"
It was easy to conceive, farther, that such spirits should be able to
assume at will a human form, in order to hold intercourse with men, or
to perform any act for which their proper body, whether of fire,
earth, or air, was unfitted. And it would have been to place them
beneath, instead of above, humanity, if, assuming the form of man,
they could not also have tasted his pleasures. Hence the easy step to
the more or less material ideas of deities, which are apt at first to
shock us, but which are indeed only dishonourable so far as they
represent the gods as false and unholy. It is not the materialism, but
the vice, which degrades the conception; for the materialism itself is
never positive or complete. There is always some sense of exaltation
in the spiritual and immortal body; and of a power proceeding from the
visible form through all the infinity of the element ruled by the
particular god. The precise nature of the idea is well seen in the
passage of the _Iliad_ which describes the river Scamander defending
the Trojans against Achilles.[76] In order to remonstrate with the
hero, the god assumes a human form, which nevertheless is in some way
or other instantly recognized by Achilles as that of the river-god: it
is addressed at once as a river, not as a man; and its voice is the
voice of a river "out of the deep whirlpools.
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