or ambrosia, and all healing powers.  In Agni and its Vedic transformations we clearly trace the worship of fire, and its cosmic value.  The Vedic worship of the air is Vayu, from va, to breathe, who is associated with the higher gods, and especially with Indra, ruler of the atmosphere:  next comes Rudra, the god of storms, accompanied by the Maruti, the winds; and in the Zendavesta the air is invoked as an element.  Hence we see that a more rational conception of the genesis of the world succeeds to these earlier representations and personifications of the elements; representations which in another form endure throughout the course of human thought.

It is now necessary to consider the other period of the mythical and scientific evolution which had its definitive conclusion in Plato and Aristotle, teachers who even now to some extent influence the two great currents of speculative science.  For us, however, it is more important to consider the Platonic teaching as that in which the mythical evolution of the earlier representations has full and clear expression; while in the Aristotelian philosophy an element of dissolution is already at work which throws some light on the illusions of the Platonic school.

We must bear in mind that the spontaneous and even the reflective intellectual faculty gradually assimilated special and independent myths into comprehensive types, which referred to all natural objects.  Next, the incarnation of spirits produced the earliest forms of polytheism, and these were slowly classified into more concentric circles, and finally into a single hierarchical system.  Owing to the attitude and ethnic temperament of the Greeks, the glorious anthropomorphism of their Olympus arose in a more vivid form than elsewhere, and it was impersonated in the all-powerful and all-seeing Zeus, ruler of the world, of gods and men.  This process, modified in a thousand ways, was carried on in all races.  Hence it resulted that every object had a type, its god; everything was typically individuated in an anthropomorphic entity in such a way that there arose a natural dualism between the phenomena, facts, and cosmic orders on the one side, and on the other the hierarchy of gods who represented them and over whom they presided.  The Hellenic philosophies prior to Plato, both physical and intellectual, and also the psychological morality of Socrates, had already accomplished the first evolution of this typical stage of universal polytheism, substituting for anthropomorphic representations physical and intellectual principles and powers.  Thought was educated in its inward exercise, as well as in the observation of facts and ideal representations.  But—­and this constituted the first evolution of anthropomorphism in general—­these powers all expressed the thing in its general and phenomenal form; it was endowed with merely zoomorphic force, and the world was regarded as physiologically living.