does not deny them reason, he does not ascribe virtue._
What, then, is the difference between good and evil demons? For the
Platonist Apuleius, in a treatise on this whole subject,[330] while
he says a great deal about their aerial bodies, has not a word to say
of the spiritual virtues with which, if they were good, they must have
been endowed. Not a word has he said, then, of that which could give
them happiness; but proof of their misery he has given, acknowledging
that their mind, by which they rank as reasonable beings, is not only
not imbued and fortified with virtue so as to resist all unreasonable
passions, but that it is somehow agitated with tempestuous emotions,
and is thus on a level with the mind of foolish men. His own words
are: "It is this class of demons the poets refer to, when, without
serious error, they feign that the gods hate and love individuals
among men, prospering and ennobling some, and opposing and distressing
others. Therefore pity, indignation, grief, joy, every human emotion is
experienced by the demons, with the same mental disturbance, and the
same tide of feeling and thought. These turmoils and tempests banish
them far from the tranquillity of the celestial gods." Can there be
any doubt that in these words it is not some inferior part of their
spiritual nature, but the very mind by which the demons hold their
rank as rational beings, which he says is tossed with passion like a
stormy sea? They cannot, then, be compared even to wise men, who with
undisturbed mind resist these perturbations to which they are exposed
in this life, and from which human infirmity is never exempt, and who
do not yield themselves to approve of or perpetrate anything which
might deflect them from the path of wisdom and law of rectitude. They
resemble in character, though not in bodily appearance, wicked and
foolish men. I might indeed say they are worse, inasmuch as they have
grown old in iniquity, and incorrigible by punishment. Their mind, as
Apuleius says, is a sea tossed with tempest, having no rallying point
of truth or virtue in their soul from which they can resist their
turbulent and depraved emotions.