to
succeeding lectures, it will be as well for me to sum up the results at
which we have already arrived.

I began with what I called the protoplasm of religion, the primitive
ideas and practices which form the psychological basis of the whole
growth. The feeling of awe and anxiety about that which is mysterious
and unknown, the feeling which the Romans called _religio_, seems to
have manifested itself in Italy, as elsewhere, in those various ways
which I discussed in my second and third lectures, in the various forms
of magic, negative and positive. We find unmistakable evidence of the
existence of those strict rules of conduct called taboos, which fetter
the mind and body of primitive man, which probably arise from an
ineffective desire to put himself in right relations with forces he does
not understand, and which have their value as a social discipline.
Again, we find surviving in historical Rome numerous forms of active or
positive magic, by which it was thought possible to compel or overcome
those powers, so as to use them for your own benefit and against your
enemies. But I was careful to point out that on the whole little of all
this evidence of the early existence of magic at Rome is to be found in
the public religion of the Roman State, and that the natural inference
from this is that at one time or another there must have been a very
powerful influence at work in cutting away these obsolete root-leaves of
the plant that was to be, and in making of that plant a neat,
well-defined growth.

I went on to deal with the first stage in the working of this influence,
which we found reflected in the religion of the family as we know it in
historical times. The family, settled on the land, with its homestead
and its regular routine of agricultural process, developed a more
effective desire to get into right relation with the Power manifesting
itself in the universe. Anxiety is greatly lessened both in the house
and on the land, because within those limits there is a "peace" (or
covenant) between the divine and human inhabitants who have taken up
their residence there. The supernatural powers, conceived now (whatever
they may have been before) as spirits, are friendly if rightly
propitiated, and much advance has been made in the methods of
propitiation; magic and religion are still doubtless mixed up together
in these, but the tendency seems to be to get gradually rid of the more
inadequate and blundering methods. In