rminus and to the assignment of the epithet "Terminus" to
Jupiter. The desire or love that was so important an element in human
life both fashioned itself into a personality and was put under the
guardianship of a special deity. Public safety was a cherished idea of
the Romans and was doubtless held to be maintained by every local or
national god, yet could none the less become an independent deity. The
data are not sufficient to enable us to determine in all cases the
question of chronological precedence between the deification of the
abstraction and the assignment of the epithet to a god. We know that in
the later Roman period abstractions were personalized, but this
procedure was often poetical or rhetorical.[1209]

+705+. A general relation may be recognized between the intellectual
character of a people and the extent to which it creates abstract gods.
The Semitic peoples, among whom the development of such gods is the
feeblest, are characterized by objectiveness of thought, indisposition
to philosophical or psychological analysis, and a maintenance of local
political and religious organization; it is natural that they should
construct concrete deities exclusively or almost exclusively. Egypt also
was objective, and carried its demand for visible objects of worship to
the point of incarnating its gods in living animals; such living gods
tend to banish pale abstractions, and such conceptions played an
insignificant part in Egyptian religion. In India, with its genius for
philosophical refinement, we might expect to find this latter class of
gods; but Indian thought speedily passed into the large pantheistic and
other generalizations that absorbed the lesser abstractions. Greece
appears to have had the combination of philosophy and practicalness that
favors the production of a certain sort of abstract gods, and a
considerable number of these it did produce;[1210] but here also
philosophy, in the form of large theories of the constitution and life
of man, got the upper hand and repressed the other development. The
Romans had no pretensions to philosophic or aesthetic thought, but they
had a keen sense of the value of family and civic life, and great skill
in using religion for social purposes. It is they among whom specialized
deities, including abstractions, had the greatest significance for the
life of the people--family and State.

+706+. With the growth of general culture all specialized divinities
tend to disapp