desire here bodily pleasures will wander as shades round the tombs, or will migrate into the bodies of various animals.  He constitutes the stars into contingent and sensible gods:  they have beautiful and immortal bodies of a round form, and are made of fire.  He asserts poetic inspiration and madness to be the result of demoniac possession, and says with Socrates that those who deny demoniac powers are themselves demoniacs.

We see from this account the mythical origin of all that concerns the organization and genesis of the world, the destinies and nature of the soul, since these are sublimated myths; the elements are first regarded as deities, and the world is made in the image of man, and considered to be alive; the stars and the earth are endowed with life and intelligence; the fate of souls before and after death, their recollection of a prior existence, their transmigrations and wanderings around the tombs, demoniac possession in inspiration and madness, are all very ancient mythical representations, which form a great part of the theoretical and spiritual cosmogony of savages in all times and places.  We have seen that not only relatively civilized peoples, but those which are quite savage divide souls into distinct parts:  throughout Africa, America, and Asia, there is a belief in the transmigration of souls into animals, plants, and other objects.  The Tasmanians believed that their souls would ascend to the stars and abide there; and all savages hold the demoniac possession of inspired persons, of madmen, and of the sick, which has led to what may be called a diabolic pathology.  The general conception of the world as a living animal, with all the tendencies ascribed to it by Plato, is only the primeval fact of the animation and personification of phenomena applied to the general idea of the universe.  Hence it is easy to see how much of Plato’s physics and psychology are due to the necessary and historic course of myth, and to the schools into which myth had been modified before his time.

We must dwell more particularly on his theory of ideas, since in this the advance made by Plato in the evolution of myth really consists, and it marks a very definite stage which had and still has a powerful influence on subsequent and modern thought.

We have already shown how, by the logical power of thought, this phase in the ideal evolution of myth was reached, and we have traced it in an inchoate form in various rude peoples, as well as in its ultimate modification in Plato.  In his writings it takes the form of a complete, vast, and organic theory.  The logical conceptions and representative ideas, idols peculiar to the mind, which were at first involved in fetishtic and anthropomorphic images, are now divested of their earlier wrappings, and are classified as the intellectual ideas which they really are, and which they have become by the innate and reflex exercise of human thought.  But on account of the faculty