Note 29 — Chapter XII · APPLIED MORAL SCIENCE.

How, then, could they escape the inference that among other beneficent beings, the heroes of antiquity in particular deserve religious honours, seeing that in these benefactors of mankind, whom legend commemorates, the Divine Spirit did not show Himself under the lower form of a ἕξις, as in the elements, nor yet as simple φύσις, as in plants, but as a rational soul? Such deified men had, according to the Stoic view—which, on this point, agrees with the well-known theory of Euemerus—greatly helped to swell the number of the popular Gods; nor had the Stoics themselves any objection to their worship.29 Add to this the personification of human qualities and states of mind,30 and it will be seen what ample opportunity the Stoics had for recognising everywhere in nature and in the world of man divine agencies and powers, and, consequently, Gods in the wider sense of the term.31 When once it is allowed that the name of God may be diverted from the Being to whom it properly belongs and applied, in a derivative sense, to what is impersonal and a mere manifestation of divine power, the door is opened to everything; and, with such concessions, the Stoic system could graft into itself even exceptional forms of polytheism.