t first sight quite
particularly solid and anthropomorphic. The statues and vases speak
clearly, and they are mostly borne out by the literature. Of course we
must discount the kind of evidence that misled Winckelmann, the mere
Roman and Alexandrian art and mythology; but even if we go back to the
fifth century B. C. we shall find the ruling conceptions far nobler
indeed, but still anthropomorphic. We find firmly established the
Olympian patriarchal family, Zeus the Father of gods and men, his wife
Hera, his son Apollo, his daughter Athena, his brothers Poseidon and
Hades, and the rest. We probably think of each figure more or less as
like a statue, a habit of mind obviously wrong and indeed absurd, as if
one thought of 'Labour' and 'Grief' as statues because Rodin or St.
Gaudens has so represented them. And yet it was a habit into which the
late Greeks themselves sometimes fell;[11:1] their arts of sculpture and
painting as applied to religion had been so dangerously successful: they
sharpened and made vivid an anthropomorphism which in its origin had
been mostly the result of normal human laziness. The process of making
winds and rivers into anthropomorphic gods is, for the most part, not
the result of using the imagination with special vigour. It is the
result of not doing so. The wind is obviously alive; any fool can see
that. Being alive, it blows; how? why, naturally; just as you and I
blow. It knocks things down, it shouts and dances, it whispers and
talks. And, unless we are going to make a great effort of the
imagination and try to realize, like a scientific man, just what really
happens, we naturally assume that it does these things in the normal
way, in the only way we know. Even when you worship a beast or a stone,
you practically anthropomorphize it. It happens indeed to have a
perfectly clear shape, so you accept that. But it talks, acts, and
fights just like a man--as you can see from the _Australian Folk Tales_
published by Mrs. Langloh Parker--because you do not take the trouble to
think out any other way of behaving. This kind of anthropomorphism--or
as Mr. Gladstone used to call it, 'anthropophuism'--'humanity of
_nature_'--is primitive and inevitable: the sharp-cut statue type of god
is different, and is due in Greece directly to the work of the artists.

We must get back behind these gods of the artist's workshop and the
romance-maker's imagination, and see if the religious thinkers of the
great per