diversity—the belief, namely, in Dæmons—but which Plutarch uses to great effect in his attempts after unity, by assigning, with Pythagoras,[174] every recognized tradition unworthy of the Highest to these subordinate beings whose influence is everywhere felt in nature and in human life, and whose presence, at any rate, interpenetrates and overruns the whole of Plutarch’s views on religion.[175] It is no unfitting circumstance in a priest of Apollo that his noblest utterances respecting the nature of God should be contained in discourses connected more or less with the temples and traditions of the god. In the discussion, for instance, on the syllable “E” written over the narrow entrance of the Amphictyonic Temple at Delphi, Ammonius is represented as expressing views of the Divine Nature which are unsurpassed for sublimity in any other part of Plutarch’s writings, or even in Greek literature generally. We quote them here as embodying Plutarch’s beliefs on the Unity, Eternity, and Absoluteness of the Divine Nature. “Not then a number, nor an arrangement, nor a conjunction or any other part of speech, do I think the inscription signifies. It is rather a complete and concise form of address, an invocation of the God, bringing the speaker with the very word, into a conscious recognition of His power. The God salutes each of us, as we approach His shrine, with the great text, ‘Know thyself,’ which is His way of saying χαῖρε to us; and we in our turn, replying to the God, say εἶ—‘Thou art,’ thus expressing our _belief in His true and pure and incommunicable virtue of absolute being_.[176]... Now we must admit that God absolutely is; not that he _is_ with reference to any period of time, but with reference to an immovable, immutable, timeless eternity, before which there was nothing, after which there is nothing, in respect to which there is neither future nor past, than which there is nothing older or younger. But being Unity, the Unity that he is _now_ is the same Unity with which he occupies eternity; and nothing really exists but that which is endowed with the same absolute existence as he—neither anything that has come into existence, nor shall come into existence, nor anything which had a beginning, or shall have an end. In worshipping him, therefore, we ought assuredly to salute and address him in a manner corresponding to this view of him; as, _e.g._, in the phrase already used by some ancient philosophers, the phrase, ‘Thou art one.’ For the Divine principle is not many, as we are, each of us compacted of countless different passions, a mingled and varying conglomerate of assembled atoms. But Being must necessarily be Unity, and Unity must be Being. It is Diversity—that is, the principle of discrepancy from Unity—which issues to the production of non-Being, whence the three names of the God are one and all appropriate. He is _Apollo_ (ἀ πολύς), because he repudiates and excludes the many