of the fine words _iniusta nefasta
vitiosa_, there was no religious principle involved in this solemn
injunction. When Bibulus in 59 B.C. sought as consul to stop Caesar's
proceedings by using his right of _spectio_, all he had to do was to
announce that he was going to look for lightning (_obnuntiare_); and if
there had been the smallest remnant of religious belief left in the
Roman mind about such transactions, it would quietly have acquiesced, in
the conviction that Jupiter would send lightning to the Roman magistrate
who asked for it; as it was, Caesar took no notice, and the Roman people
only laughed. Caesar was at the time, let us note, the head of the Roman
religion, pontifex maximus. So with the augurs as the interpreters of
the magisterial _spectio_; proud as Cicero was of becoming an augur,
with all the old surviving elective ritual,[641] he never, we may be
sure, believed for a moment that he had the power of interpreting the
will of the gods. A century before his augurship the whole business of
public divination had been regulated by statute, like any other secular
matter; and in his own day it was an open question with men of education
whether there were such a thing as divination at all.[642] True, as we
shall see, the _illegitimate_ forms of divination were at this very time
gaining ground, as the current of superstition increased in strength
which marks this last period of the republic; but the augur's art and
the _spectio_ of the magistrate were still surviving as mere
constitutional fossils, and were not destined to share largely in
Augustus' heroic attempt to put fresh life into the _ius divinum_. _Vile
damnum_, as Tacitus said of the foreign quacks banished to Sardinia by
Tiberius; for neither in the sphere of religion nor later in that of
politics can the art of divination be said to have had any lasting
value.

I have not dealt at any length with the augurs and the State system of
divination, but I hope I have said enough to show that, as I hinted at
the beginning of this lecture, it affords an excellent illustration of
the way in which the religious instinct, the desire to be in right
relation with the Power manifesting itself in the universe, was first
soothed and satisfied, then hypnotised and paralysed, by the
formalisation and gradual secularisation of religious processes. The
desire to obtain the sanction of the Power by seeking for favourable
signs or omens seems to be a universal instinct o