Not one of them, of any school whatsoever--from the semi-mythic
Seven Sages to Plato and Aristotle--but finds it necessary to consider
not in passing, but as the great object of research, questions
concerning the gods:- whether they are real or not; one or many;
personal or impersonal; cosmic, and parts of the universe, or organisers
and rulers of it; in relation to man, or without relation to him. Even
in those who flatly deny the existence of the gods, even in Lucretius
himself, these questions have to be considered, before the question,
What is man? can get any solution at all. On the answer given to them
is found to depend intimately the answer to the question, What is the
immaterial part of man? Is it a part of nature, or of something above
nature? Has he an immaterial part at all?--in one word, Is a human
metaphysic possible at all? So it was with the Greek philosophers of
old, even, as Asclepius and Ammonius say, with Aristotle himself. "The
object of Aristotle's metaphysic," one of them says, "is theological.
Herein Aristotle theologises." And there is no denying the assertion.
We must not then be hard on the Neoplatonists, as if they were the first
to mix things separate from the foundation of the world.
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