Thus under the Supreme is a hierarchy of heavenly powers or gods, and again between them and men is another order of beings, the daemons.[73] These, unlike the gods, are of mixed nature, for while the gods are emanations or Logoi of the Supreme, the daemons have something of the perishable. "Plato and Pythagoras and Xenocrates and Chrysippus, following the ancient theologians, say that daemons are stronger than men and far excel us in their natural endowment; but the divine element in them is not unmixed nor undiluted, but partakes of the soul's nature and the body's sense-perception, and is susceptive of pleasure and pain, while the passions which attend these mutations affect them, some of them more and others less. For there are among daemons, as among men, differences of virtue and wickedness."[74] "It can be proved on the testimony of wise and ancient witnesses that there are natures, as it were on the frontiers of gods and men, that admit mortal passions and inevitable changes, whom we may rightly, after the custom of {97} our fathers, consider to be daemons, and so calling them, worship them."[75] If the atmosphere were abolished between the earth and the moon (for beyond air and moon it was generally supposed that the gods lived[76]), the void would destroy the unity of the universe; and in precisely the same way "those who do not leave us the race of daemons, destroy all intercourse and contact between gods and men, by abolishing what Plato called the interpretive and ancillary nature, or else they compel us to make confusion and disorder of everything, by bringing God in among mortal passions and mortal affairs, fetching him down for our needs, as they say the witches in Thessaly do with the moon."[77] And "he, who involves God in human needs, does not spare his majesty, nor does he maintain the dignity and greatness of God's excellence."[78] The Stoic teaching that men are "parts of God" makes God responsible for every human act of wickedness and sin--the common weakness of every pantheistic system.[79]