Just as astrologists blame the stars for the individual’s short-comings--while at the same time holding on to the doctrine of free will, by assuring us that “the stars incline but do not compel”--and credit the astral bodies for his good traits and successes, exactly so the ancient Greeks placed responsibility for man’s derelictions and misfortunes--as well as for his happy achievements--on the gods. Minerva’s influence endowed the individual with intelligence; Venus infused the passion of love; Apollo dispersed manly beauty, health and happiness; Mars involved peoples in wars; while Mercury was the god of mathematics, inventions, business transactions, etc. Without denying the existence of the gods, Epicurus, as we have seen, did seek to show that the Olympian divinities were not in any way concerned with terrestrial affairs.[25] Though the gods are dead, we cannot yet say, with Henley, I am the captain of my soul, I am the master of my fate. For modern man has within his own physiological “world” real substitutes for the imaginary gods of Olympus, which really “incline” if they “do not compel,” “behavior.” While the gods have been all but forgotten, and the “fateful” stars have been reduced to vast incandescent masses of helium, hydrogen, calcium, iron, etc., the endocrine (ductless) glands still largely control or alter personality; though these bodies are but constellations of atomic systems, with electrons for sun and planets, each revolving in an all but inscrutable cosmos of its own. These still mysterious glands are today the real “astral influences”--acting under “necessity”--which confer upon us manly beauty and intelligence, or, perhaps, a dwarfed body and an imbecilic brain. The pituitary body, originating tens of millions of years ago in the roof of the mouth of some lowly chordate (lancelet stage), in Cambrian times, and now attached to the base of man’s brain, has taken the place of Minerva and Apollo; the gonads and the thymus have absorbed the functions of Venus; the adrenals, the combative “influence” of Mars; while the thyroid makes of us--or “inclines” us to become--poets, radicals, “up-lifters,”--or maybe, mere lovers of the lime light![26] Surely this character-building “by necessity” would have delighted the soul of Democritus and brought joy to the heart of his great disciple Epicurus, who introduced an element of chance into Atomism only to bridge what was to him an impassable gulf between the laws of mechanics and observed phenomena. This insistence of the ancient Atomists on the necessity of attempting to account for all natural phenomena as the result of uniform, immutable, universal “necessity” or law is one of the greatest conceptions handed down to us from antiquity--a monument to the human mind equalled only by the attempt to correlate all qualitative differences of substances (atoms) with differences of size, shape and position in space (with relation to one another) and with movement.