Plutarch gives emphatic indications of his own attitude on the subject by drawing attention to such expressions of the earlier philosophers as pointed to the recognition of two opposite descriptions of Dæmons—the virtuous and the vicious. In one place, as we have seen, he admits that Homer does not distinguish between the terms “Gods” and “Dæmons,” and in his historical _résumé_ of Dæmonology in the “Isis and Osiris,”[249] he is compelled to make a parallel admission that the Homeric epithet derived from Dæmons is indiscriminately applied to good and bad actions. He makes this admission, however, the basis of a subtle conclusion to the effect that Homer wished to imply that the Dæmons had a confused and ill-defined character, involving the existence of both good and bad specimens of the race. Nothing definitely distinguishing between the two sorts of Dæmons is to be obtained from Plato,[250] and Plutarch accordingly dwells with special emphasis upon the views of Empedocles and Xenocrates, who maintained, the one, that Dæmons who had been guilty of sins of commission or omission were driven about between earth and sky and sea and sun, until this purifying chastisement restored them to their natural position in the dæmonic hierarchy;[251] the other, that certain disgraceful and ill-omened sacrificial observances “are not properly connected with the worship of the _gods or of good Dæmons_,[252] but that there are surrounding us certain beings, great and potent, but malignant too, and hateful, who rejoice in such repulsive ceremonies, and are thereby restrained from the perpetration of greater evils.” Democritus and Chrysippus are elsewhere quoted as supporters of the same view.[253] Plutarch, accordingly, faithful to his principle of making Philosophy Mystagogue to Religion, has obtained from the philosophers a conviction that there are two kinds of dæmonic beings, two sets of supernatural characters with attributes inferior to those of the Divine Nature, and yet superior to those displayed by the human family. It has already been shown how naturally the good Dæmons would tend to become identified with the gods: a passage has just been quoted in which we can see this process of identification taking place. But Plutarch furnishes still more emphatic testimony to the necessity of such a consummation.