wisdom, but of God’s, to discriminate and distinguish predilections and antipathies in character before they become conspicuous to the world by breaking out into gross evil-doing under the influence of the passions. _For God is assuredly cognizant of the natural disposition of every individual man_, being, by His nature, more fitted to perceive soul than body: nor does He await the outbreak of actual sin before He punishes violence, profanity, obscenity.”[194] Thus, although Plutarch accepts the philosophic phrasing current respecting the nature of the Deity, his ardent, sympathetic temperament brings down the philosophers’ Deity from its majestic isolation, and makes it “meet halfway” the gods of the popular faith, so that both may be of service to humanity, the latter being purified and elevated, the other actualized and humanized. We discern with sympathy Plutarch’s attempt to satisfy the eternal craving of men for a mediator between themselves and the unapproachableness of the Highest; and we are prepared for his exposition of the doctrines of Dæmonology. This tendency to give warmth and life to philosophic abstractions is occasionally visible in an unconscious attempt to assimilate the qualities possessed by the Deity to those displayed in a less degree by mankind. Thus, he implicitly accepts the Platonic position that Eternity is all present to God,[195] a position which is also accepted by modern European Theology: but he elsewhere regards the Deity (formally using the name of Apollo) as a scientific observer, with infallibly acute reasoning powers directed upon phenomena retained in an unshakable memory. His predictions of events are, therefore, really predictions, not statements of present facts; and the “rigorous certainty and universality” which they possess are the certainty and universality attaching to the human discoveries of the laws of geometry and the law of causation, and not to a divine insight which is omniscience because it is always regarding events as present, whether they are actually past, present, or to come. “Apollo is a prophet, and prophecy is the art of ascertaining the future from the present or the past. Now nothing exists without a cause, and prediction, therefore, depends upon reason. The present springs inevitably from the past, the future from the present. The one follows naturally upon the other by a succession which is unbroken from beginning to end, and, accordingly, he who knows the natural causes of past, present, and future events, and can connect their mutual relationships, can predict the future, knowing, in the words of Homer, ‘things that are now, things that shall be, and things that are over.’ The whole art of Dialectics consists in the knowledge of the Consequent.”[196]