ds, holding, as did the ancients, that they are
like men and women both in body and passion, except that they are even
comelier and more powerful, and also that they can render themselves
invisible to human eyesight. They are capable of being propitiated by
mankind and of coming to the assistance of those who ask their aid. Their
interest in human affairs is keen, and on the whole beneficent; but they
become very angry if neglected, and punish rather the first they come
upon, than the actual person who has offended them; their fury being
blind when it is raised, though never raised without reason. They will
not punish with any less severity when people sin against them from
ignorance, and without the chance of having had knowledge; they will take
no excuses of this kind, but are even as the English law, which assumes
itself to be known to every one.

Thus they have a law that two pieces of matter may not occupy the same
space at the same moment, which law is presided over and administered by
the gods of time and space jointly, so that if a flying stone and a man's
head attempt to outrage these gods, by "arrogating a right which they do
not possess" (for so it is written in one of their books), and to occupy
the same space simultaneously, a severe punishment, sometimes even death
itself, is sure to follow, without any regard to whether the stone knew
that the man's head was there, or the head the stone; this at least is
their view of the common accidents of life. Moreover, they hold their
deities to be quite regardless of motives. With them it is the thing
done which is everything, and the motive goes for nothing.

Thus they hold it strictly forbidden for a man to go without common air
in his lungs for more than a very few minutes; and if by any chance he
gets into the water, the air-god is very angry, and will not suffer it;
no matter whether the man got into the water by accident or on purpose,
whether through the attempt to save a child or through presumptuous
contempt of the air-god, the air-god will kill him, unless he keeps his
head high enough out of the water, and thus gives the air-god his due.

This with regard to the deities who manage physical affairs. Over and
above these they personify hope, fear, love, and so forth, giving them
temples and priests, and carving likenesses of them in stone, which they
verily believe to be faithful representations of living beings who are
only not human in being more t