"But the Greek nation was too full of youthful vigour for the general acceptance of a belief which
denies this world and transfers real life to the Beyond. Accordingly the Orphic doctrine remained
confined to the relatively narrow circle of the initiate, without acquiring the smallest influence on
the State religion, not even in communities which, like Athens, had taken up the celebration of the
mysteries into the State ritual and placed it under legal protection. A full millennium was to pass
before these ideas--in a quite different theological dress, it is true--achieved victory in the Greek
world."
It would seem that this is an overstatement, particularly as regards the Eleusinian mysteries, which
were impregnated with Orphism. Broadly speaking, those who were of a religious temperament
turned to Orphism, while rationalists despised it. One might compare its status to that of
Methodism in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
We know more or less what an educated Greek learnt from his father, but we know very little of
what, in his earliest years, he learnt from his mother, who was, to a great extent, shut out from the
civilization in which the men took delight. It seems probable that educated Athenians, even in the
best period, however rationalistic they may have been in their explicitly conscious mental
processes, retained from tradition and from childhood a more primitive way of thinking and
feeling, which was always liable to prove victorious in times of stress. For this reason, no simple
analysis of the Greek outlook is likely to be adequate.
The influence of religion, more particularly of non-Olympian religion, on Greek thought was not
adequately recognized until recent times. A revolutionary book, Jane Harrison Prolegomena to
the Study of Greek Religion, emphasized both the primitive and the Dionysiac elements in the
religion of ordinary Greeks; F. M. Cornford's From Religion to Philosophy tried to make students
of Greek philosophy aware of the influence of religion on the philosophers, but cannot be wholly
accepted as trustworthy in many of its interpretations, or, for that matter, in its anthropology. The
most balanced statement known to me is in John Burnet Early Greek Philosophy, especially
Chapter II, "Science and Religion." A conflict between science and religion arose, he says, out of
"the religious revival which