Accordingly, the pretension of philosophers to
explain physical phaenomena by physical causes, or to predict their
occurrence, was, up to a very late period of Polytheism, regarded as
a sacrilegious insult to the gods. Anaxagoras was banished for it,
Aristotle had to fly for his life, and the mere unfounded suspicion of
it contributed greatly to the condemnation of Socrates. We are too well
acquainted with this form of the religious sentiment even now, to have
any difficulty in comprehending what must have been its violence then.
It was inevitable that philosophers should be anxious to get rid of at
least _these_ gods, and so escape from the particular fables which stood
immediately in their way; accepting a notion of divine government which
harmonized better with the lessons they learnt from the study of nature,
and a God concerning whom no mythos, as far as they knew, had yet been
invented.
Again, when the idea became prevalent that the constitution of every
part of Nature had been planned from the beginning, and continued to
take place as it had been planned, this was itself a striking feature of
resemblance extending through all Nature, and affording a presumption
that the whole was the work, not of many, but of the same hand.
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