 At this stage, Hume’s genealogy of religion presents us with an account of the same general conflict that he portrays in Dialogues between Cleanthes’s anthropomorphism and Demea’s mysticism. This conflict, as Hume explains it, has deep roots in the dynamics of human nature and our conflicting propensities. The result of this process is an inherent instability in theism itself. On the one side, there is a tendency, originally present in polytheism, to anthropomorphize the gods in the hope of placating and controlling them. On the other side, our “exaggerated praise and compliments” produce a refined and abstract idea of god that no longer satisfies the vulgar imagination. The result of this situation is that there is “a kind of flux and reflux in the human mind, and that men have a natural tendency to rise from idolatry to theism, and to sink again from theism into idolatry” (NHR, 8.1).