Purely practical considerations ordain that we should not pursue our subject too far into its embryonic stage, or at least not to a time before its conception. What may we call the conception of Greek philosophy? It occurred when the conviction began to take shape in men's minds that the apparent chaos of events must conceal an underlying order, and that this order is the product of impersonal forces. To the mind of a pre-philosophical man, there is no special difficulty in accounting for the apparently haphazard nature of much that goes on in the world. He knows that he himself is a creature of impulse and emotion, actuated not only by reason but by desires, love, hatred, high spirits, jealousy, vindictiveness. What more natural than that the ways of the world around him should have a similar explanation? He sees himself to be at the mercy of superior and incomprehensible forces, which sometimes seem to act with little regard for consistency or justice. Doubtless they are the expression of beings like-minded with himself, only longer-lived and more powerful. Our present purpose does not require us to enter the troubled regions of anthropological controversy by suggesting that these remarks have any necessary bearing on the ultimate origin, or origins, of religious belief. All we have to notice is that these are the assumptions of that type of polytheism or polydaemonism which dominated the early mind of Greece and can be studied in all its picturesque detail in the Homeric poems. Everything there has a personal explanation, not only external and physical phenomena like rain and tempest, thunder and sunshine, illness and death, but also those overmastering psychological impulses through which a man feels no less that he is in the power of something beyond his own control. A guilty passion is the work of Aphrodite, an act of folly means that ‘Zeus took away his wits’, outstanding prowess on the field of battle is owed to the god who ‘breathed might into’ the hero.