The imagination, the faculty which creates and excites phantasms in man, is not, as is erroneously supposed, the primary source of myths, but only that which in a secondary degree elaborates and perfects their spontaneous forms; and precisely because it is near akin to this primordial mythical faculty, it goes on to organize and classify these polytheistic myths.  By a moral and necessary development an approximation is made, if not to truth itself, at any rate to its symbols; whence reason is afterwards more easily infused into myth on the one side, and on the other it is resolved into rational ideas and cosmic laws.  It was in this way that poets perfected myth in its influence on virtue and civilization, and by them it was directed into the paths of science and of truth.

As Dr. Zeller has well said in his lecture on the development of monotheism in Greece herself, the great Greek poets were her first thinkers, her sages, as they were afterwards called.  They sang of Zeus, and exalted him as the defender of righteousness, the representative of moral order.  Archilocus says that Zeus weighs and measures all the actions of good and evil men, as well as those of animals.  He is, said Terpandros somewhat later, the source and ruler of all things.  According to Simonides of Amorgos, the principle of all created things rests with him, and he rules the universe by his will.  Thus, as time went on, Zeus became, in the general conception, the personification of the world’s government, which was delivered from the fatality of destiny and from the promptings of caprice.  Destiny which, according to the early mythical representation, it was impossible to escape, is resolved into the will of Zeus, and the other gods which were at first supposed to be able to oppose him, become his faithful ministers.  Such is the teaching of Solon and of Epicharmos.  “Be assured that nothing escapes the eyes of the divinity; God watches over us, and to him nothing is impossible.”

This impulse of the imaginative faculty combined with the process of reason is most plainly seen in the conceptions of the three great poets of the fifth century, Pindar, AEschylus, and Sophocles.  In the words of Pindar:  “All things depend on God alone; all which befalls mortals, whether it be good or evil fortune, is due to Zeus:  he can draw light from darkness, and can veil the sweet light of day in obscurity.  No human action escapes him:  happiness is found only in the way which leads to him; virtue and wisdom flow from him alone.”

We find the same order and manner of thought in AEschylus, although he remained faithful to the polytheistic creed, which indeed confirms the truth of our theory.  The moral law was gradually developed and purified by this long succession of poets, and it clearly appears from AEschylus and his successors how man reaps that which he has sown:  he whose heart and hands are pure lives his life unmolested, while guilt sooner or later brings its own punishment with it.  The