Whatever Plato’s opinion of vulgar magic, his view of nature was much like that of primitive man. He humanized material objects and materialized spiritual characteristics. For instance, he asserted that the gods placed the lungs about the heart “as a soft spring that, when passion was rife within, the heart, beating against a yielding body, might be cooled and suffer less, and might thus become more ready to join with passion in the service of reason.”[121] He affirmed that the liver was designed for divination, and was a sort of mirror on which the thoughts of the intellect fell and in which the images of the soul were reflected, but that its predictions ceased to be clear after death.[122] Plato spoke of the existence of harmonious love between the elements as the source of health and plenty for vegetation, beasts and men. Their “wanton love” he made the cause of pestilence and disease. To understand both varieties of love “in relation to the revolutions of the heavenly bodies and the seasons of the year is,” he tells us, “termed astronomy.”[123] This suggests that he believed in astrology—in the potent influence of the stars over all changes in earthly matter. He called the stars “divine and eternal animals, ever abiding.”[124] The “lower gods,” of whom many at least are identical with the heavenly bodies, form men who, if they live well, return after death each to a happy existence in his proper star.[125] The implication is, though Plato does not say so distinctly, that the stars influence human life. Aristotle’s doctrine was similar. Windelband has well expressed his view: The stars themselves were ... for Aristotle beings of superhuman intelligence, incorporate deities. They appeared to him as the purer forms, those more like the deity, and from them a purposive rational influence upon the lower life of the earth seemed to proceed—a thought which became the root of mediæval astrology.[126] Moreover, “his theory of the subordinate gods of the spheres of the planets ... provided for a later demonology.”[127] And a belief in demons fosters a belief in magic. For such subordinate gods—on the one hand movers of nature’s forces, and on the other hand subject to passions like man and open to influence through symbols and conjurations—are evidently most suitable agents for the worker of magic to employ. We must also mention Aristotle’s attribution of “souls” to plants and animals, a theory which would readily lend itself to an assumption of magic properties in herbs and beasts.