Theology; and had he pushed this view to its logical conclusion, as the Epicurean Boethus[310] did, the Dæmons would have disappeared, and their places would have been wholly occupied by natural causes operating under the Divine impetus inspired by the great First Cause. But the necessity for a _personality_, human on one aspect, Divine on the other, to stand between God and man, was too strongly felt by Plutarch to enable him to accept without qualification the conclusions of pure rationalism. The blank between the Creator and His creatures is occupied, therefore, partly by natural causes, partly by the Dæmons, whose existence and mode of operation are now involved in the working of natural causes regarded as under their superintendence, and now appear as supernatural agencies vaguely dependent upon the will of the Supreme Power. CHAPTER VIII. _Sincerity of Plutarch’s belief in Dæmons—Function of the Dæmons as Mediators not confined to oracular inspiration—Dæmons in their personal relationship with the human soul—The DE DÆMONIO SOCRATIS—This tract not a formal treatise on Demonology—Various explanations of the Socratic “Dæmon”—Ethical value of the conception of Dæmons as spiritual guardians of individual men—“Men may rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things”—Dangers of the conception—Superstition: Plutarch’s general attitude towards that Vice._ The evident sincerity of Plutarch’s piety—his attitude of more than toleration towards everything consecrated by the religious tradition of his age and country—render it impossible for us to regard his system of Dæmonology as a mere concession made by Rationalism to Superstition.[311] But it is not the less clear that Plutarch thinks he has found in the existence of Dæmons not only a means of communication between God and man, but a means of reconciliation between Philosophy and Piety, between Boethus and Serapion. It is a very happy circumstance for a man’s moral progress when he finds Religion and Reason in an agreement so plausible; and when Reason has in some way furnished the very means of agreement—for was it not Plato himself to whom most people had gone for their Dæmonology?—the resulting tendency will have the strength of two harmonizing influences, instead of the halting weakness of a compromise between two mutually conflicting elements.[312] Plato’s Dæmonology is a trick of fence: an ironical pose of sympathetic agreement with popular ideas: but Plutarch does not see this, and can honestly think himself a Platonist, a philosopher, even on a question whose settlement demands philosophical concessions all along the line. It is true that there was one gain for Philosophy which, in Plutarch’s mind, would compensate for even greater sacrifices than it was actually called upon to make: the gain, namely, that each concession to the belief in Dæmons would bring into greater prominence the pure splendour and naked simplicity of the