or mental attitude, already familiar in Plutarch. Galaxidorus takes the extreme rationalistic view. He rebukes Philosophy for promising to pursue scientific methods in the investigation of “the Good and the Expedient,” and then, in contempt of Reason, falling back upon the gods as principles of action, thus relying on dreams instead of demonstrations.[314] He thinks the Dæmon of Socrates was nothing but the “last straw” which inclines, in one direction or the other, a man whose close and experienced study of every aspect of the case has not enabled him to come to a practical decision. A sneeze might be the grain which turned the balance. Phidolaus will not allow so “great a phenomenon of prophetic inspiration” to be explained by a sneeze, a method of divination which “is only jestingly used by common people in small matters.”[315] A statement of Simmias to the effect that he had heard Socrates often inveighing against those who asserted they had seen a divine vision, while he always listened sympathetically to those who said they had heard a voice, leads to a general surmise that the Dæmon may have been “not an apparition, but the perception of a voice or the interpretation of a word, which had occurred to him under extraordinary circumstances, just as in a dream there is no actual voice, but we have fancies and notions of words, and imagine that we can hear people speaking.”[316] Archidamas, who is narrating the dialogue and its events to Caphisias, here expounds his own views on the subject in the light of the foregoing explanation. He thinks that the voice, or the perception of a voice, which influenced Socrates, was the speech of a Dæmon, who, without the intermediation of audible sound, made this direct appeal to the mind of the pure and passionless sage;[317] it was the influence of a superior intelligence and of a diviner soul, operating upon the soul of Socrates, whose calm and holy temper fitted him “to hear this spiritual speech which, though filling all the air around, is only heard by those whose souls are freed from passion, and its perturbing influence.”[318] Here we have the extreme religious view placed, as usual, in contrast with the sceptical rationalism of Galaxidorus, which has also been indirectly opposed by a narrative of the events, involving the hearing of a Dæmonic voice, connected with the death and burial of a Pythagorean philosopher, Lysis, from which it appears that the Pythagoreans believed that a few men only were under the guardian care of the Dæmons.[319] These two opposing views having been fully expounded by their respective defenders, we should now expect the dialogue to be concluded, in the usual manner of Plutarch, with a compromise between the rationalistic and the religious attitudes. But on this occasion we are disappointed. Plutarch abandons the _rôle_ of rationalist and gives himself up entirely to the view of Dæmonic influence expounded by Archidamas, taking Myth for his guide