had gained the victory over the Titans, says Hesiod,[650] the gods offered him the supreme rule (ὤτρυνον βασιλεύεμεν ἠδὲ ἀνάσσειν), and when he had entered upon it, he distributed offices and dignities among his electors (ὁ δὲ τοῖσιν ἐῢ διεδάσσατο τιμάς). Are these different circumstances from those of the aristocratic republics of Greece?—is the relation of Zeus to the subordinate gods unlike that of the εἵς κοίρανος