But this natural religion of the Greeks differed from that of others in that neither outward nature as such, nor the sensuous being of man as such, but human nature in its beauty, as illumined by mind, is its point of excellence. The Greek did not, like the Eastern, lose his independence before the powers of nature, nor revel like the northern savage in boundless liberty, but in the full consciousness of his freedom saw its highest fulfilment in obedience to the general order as the law of his own nature. And as the purely Grecian deities are the ideals of human activity, he thus stands to them in a calm and free relation, such as no other nation of antiquity felt, because they are the mirror of his own being, but his being exalted, so that he is drawn to them without purchasing this at the cost of the pain and toil of an inward struggle.(325) How the features of his own land served to image out to his fancy the Greek’s religious attitude a poet has told us in exquisite verses, worthy of the beauty which they describe; the apotheosis of nature. “Where are the Islands of the Blest? They stud the Ægean sea; And where the deep Elysian rest? It haunts the vale where Peneus strong Pours his incessant stream along, While craggy ridge and mountain bare Cut keenly through the liquid air, And in their own pure tints arrayed, Scorn earth’s green robes which change and fade, And stand in beauty undecayed, Guards of the bold and free.”(326) It seems to me essential to bear in mind throughout our whole inquiry this standing-point of the Greek mind, because through all the succession of schools and the fluctuation of doctrines, it remains, so to say, the ground-work on which they are embroidered. It is the very texture of Hellenic thought upon which first Pythagoras, then Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno, Cleanthes, Panætius, and even Plotinus and Porphyrius spin their web. They vary the decoration, but the substance remains unaltered. This standing-point rules the conception of virtue, and therefore of the whole moral world. It reaches also to the final end of man, and determines it.