PRE-ANIMISM 65 



which, in the first instance, no personal quantities are 

 ascribed, may perhaps afford an explanation of a problem 

 which has exercised several inquirers of late the origin of 

 the faineant unworshipped Supreme Beings who figure in 

 savage mythology almost all over the world." The hypothesis 

 also endeavours to account, by the operation of known 

 processes of thought, not merely for what Mr. Andrew 

 Lang calls "the high gods of low races," but also for the 

 entire congeries of notions from which the beginnings of 

 religions have gradually emerged. It supposes that early 

 man's first contact with his surroundings gave him the idea 

 of a number of influences, powers, tendencies, forces, outside 

 and other than himself which affected him in various ways. 

 Speaking of the early Japanese religion, Mr. Astor says : 

 " Primitive man did not think of the world as pervaded by 

 spiritual forces. His attitude was a piecemeal conception of 

 the universe as alive, just as his fellow man was regarded as 

 alive without being analysed into soul and body." 1 Two 

 valuable examples from the higher culture may be added. 

 In early Greek religion Zeus is the thunder before he 

 becomes the Thunderer; "the characteristic appellation of 

 a divine spirit in the oldest stratum of the Roman religion 

 is not deus, a god, but rather numen, a power ; he becomes 

 dens when he obtains a name, and so is on the way 

 to acquiring a definite personality." As their religious 

 calendar proves, few, if any, of the gods of the early 

 Romans, who were an agricultural people, were personal ; 

 and, as Mr. Carter says in his Religion of Numa, "it 

 required centuries to educate the Roman into the conception 

 of personal, individual gods." 3 In some of the festivals 

 " which may have possibly come down from the oldest 

 period the deity is almost entirely lost. Here is good 

 -evidence of the indistinctness of the Roman conception of 

 the divine ; the cult appealed to the people as the practical 

 method of obtaining their desires, but the unseen powers 

 with whom they dealt in this cult were beyond their ken, 

 often unnamed, and only visible in the sense of being sealed 



in, or in some sort symbolized by, tree or stone or animal 



Only the great deity of the stock stands out at all clearly 

 Father Mars of the Romans, Father Diovis of the whole 

 Latin race : to these we may perhaps add the Hercules or 

 Genius, and Juno, representing respectively the male and 



1 Shinto, p. 26. 2 Bailey's Religion of Ancient Rome, p. 12. 3 p. 70. 



