They continue as abstractions and do not immediately descend to earth again, whereas for law such a descent is absolutely necessary because jurisprudence is interested not so much in the abstraction by itself, but rather in the abstract as presented in concrete cases.  Hence a type of mind which found it equally easy to make the concrete into the abstract and then to turn the abstract so made into a kind of concrete again, is par excellence the legal mind, and no better proof of the instinctive tendency to law-making on the part of the Romans can be found than in the fact that the same habits of mind which make laws also governed the development of their religion.

Unfortunately however it was not these abstract deities who could save old Roman religion.  They were merely the logical outcome of the deities already existing, merely new offspring of the old breed.  They did not represent any new interests, but were merely the individualisation of certain phases of the old deities, phases which had always been present and were now at most merely emphasised by being worshipped separately.

THE REORGANISATION OF SERVIUS

Like a lofty peak rising above the mists which cover the tops of the lower-lying mountains, the figure of Servius Tullius towers above the semi-legendary Tarquins on either side of him.  We feel that we have to do with a veritable character in history, and we find ourselves wondering what sort of a man he was personally—­a feeling that never occurs to us with Romulus and the older kings, and comes to us only faintly with the elder Tarquin, while the younger Tarquin has all the marks of a wooden man, who was put up only to be thrown down, whose whole raison d’etre is to explain the transition from the kingdom to the republic on the theory of a revolution.  Eliminate the revolution, suppose the change to have been a gradual and a constitutional one, and you may discard the proud Tarquin without losing anything but a lay-figure with its more or less gaudy trappings of later myths.  But it is not so with Servius; his wall and his constitution are very real and defy all attempts to turn their maker into a legend.  Yet on the other hand we must be on our guard, for much of the definiteness which seems to attach to him is rather the definiteness of a certain stage in Rome’s development, a certain well-bounded chronological and sociological tract.  It is dangerous to try to limit too strictly Servius’s personal part in this development; and far safer, though perhaps less fascinating, to use his name as a general term for the changes which Rome underwent from the time when foreign influences began to tell upon her until the beginning of the republic.  He forms a convenient title therefore for certain phases of Rome’s growth.  And yet even this is not strictly correct, for Servius stands not so much for the coming into existence of certain facts, as for the recognition of the existence