For Plutarch the old mythology is sufficient as a basis for a religious belief. Like most of the Greek philosophers who incline toward theism, he maintains that myths are, to a greater or less extent, corruptions of primitive verities. These originated in the popular mind and received artistic form at the hands of the poets. Underlying them all there is truth enough and beauty enough to show the aspiration of the soul after higher things, and they form the basis of a purely theistic belief. Plutarch’s unbounded faith in human reason leads him to believe that it alone is entirely sufficient to enable any and every man to lead a virtuous life. His advice to every one is, in substance: get all the light you can; use the reason you are endowed with by the creator; acquire additional knowledge and wisdom every day; make your inward life an object of daily study and reflection,—if you do these things you will lead a virtuous life. Those persons who have no love for the beautiful and the good, no desire to become virtuous, fail because they neglect to cultivate the reason with which every man is originally endowed. They grope in the darkness cast about them by their own passions, and refuse to follow the lamp that reason holds up before them. Plutarch’s optimism; his faith in the power of the intellect to make the world better, is especially remarkable in view of the fact that his countrymen, notwithstanding their general intelligence, notwithstanding the large number of great men in almost every department of knowledge born in Greek lands, in spite of the fact that Greece was the native hearth of philosophy, had for centuries been retrograding morally, intellectually and politically. So hard is it to divorce most men from a theory to which they have attached themselves. His mistake arose from his seeing all men in the mirror of his own thoughts. He believed that the whole human race could be influenced by the motives that influenced himself, and that all could, if they wished, be constantly engaged in the search for light and wisdom in the way he sought them. This radical error he inherited from his master, Plato, and it is strange that he did not detect it. He seems never to have suspected that he might be mistaken.