But it was in this conception that philosophic thought had terminated. And here we find the chief cause of its powerlessness to improve and purify the mythology which it attacked, and much more to affect the lives and conduct of those who professed its tenets. For the old mythology had at least a strong consciousness of personality in its gods. In Homer himself the original tradition, of which his religion was a corruption, still spoke of the father of gods and men as the ruler and judge of the world. In the heathen mind generally such a conception still existed; nor is it too much to say that the common people among the Greeks and Romans were nearer to the truth of one personal God than the philosopher; and the philosopher himself when he listened at any moment of danger and anxiety to the promptings “of the soul naturally Christian” within him, than when he indulged in his esoteric problems. 2. But the conception of personality in God rules the conception of personality in man. As throughout the Greek philosophy the former was weak and imperfect, until in the Stoic system it vanished, so the latter. The physical theory of the Greek overmastered and excluded the conception of freewill in his mind, first as to God and then as to man. As evil existed throughout the world, for which he had no better solution than to place its seat in that matter which was coexistent with the divine reason, and which that reason was powerless wholly to subdue, so in the smaller world of man. In him a portion of the divine reason was united with matter. If Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics arranged somewhat differently the mode of this composition, yet to all of them alike from the one side and the other the notion of physical necessity came in. The material constituent tended to evil, the reasoning constituent to good: in the man who was made up of the two there was a perpetual jar. There was no room left in their theory for the conception of the soul as a self-originating cause of action. No sect struggled so hard and so persistently to maintain a doctrine of freewill as the Stoic: but it went down before that central tenet of their system, physical necessity, the inexorable sequence of cause and effect, which made up their “common law,” by which the world was ruled. The conception of an all-wise, all-good, and all-powerful personal Creator, in whose nature the eternal law is based, not being clear to their minds, so neither was the conception of sin, as the infringement of that law. The law of physical necessity took the place of the eternal moral law: that which man did he did by virtue of the physical constituents out of which he was composed. The evil which he did was physical rather than moral: and he was not responsible for what he could not prevent. The questions of freewill, of evil viewed as sin, and of responsibility, are inextricably bound up with the doctrine of the human personality; and on all these the philosophic mind was dark and confused.