whose influence is everywhere felt in nature and in human life, and whose presence, at any rate, interpenetrates and overruns the whole of Plutarch's views on religion.[1]
It is no unfitting circumstance in a priest of Apollo that his noblest utterances respecting the nature ofto him, and support the appellation with an interesting passage from M. Maury, in which he deals with the distinction between theosophs and philosophers in the early stages of Greek philosophy and religion:—"Les uns soumettant tous les faits à l'appréciation rationelle, et partant de l'observation individuelle, pour expliquer la formation de l'univers substituaient aux croyances populaires un système créé par eux, et plus ou moins en contradiction avec les opinions du vulgaire: c'etaient les philosophes proprement dits. Les autres acceptaient la religion de leurs contemporains, . . . ils entreprenaient au nom de la sagesse divine, dont ils se donnaient pour les interprétes, non de renverser mais de réformer les notions théologiques et les formes religieuses, de façon à les mettre d'accord avec leurs principes philosophiques" (Maury, vol. i. p. 339). Cf. C. G. Seibert, De Apologetica Plutarchi Theologia (1854):-"Finis autem ad quem tendebat ipsa erat religio a majoribus accepta, qua philosophiæ ope purgata æqualium animos denuo implere studebat." He thinks Plutarch was a theologian first and a philosopher after. (In the passage quoted above from the De Defectu it is difficult not to regard Mr. Paton's emendation of [Greek: philotheos men oun kai philomantis] as more in accordance with the character of Cleombrotos than the [Greek: philotheamôn kai philomathês] of Bernardakis' text, although, of course, he was a great traveller and an ardent student.)]
- ↑ Plutarch devotes so much of his work to an exposition of his views of the Divine character, that one feels inclined to regard him less as a philosopher in the general sense than as a theologian. A kindly piece of description of his own (see De Defectu Orac., 410 A), in which he mentions Cleombrotos of Lacedemon as "a man who made many journeys, not for the sake of traffic, but because he wished to see and to learn," and says that as a result of his travels and researches he was compiling a practically complete corpus of philosophical material, the end and aim of philosophy being, as he used to put it, "Theology"—may be spoken with equal truth of Plutarch himself. We cannot, perhaps, do better than apply the term [Greek: Theosophos
