Note 23 — Chapter XII · APPLIED MORAL SCIENCE.

(3) The truth in Polytheism. In this derivative sense, divinity was allowed to many beings by the Stoics, and, in particular, to the stars, which Plato had called created Gods, which Aristotle had described as eternal divine beings, and the worship of which lay so near to the ancient cultus of nature. Not only by their lustre and effect on the senses, but far more by the regularity of their motions, do these stars prove that the material of which they consist is the purest, and that, of all created objects, they have the largest share in the divine reason.23 And so seriously was this belief held by the Stoics, that a philosopher of the unwieldy piety of Cleanthes so far forgot himself as to charge Aristarchus of Samoa, the discoverer of the earth’s motion round the sun, the Galilæo of antiquity, with impiety for wishing to remove the hearth of the universe from its proper place.24 This deification of the stars prepares us to find years, months, and seasons called Gods,25 as was done by Zeno, or at least by his School. Yet, it must be remembered, that the Stoics referred these times and seasons to heavenly bodies, as their material embodiments.26