Yet it is evident that they have a beginning, that they decay, and that they are void of all sense.
Protagoras did not seem to have any idea of the real nature of the Gods; for he acknowledged that he was altogether ignorant whether there are or are not any, or what they are.
What shall I say of Democritus, who classes our images of objects, and their orbs, in the number of the Gods; as he does that principle through which those images appear and have their influence?
He deifies likewise our knowledge and understanding.

Is he not involved in a very great error?
And because nothing continues always in the same state, he denies that anything is everlasting, does he not thereby entirely destroy the Deity, and make it impossible to form any opinion of him?
Diogenes of Apollonia looks upon the air to be a Deity.

But what sense can the air have?
or what divine form can be attributed to it?
It would be tedious to show the uncertainty of Plato's opinion; for, in his Timaeus, he denies the propriety of asserting that there is one great father or creator of the world; and, in his book of Laws, he thinks we ought not to make too strict an inquiry into the nature of the Deity.

And as for his statement when he asserts that God is a being without any body--what the Greeks call [Greek: asomatos]--it is certainly quite unintelligible how that theory can possibly be true; for such a God must then necessarily be destitute of sense, prudence, and pleasure; all which things are comprehended in our notion of the Gods.

He likewise asserts in his Timaeus, and in his Laws, that the world, the heavens, the stars, the mind, and those Gods which are delivered down to us from our ancestors, constitute the Deity.