EARLY ROMAN RELIGION. 65 



the later accretions which are in most cases inspired by a very dif- 

 ferent view of the gods. One must, however, add, to guard against 

 any misconception, that the primitive deities of Greece were in many 

 ways identical with those of Rome, belonging as both did to the same 

 stage of religious development, a stage that I shall at once describe, 

 but the important point to be emphasized is that both nations de- 

 veloped from this same stage along their own lines, and also within 

 this stage formed different conceptions. 



These " numina " belong to that stage of early religious belief 

 known to-day as Animism. In this paper I am not concerned with 

 the question as to how this form of belief was evolved ; that belongs 

 to the Metaphysic of Religion ; it is sufficient here to briefly indicate 

 its character. By Animism, then, is meant that stage in which primi- 

 tive man worships spirits, and earliest of all the great elements of 

 Nature, the sun, the rain, the winds, on which his subsistence and 

 his comfort so materially depend; later on, the worship extends to 

 minor objects, the oak and the waterfall, the spring and the grove, 

 and even further to other than natural objects. These various spirits, 

 ever increasing in number, form what we may call a vague and some- 

 what indistinguishable crowd; as opposed to the later stage of wor- 

 shipping gods with a name and more or less of a personality, the 

 spirits are invoked often without any name, only by those who have 

 need of them, and by these only when the occasion requires and are 

 worshipped chiefly, if not entirely, from a motive of fear. This in- 

 vocation is only occasional, because the existence of the spirit only 

 lasts during the continuance of that over which he presides. Satur- 

 nus has his festival at the time of the sowing of the seed and is not 

 invoked at any other time of the year. 



But while we call Animism a stage in religion, it is very obvious 

 that within these limits there can be a number of lesser stages of 

 gradual development. I have assumed that this spirit worship begins 

 with the greater powers of nature and then took in also the smaller 

 and lesser ones. Some authorities hold the converse ; but whichever 

 tame first, it is obviously a later stage when man believes that there 

 is a spirit to be invoked in connection with his own personal needs, 

 to be prevented by propitiation from harming himself and his flocks, 

 or later his crops and his household effects, and later still watching 

 over his welfare and thus abandoning the negative attitude of not 

 "harming him. Therefore we may ask to what stage of Animism does 

 this early religion of Rome belong; is this form the earliest in which 

 we can find the Roman, after his severance from the rest of the Ar- 



