Note 15.2 — Chapter I · Inaugural Lecture.

But the most curious testimony to my thesis is borne by an inscription on an Egyptian lamp—an invocation of the God Thoth: “O Father of Light, O Word (λόγος) that orderest day and night, come show thyself to me. O God of Gods, in thy ape-form enter.”15.2 Here the association of so mystic a concept as the “Logos,” the divine Reason, an emanation of God with the form of an ape, is striking enough, and suggests to us many reflections on the contrast between the Egyptian theriomorphism and the human idolatry of the Greek. The Hermes of Praxiteles was too stubborn a fact before the people’s eyes to fade or to soar into the high vagueness of the “Logos,” too stable in his beautiful humanity to sink into the ape.