The ideal truth within us, constituting the inner life that is studied by philosophers, becomes transmuted by the facts of history into assured reality.
An extreme school, the Aktistetae or Gaianists (Gaianus was bishop of Alexandria c. 550) even held that from the moment the Logos assumed the body the latter was untreated, the human being transmuted into the divine nature; and the Adiaphorites went still further; denying, like Stephen Barsudaili, an Edessan abbot, all distinction of essence not even between the manhood and the Godhead in Christ, but between the divine and the human, and asserting that "all creatures are of the same essence with the Creator."
Bacon's form has already in transmission through Hobbes been transmuted into cause as antecedent in the time series.
But between these lays and Homer we must place the cultivation of epic poetry as an art.2 The pre-Homeric lays doubtless furnished the elements of such a poetry - the alphabet, so to speak, of the art; but they must have been refined and transmuted before they formed poems like the Iliad and Odyssey.
As Spencer thinks ancestor-worship the first form of religion, and as he holds that persons with such names as sun, moon and the like became worshipped as ancestors, his theory results in the belief that nature-worship and the myths about natural phenomena - dawn, wind, sky, night and the rest - are a kind of transmuted worship of ancestors and transmuted myths about real men and women.
