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...together with him. This the Greek says, and the barbarian says, the inhabitant of the continent, and he who dwells near the sea, the wise and the unwise. And if you proceed as far as to the utmost shores of the ocean, there also there are gods, rising very near to some, and setting very near to others. Do you think that Plato opposes, or prescribes laws contrary to these, and that he does not accord with this most beautiful assertion, and most true affection of the human mind? What is this? The eye says it is the sun. What is that? The ear says it is thunder. What are these things thus flourishing and beautiful, these revolutions and [the text continues with the Greek citation] original Greek: "It has been handed down from the ancients and those of great antiquity, and left to those who followed in the form of a myth, that these are gods, and that the divine encompasses the whole of nature. The remaining elements were introduced in a mythical way to persuade the masses and for the sake of laws and social utility. For they describe these gods as having human form, and being similar to certain other living creatures, and other things follow these which are similar to what has been said. If one were to separate these elements and keep only the first—that they believed the first essences were gods—they would consider it to be spoken divinely. And since arts and philosophy have likely been discovered many times over to the extent possible, and have again perished, these opinions of theirs have been preserved, as it were, like relics to the present time; thus, the ancestral opinion, and that from the first men, is manifest to us only to this extent." The reader who is desirous of obtaining scientific conviction of this most important of all truths, may consult the note to my translation of this chapter of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (the study of the fundamental nature of reality), my Introduction to the Parmenides of Plato, and above all, to my Translation of Proclus’s Elements of Theology.