with corn when shot
up, Tutilina with corn stored in the granary, Nodotus has for his
care the knots in the straw. There is a god Door, a goddess Hinge, a
god Threshold. Each act in opening infancy has its god or goddess.
The child has Cunina when lying in the cradle, Statina when he
stands, Edula when he eats, Locutius when he begins to speak, Adeona
when he makes for his mother, Abeona when he leaves her; forty-three
such gods of childhood have been counted. Pilumnus, god of the
pestle, and Diverra, goddess of the broom, may close our small sample
of the limitless crowd.

It is usually said about these multitudinous petty deities that the
Roman was very religious, and saw in every act and everything for
which he had a name, something mysterious and supernatural. The
Greek, it is said, sees things on his own level, and adds to them a
god who is human; it is by the human spirit that he interprets them.
The Roman, on the contrary, sees things as mysteries and fills them
with gods who are not human. That is true; but the question to be
asked about these Roman gods is, to what stage of religious
development do they belong: do they prove a primitive or an advanced
stage of religious thought? It has been observed that these names of
gods are all epithets, or adjectives; and it has been supposed that
there was originally a noun belonging to them, that they were all
epithets of one great deity, or, as some are masculine and some
feminine, of a great male and a great female deity. The noun fell out
of use, it is supposed, but was still present to the mind of the
Roman, and thus his regiments of divine names are not really
designations of different persons, but titles of the same person,
supposed to be present alike in all these numberless manifestations.
But it is not easy to conceive how, if primitive Italy had reached
the conception of the unity of deity, that deity became so remarkably
subdivided, nor how his own proper name and character were lost. It
is much more natural to suppose that the petty gods of Rome were all
the deities the early Latins had, and were worshipped for their own
sake. They represent the stage of thought called Animism (see chapter
iii.) when every part of nature is thought to have its spirit, and
the number of invisible beings is liable to be multiplied
indefinitely. While other Aryan races had passed beyond this stage
when we first know them, and advanced to the belief in great gods
ruling great p