little was for the most part misunderstood or not understood
at all. It could not be otherwise; for, just as in the peoples
themselves the great contrasts, which during the Graeco-Italian
period had lain side by side undeveloped, were after their division
distinctly evolved, so in their religion also a separation took
place between the idea and the image, which had hitherto been but
one whole in the soul. Those old tillers of the ground, when the
clouds were driving along the sky, probably expressed to themselves
the phenomenon by saying that the hound of the gods was driving
together the startled cows of the herd. The Greek forgot that the
cows were really the clouds, and converted the son of the hound
of the gods--a form devised merely for the particular purposes of
that conception--into the adroit messenger of the gods ready for
every service. When the thunder rolled among the mountains, he
saw Zeus brandishing his bolts on Olympus; when the blue sky again
smiled upon him, he gazed into the bright eye of Athenaea, the
daughter of Zeus; and so powerful over him was the influence of the
forms which he had thus created, that he soon saw nothing in them
but human beings invested and illumined with the splendour of
nature's power, and freely formed and transformed them according to
the laws of beauty. It was in another fashion, but not less strongly,
that the deeply implanted religious feeling of the Italian race
manifested itself; it held firmly by the idea and did not suffer
the form to obscure it. As the Greek, when he sacrificed, raised
his eyes to heaven, so the Roman veiled his head; for the prayer
of the former was contemplation, that of the latter reflection.
Throughout the whole of nature he adored the spiritual and the
universal. To everything existing, to the man and to the tree, to
the state and to the store-room, was assigned a spirit which came
into being with it and perished along with it, the counterpart of
the natural phenomenon in the spiritual domain; to the man the male
Genius, to the woman the female Juno, to the boundary Terminus,
to the forest Silvanus, to the circling year Vertumnus, and so on
to every object after its kind. In occupations the very steps of
the process were spiritualized: thus, for example, in the prayer
for the husbandman there was invoked the spirit of fallowing, of
ploughing, of furrowing, sowing, covering-in, harrowing, and so
forth down to that of the in-bringing, up-s