ly troubled itself to define their
status and it may even be uncertain whether respect is shown to the
spirits inhabiting streams and mountain peaks or to the peaks and
streams themselves[104].

They may be kindly (though generally requiring punctilious attention),
or mischievous, or determined enemies of mankind. But infinite as are
their variations, the ordinary Asiatic no more doubts their existence
than he doubts the existence of animals. The position which they enjoy,
like their character, is various, for in Asia deities like men have
careers which depend on luck. Many of them remain mere elves or goblins,
some become considerable local deities. But often they occupy a position
intermediate between real gods and fairies. Thus in southern India,
Burma and Ceylon may be seen humble shrines, which are not exactly
temples but the abodes of beings whom prudent people respect. They have
little concern with the destinies of the soul or the observance of the
moral law but much to do with the vagaries of rivers and weather and
with the prosperity of the village. Though these spirits may attain a
high position within a certain district (as for instance Maha Saman, the
deity of Adam's Peak in Ceylon) they are not of the same stuff as the
great gods of Asia. These latter are syntheses of many ideas, and
centuries of human thought have laboured on their gigantic figures. It
is true that the mental attitude which deifies the village stream is
fundamentally the same as that which worships the sun, but in the latter
case the magnitude of the phenomenon deified sets it even for the most
rustic mind in another plane. Also the nature gods of the Veda are not
quite the same as the nature spirits which the Indian peasants worship
to-day and worshipped, as the Pitakas tell us, in the time of the
Buddha. For the Vedic deities are such forces as fire and light, wind
and water. This is nature worship but the worship of nature generalized,
not of some bold rock or mysterious rustling tree. It may be that a
migratory life, such as the ancient Aryans at one time led, inclined
their minds to these wider views, since neither the family nor the tribe
had an abiding interest in any one place. Thus the ancestors of the
Turks in the days before Islam worshipped the spirits of the sky, earth
and water, whereas the more civilized but sedentary Chinese had genii
for every hamlet, pool and hillock.

It is difficult to say whether monotheism is a devel