which tends perpetually to annihilation. It is the function of some other god, or, rather, of some dæmon, appointed to direct nature in the processes of generation and destruction, to do and suffer these changes.” In both these views the literal acceptation of the mythological names is repudiated, and the two differ only in that the Stoics quoted in Plutarch’s speech make the Supreme Ruler modify His essence to the production of phenomena, while Ammonius relegates that function to a subordinate power; keeping his Platonic Demiurgus pure from these undignified metamorphoses. It will subsequently appear, when we come to deal with the Dæmonology of Plutarch, that the latter view is the one he also actually accepted. The discussion, at any rate, furnishes a capital instance of what Plutarch means by his assertion that Reason must be Mystagogue to Theology. Mythological terms must be examined by Reason before their meaning can be accepted as an element in religious teaching. The particular view taken of the expressions is left to the taste or philosophic bent of the individual critic: to Academic or Stoic reasonings; the only essential is that the crude literal meaning of the terms shall be repudiated as discordant with a rational estimate of the Divine Nature.[145] In the critical essay, “Quomodo adolescens poetas audire debeat,” the same method is applied to the whole religious and moral teaching of the national poets. However great Plutarch’s admiration for Plato as man and philosopher may be, his sound sense of what is practicable in common life prevents him from subjecting the ancient poetry of Greece, as an element in ethical culture, to the impossible standard of the “Republic,” and he therefore, on this question, opposes Stoic and Peripatetic wisdom to the teaching of a Master with whose sublime views he often finds himself in agreement.[146] Throughout the whole work he applies the touchstone of common sense to all the beauties and all the barbarities of the traditional legends as embodied in Epic and Tragic poetry. Reason and common sense admit the high value of imaginative literature in ethical education, and reason and common sense decide what practical advice shall be given to youthful students of fiction, in order that moral lessons may be driven home, immoral incidents, descriptions, and characters made harmless, or even beneficial, while, at the same time, even purely æsthetic considerations are not neglected.