We may in this connection distinguish three separable aspects as of most importance. The _first_, which arrests our attention, are the _oracles_ in which the knowledge and volition of gods, still under a formless mode, gives witness to their presence through natural existences. The _second_ point of view to be noted is concerned with the universal forms of Nature, no less than the abstractions of Right and so forth, which lie at the root of the genuine spiritual and individual deities, which are, so to speak, their birth-cradles and furnish us with the necessary conditions of their origin and activity: they are the old gods in contradistinction to the new. _Thirdly_, and finally, we are made aware of the essentially necessary progress to the Ideal in the fact that the primarily superficial personifications of the activities of Nature and the most abstract spiritual conditions are contested and thrust from their prominence as something essentially subordinate and negative and, by virtue of this debasement the self-sufficient spiritual individuality and its human form and action, is suffered to attain an unchallenged masterdom. This revolution, which constitutes the real central position in the historical origins of the classic gods, is in Greek mythology placed before our imagination in the conflict--a mode of presentation as naïve as it is astonishingly direct--between the old and new gods, in the headlong fall of the Titans, and in the victory which the divine race of Zeus secures. (_a_) To take, then, first in order the _oracles_, it will not be necessary for us now to dilate on them to any considerable extent. The essential point which concerns us here is merely due to this fact, that in classical art the phenomena of Nature are no longer revered as such--in the way that the Parsees, for example, pray to naphthetic regions or fire, or as among the Egyptians, gods remain inscrutable, mysterious, and mute riddles--but that the gods, being themselves subjects of knowledge and volition, do verily give to man by means of natural phenomena indications of their wisdom. In this sense the ancient Hellenes made inquiry at the oracle of Dodona[155], whether they should accept the names of gods, which have come to them from barbarians, and the oracle replied: "Use them."