Hence Cleombrotus is represented as saying how difficult it is to draw the line exactly at the direct interposition of Providence in human affairs; since those who exclude God from second causes, and those who see Him everywhere, are equally in error. Hence the pious student of Theology is permitted to give a full exposition of the doctrines of Dæmonology as applied to the question of Oracles and Inspiration. “Plato delivered Philosophy from many difficulties when he discovered Matter as the substratum of phenomenal qualities; but those who invented the science of Dæmonology have solved greater difficulties still.” We are already familiar with the nature and activities of the Dæmons; it remains to see how their existence is applied to the question under discussion. “Let us not listen,” says Cleombrotus, “to those who say that oracles are not divinely inspired, or that religious rites and ceremonies are disregarded by the gods: nor, on the other hand, let us approve of the view that God is actively, personally, and directly concerned in these matters; but let us believe that the Dæmons are superintendents of, and participators in, the sacred sacrifices and mysteries, justly assigning these functions to Lieutenants of the gods, as it were to Servants and Secretaries, while others go about and punish great and notorious acts of injustice.”[303] This belief, in the opinion of Cleombrotus, furnishes an explanation of the silent periods of the oracles. “I am not afraid to say, as many others have said before me, that when the Dæmons who have been appointed to administer prophetic shrines and oracles leave them finally, then the shrines and oracles finally decline. If these guardians flee and go elsewhither, and then return after a long interval, the oracles, silent during their absence, become again, as of old, the means of conveying responses to those who come to consult them.” “But,” says Demetrius, “it is impossible to assert that the oracles are silent owing to their desertion by the Dæmons, unless we are first reassured respecting the method by which the Dæmons, when in actual superintendence of the oracles, make them actively inspired.”[304] Plutarch here introduces a rationalistic argument imputing prophetic inspiration to subterrestrial exhalations, and draws down upon himself the reproof from Ammonius that he has followed up the abstraction of Divination from the gods by now depriving the Dæmons of that power and referring it to “exhalations, winds, and vapours.” Plutarch, however, though adhering to Rationalism to the extent of insisting on the operation of secondary causes, saves his piety by explicitly placing them under the superintendence of the Dæmons. “There are two causes of generation: the Zeus of the ancient poets and theologians, and the physical causes of the natural philosophers. The study of either of these sets of causes, to the exclusion of the other, leads to defective philosophy. But he who first made use of both these