Thus the dæmons serve two purposes in religious philosophy. They safeguard the Absolute and the higher gods from contact with matter, and they relieve the Author of Good from responsibility for evil. At the same time they supply the means of that relation to the divine which is essential for man's higher life—"passing on the prayers and supplications of men thitherward, and thence bringing oracles and gifts of blessing."[[80]] "They say well, who say that when Plato discovered the element underlying qualities that are begotten—what nowadays they call matter and nature—he set philosophers free from many great difficulties; but to me they seem to solve more difficulties and greater ones, who set the race of dæmons between gods and men and discovered that in some such way it made a community of us and brought us together, whether the theory belongs to the Magians who follow Zoroaster, or is Thracian and comes from Orpheus, or is Egyptian, or Phrygian."[[81]] Homer, he adds, still uses the terms "gods" and "dæmons" alike; "it was Hesiod who first clearly and distinctly set forth the four classes of beings endowed with reason, gods, dæmons, heroes and finally men."
The dæmons, then, are the agents of Providence, of the One Reason, which orders the universe; they are the ministers of the divine care for man. And here perhaps their mediation is helped by the fact that the border lines between themselves and the gods above on the one hand, and men below on the other, are not fixed and final. Some dæmons, such as Isis, Osiris, Herakles and Dionysos, have by their virtue risen to be gods,[[82]] while their own numbers have been recruited from the souls of good men.[[83]] "Souls which are delivered from becoming (geneseôs) and thenceforth have rest from the body, as being utterly set free, are the dæmons that care for men, as Hesiod says";[[84]] and, just as old athletes enjoy watching and encouraging young ones, "so the dæmons, who through worth of soul are done with the conflicts of life," do not despise what they have left behind, but are kindly minded to such as strive for the same goal,—especially when they see them close upon their hope, struggling and all but touching it. As in the case of a shipwreck those on shore will run out into the waves to lend a hand to the sailors they can reach (though if they are out on the sea, to watch in silence is all that can be done), so the dæmons help us "while the affairs of life break over us (baptixoménous hypò tôn pragmatôn) and we take one body after another as it were carriages." Above all they help us if we strive of our own virtue to be saved and reach the haven.[[85]]
But this is not all, for in his letter written to console Apollonios Plutarch carries us further. There was, he says, a man who lost his only son—he was afraid, by poison. It perhaps adds confidence to the story that Plutarch gives his name and home; he was Elysios of Terina in Southern Italy. The precision is characteristic. Elysios accordingly went to a psychomanteion, a shrine where the souls of the dead might be consulted.[[86]] He duly sacrificed and went to sleep in the temple. He saw in a dream his own father with a youth strikingly like the dead son, and he was told that this was "the son's dæmon,"[[87]] and that the death had been natural, and right for the lad and for his parents. Elsewhere Plutarch quotes the lines of Menander—
By each man standeth, from his natal hour,
A dæmon, his kind mystagogue through life—[[88]]
but he prefers the view of Empedocles that there are two such beings in attendance on each of us.[[89]] The classical instance of a guardian spirit was the "daimonion" of Socrates, on which both Plutarch and Apuleius wrote books.[[90]] Plutarch discusses many theories that had been given of it, but hardly convinces the reader that he really knew what Socrates meant.
In a later generation it was held that if proper means were taken the guardian spirit would come visibly before a man's eyes. So Apuleius held, and Porphyry records that when an Egyptian priest called on the dæmon of Plotinus to manifest himself in the temple of Isis (the only "pure" spot the Egyptian could find in Rome), there came not a dæmon but a god; so great a being was Plotinus.[[91]] Plutarch discusses the question of such bodily appearances in connexion with the legend of Numa and Egeria. He can believe that God would not disdain the society of a specially good and holy man, but as for the idea that god or dæmon would have anything to do with a human body—"that would indeed require some persuasion." "Yet the Egyptians plausibly say that it is not impossible for the spirit of a god to have intercourse with a woman and beget some beginnings of life," though Plutarch finds a difficulty in such a union of unequals.[[92]]
Plutarch has comparatively little to say of visible appearances of tutelary or other dæmons. To what lengths of credulity men went in this direction will be shown in a later chapter. Yet a guardian who does not communicate in some way with the person he guards, and a series of dæmonic and divine powers content to be inert and silent, would be futile; and in fact there was, Plutarch held, abundance of communication between men and the powers above them. It was indeed one of the main factors of his religion that man's life is intimately related to the divine.
Plutarch, of course, could know nothing of the language in use to-day, but it is clear that he was familiar with some or all of the phænomena, which in our times have received a vocabulary of their own, for the moment very impressive. Psychopathic, auto-suggestion, telepathy, the subliminal self—the words may tell us something; whether what they tell us is verifiable, remains to be seen. Plutarch's account of the facts, for the description of which this language has been invented, seems even more fantastic to a modern reader, but it must be remembered that he and his contemporaries were led to it at once by observation of psychical phænomena, still to be observed, and by philosophic speculation on the transcendence of God. As a body of theories, the ancient system holds together as well as most systems in the abstract. It was not in theory that it broke down. Plutarch as usual presents it with reservations.
The mantic art