It was because of this last fact that Greek poets could deal freely with gods and heroes in the narratives they created. The divine name possessed none of the ineffable sanctity it has for us by thousands of years of tradition. Except during the performance of the ritual act, the god’s presence and power were not vividly felt, and it would have been considered preposterous to suppose that he resented as compromising an idle tale from which he suffered no impairment of worship. That the gods really existed, and that honor was to be paid them after the ancestral manner, was more than the essence, it was the totality, of popular Greek theology. Speculation as to the real nature of gods and the world, the mass of citizens would have regarded as the most futile form of triviality.[18] But there were some who thought otherwise. Many thoughtful men must have felt the absurdities and immoralities of the myths as keenly as we do. Xenophanes[19] protests, and no doubt not first of all men, against them. Further, with the earliest stirrings of cosmic speculation in Ionia, systems of theology are proposed that dispense with demiurges and administrators. Intellectually developed men cannot have been long in ridding themselves of popular conceptions that violated the most elementary reflection. To be sure, the philosopher did not always feel free to carry his conviction to the point of openly disregarding the established forms. To do so would bring him into conflict with other institutions that he valued, and with which religious forms had become inextricably bound up. But his own beliefs took broader and broader ground, and well before Alexander became monotheism, pantheism, or agnosticism.[20] All these standpoints must be kept in mind when we deal with the conflict between Greek and Jew: the popular one, no doubt rooted in a primitive animism, to which the gods were of indifferent and somewhat shifting personality, but to which the ritual act was vital; the attitude of poetry and folk-lore, in which divine persons appeared freely as actors, but in which each poem or legend was an end in itself unrelated to any other; and finally the philosophic analysis, which did not notably differ in result from similar processes of our own day. We find the Hellenic world in possession of very many gods. Some of them are found practically wherever there were Greeks, although the degree of veneration they received in the different Greek communities varied greatly. However, such common gods did exist, and their existence involves the consideration of the spread of worships.