(1) The beliefs of the people are, of course, the basis of all the others, though they come to be affected by these others in various degrees. There is no doubt that the people generally believed in the sanctity and efficacy of the shapeless idols or primitive images, and this belief would tend to support hieratic conservatism, and thus to hinder artistic progress. But, on the other hand, the people of Greece showed throughout their history a tendency to an intensely and vividly anthropomorphic imagination. This tendency was doubtless realised and encouraged by the poets, but it was not created by them, any more than by the mythologists who defined and systematised it. The exact relation of this anthropomorphic imagination to the primitive sacred stocks and stones is not easy to ascertain; but it seems to have tended, on the one hand, to the realisation of the existence of the gods apart from such sacred objects, and thus to reduce the stocks and stones to the position of symbols--a great advance in religious ideals; and, on the other hand, to the transformation of the stocks and stones into human form, not merely by giving them ears and eyes that they might hear and see, but also by making them take the image and character of the deity whom they represented. It was impossible for any ordinary Greek to think of the gods in other than human form. He had, indeed, no such definite dogma as the Hebrew statement that "God created man in His own image"; for the legends about the origin of the human race varied considerably and many of them represented crude philosophical theorising rather than religious belief. But the monstrous forms which we find in Egypt and Mesopotamia as embodiments of divine power were alien to the Greek imagination; if we find here and there a survival of some strange type, such as the horse-headed Demeter at Phigalia, it remains isolated and has little influence upon prevalent beliefs. The Greek certainly thought of his gods as having the same human form as himself; and not the gods only, but also the semi-divine, semi-human, sometimes less than human beings with which his imagination peopled the woods and mountains and seas. His Nereids had human feet, not fishy tails like our mermaids; and if centaurs and satyrs and some other creatures of his imagination showed something of the beast within the man in their visible shape, they had little about them of the mysterious or the unearthly. It would be a great mistake to regard all these creatures as mere impersonations or abstractions. If "a pagan suckled in a creed outworn" could "Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn,"