But leaving the soul of Plutarch, with our charitable wishes, to his Maker, we can only trace the rest of his opinions in religion from his philosophy, which we have said in the general to be Platonic; though it cannot also be denied, that there was a tincture in it of the Electic sect, which was begun by Potamon under the empire of Augustus, and which selected from all the other sects what seemed most probable in their opinions, not adhering singularly to any of them, nor rejecting every thing. I will only touch his belief of spirits. In his two Treatises of Oracles, the one concerning the reason of their cessation, the other, inquiring why they were not given in verse, as in former times, he seems to assert the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration of souls. We have formerly shewn, that he owned the unity of a Godhead, whom, according to his attributes, he calls by several names; as Jupiter, from his almighty power; Apollo, from his wisdom, and so of the rest; but, under him, he places those beings whom he styles Genii, or Demons, of a middle nature betwixt divine and human: for he thinks it absurd, that there should be no mean betwixt the two extremes of an immortal and a mortal being; that there cannot be in nature so vast a flaw, without some intermedial kind of life, partaking of them both. As, therefore, we find the intercourse betwixt the soul and body to be made by the animal spirits, so, betwixt divinity and humanity, there is this species of demons, who, having first been men, and following the strict rules of virtue, had purged off the grossness and feculency of their earthly being, are exalted into these Genii, and are from thence either raised higher into an ethereal life, if they still continue virtuous, or tumbled down again into mortal bodies, and sinking into flesh, after they have lost that purity which constituted their glorious being. And this sort of Genii are those, who, as our author imagines, presided over oracles; spirits which have so much of their terrestrial principles remaining in them, as to be subject to passions and inclinations; usually beneficent, sometimes malevolent, to mankind, according as they refine themselves, or gather dross, and are declining into mortal bodies. The cessation, or rather the decrease of oracles, (for some of them were still remaining in Plutarch’s time,) he attributes either to the death of those demons, (as appears by the story of the Egyptian Thamus, who was commanded to declare that the great god Pan was dead,) or to their forsaking of those places where they formerly gave out their oracles, from whence they were driven by stronger genii into banishment for a certain revolution of ages. Of this last nature was the war of the giants against the gods; the dispossession of Saturn by Jupiter; the banishment of Apollo from heaven; the fall of Vulcan, and many others; all which, according to our author, were the battles of these Genii, or Demons, amongst themselves.