374 mSTORY OF GREECE. another. Now such a view of the divine agency could neei be reconciled with the religious feelings of the ordinary Grecian believer, even as they stood in the time of Anaxagoras ; still less could it have been reconciled with those of the Homeric man, more than three centuries earlier. By him Zeus and Athene were conceived as definite Persons, objects of special reverence, hopes, and fears, and animated with peculiar feelings, sometimes of favor, sometimes of wrath, towards himself or his family or country. They were propitiated by his prayers, and prevailed upon to lend him succor in danger but offended and disposed to bring evil upon him if he omitted to render thanks or sacrifice. This sense of individual communion with, and de- pendence upon them was the essence of his faith ; and with that faith, the all-pervading Mind proclaimed by Anaxagoras which had no more concern with one man or one phenomenon than with another, could never be brought into harmony. Nor could the believer, while he prayed with sincerity for special blessings or protection from the gods, acquiesce in the doctrine of Hippocrates, that their agency was governed by constant laws and physical conditions. That radical discord between the mental impulses of science and religion, which manifests itself so decisively during the most cultivated ages of Greece, and which harassed more or less so many of the philosophers, produced its most afflicting re- sult in the condemnation of Socrates by the Athenians. Accord- ing to the remarkable passage recently cited from Xenophon, it will appear that Socrates agreed with his countrymen in denounc- ing physical speculations as impious, that he recognized the re- ligious process of discovery as a peculiar branch, coordinate with the scientific, and that he laid down a theory, of which the ba- sis was, the confessed divergence of these two processes from the beginning thereby seemingly satisfying the exigencies of re- ligious hopes and fears on the one hand, and those of reason, in her ardor for ascertaining the invariable laws of phenomena, on the other. We may remark that the theory of this religious and extra-scientific process of discovery was at that time sufficiently complete ; for Socrates could point out, that those anomalous phae- nomena which *he gods had reserved for themselves, and into
