Among the origins which have been assigned to religious beliefs, there is one remarkable hypothesis which may be contrasted with the ghost-theory, and which, so far as the beliefs of cultivated men at the present day are concerned, is about as important as the origin of the belief in ghosts, or as fetichism. It seems that some of the Greek philosophers and historians, entirely regardless of the ghost-theory as the origin of beliefs in supernatural beings, considered that they were fictions invented by the first lawgivers, and promulgated by them for useful purposes. Belief in the gods was thus imposed by the authority of those who organized society and dictated what men were to believe in order to exercise a useful restraint. Plato himself regarded this as the origin of what the communities around him believed respecting the attributes and acts of the gods; the matters believed being fictions prescribed by the lawgivers. In his "Republic," in which he sketches the entire political, social, ethical, and religious constitution of an ideal city, assuming it to be planned and put in operation by an absolute and unlimited authority, he laid it down as essential for the lawgiver to determine what the fictions were to be in which his own community were to be required to believe. Some fictions there must be; for in the community there would be originally nothing but a vague emotional tendency to belief in supernatural beings, and this tendency must be availed of by some positive mythical inventions which it was for the lawgiver to produce and the citizens to accept. Such fictions were the accredited stories about the gods and heroes, which formed the religious beliefs among Plato's contemporaries, and were everywhere embodied in the works of poets, painters, and sculptors, and in the religious ceremonies. But the ancient fictions were, in Plato's opinion, bad, inasmuch as they gave wrong ethical ideas of the characters of the gods. They did not rest upon traditionary evidence, or divine inspiration, being merely pious frauds, constructed by authority and for an orthodox purpose. But they did not fulfill the purpose as well as they should have done. Accordingly, Plato directs in his "Republic" the coinage of a new body of legends, for which he claims no character of veracity, but which will be more in harmony with what he conceives to be the true characters of the gods, and will produce a more salutary ethical effect upon those who are to be the efficient rulers of the commonwealth after it is founded. As the founder of his ideal city, he claims and exercises an exclusive monopoly of coining and circulating such fictions, and they are to be absolutely accepted by those who are to constitute its rulers, and who are to promulgate and teach them to the community, as the physician administers wholesome remedies. To prevent the circulation of dissenting narratives, he establishes a peremptory censorship. There is thus no question of absolute truth or absolute falsehood. That is true which is stamped at the mint of the lawgiver, and that is false which he interdicts.[103]

Nowhere has orthodoxy been rested more distinctly upon the basis of absolute human authority—authority acting upon the highest motives of the public good, for the most salutary purposes, but without claiming anything in the nature of divine inspiration, or even pretending to any other truth than conformity to preconceived ideas of the characters of the gods. As evidence of what Plato regarded as the origin of the religious beliefs which were held by his contemporaries, his "Republic" is an important testimony; for he assigns almost nothing to mankind in general, but an emotional tendency to believe in invisible quasi-human agents, of whom they had no definite conceptions, and at the same time they were entirely ignorant of recorded history, past and present. They needed distinct legendary fictions and invented narratives; these were furnished to them by those who could coin them, and were accepted upon the authority of those who promulgated them. Those who first embodied the fictions as narratives were the oldest poets; in progress of time the authority which dictated belief in them came to be the state. Plato rejected the fictions of the state, and in his "Republic" proposed to substitute fictions of his own. The testimony of Plato, therefore, in respect to the origin of religious beliefs in the early ages of Greece is decidedly against the ghost-theory, whatever support may be found for that theory in the beliefs of the uncivilized races of our own day, or in the beliefs of other nations of antiquity. But neither the ghost-theory, as the origin of beliefs in supernatural beings, nor the origin of such beliefs in the will of the lawgiver, which Plato clearly held in his "Republic" to be the foundation of orthodoxy, is any test or measure of what philosophy may attain to as a rational conception at the present day.[104]

I propose, therefore, to imagine a man of mature years, without any religious prepossessions whatever, a perfectly independent thinker, furnished with the knowledge that is now within the easy reach of human acquisition, capable of correct reasoning, and with no bias to any kind of belief. It is only necessary to personify in one individual the intellectual capacity of the cultivated and educated part of mankind, but without the religious ideas instilled into them by education, in order to have a valuable witness to the mental processes and results which can be followed and attained by a right employment of our faculties. And, the better to exhibit the processes and results, I propose to let this imaginary person discuss in the form of dialogue, in which another imaginary interlocutor shall be a modern disciple of the evolution school, whatever topics would be likely to come into debate between such persons.