ABSTRACT
EPILOGUE THROUGHOUT the myth of creation here concluded we have watched the divine Reason bringing intelligible order into the world in so far as he could persuade Necessity to co-operate. I urged that, if Plato's words are not to be robbed of all meaning, Necessity must be recognised as standing for a factor in the existing world never completely subdued by Reason. Further, if this Reason can be identified with the reason in the World-Soul itself, that other factor can hardly be anything but an irrational element in the World-Soul, the source of wandering motions. There is at all times some chaos within the cosmos. Becoming was imaged as the child of a father and a mother, who correspond to Heaven and Earth, the first parents of more primitive myth. The father is from above, Olympian; the mother from beneath; and one of her names is Necessity. Already in Homer Zeus and the other Olympians are confronted by a power they cannot subordinate, called Destiny or Fate. Like Plato's Demiurge, the Homeric gods are not omnipotent; and it seems impossible to deduce from Homer any coherent account of the relation between their will and the thwarting opposition of Destiny. Here Homer left an unsolved problem to be grappled with by the only religious genius of classical Greece who can take rank with Plato. It is no accident that the greatest work of Aeschylus, the Oresteia, culminates in the reconciliation of Zeus and Destiny; and that the reconciliation is effected by divine Reason, in the person of Athena, l persuading the daughters of Necessity to co-operate in her beneficent purposes.
