apart from the god to which they were attached. The
grammatical change which accompanied this psychological movement was the
transfer of the adjective into an abstract noun. Both adjectives and
abstract nouns express quality, but the adjective is in a condition of
dependence on a noun, while the abstract noun is independent and
self-supporting. And thus, just as in certain of the lower organisms a
group of cells breaks off and sets up an individual organism of its own,
so in old Roman religion some phase of a god's activity, expressed in an
adjective, broke off with the adjective from its original stock and set
up for itself, turning its name from the dependent adjective form into
the independent abstract noun. Thus Juppiter, worshipped as a god of
good faith in the dealings of men with one another, the god by whom
oaths were sworn under the open sky, was designated as "Juppiter,
guarding-good-faith," Juppiter Fidius. There were however many other
phases of Juppiter's work, and hence the adjective _fidius_ became very
important as the means of distinguishing this activity from all the
others. Eventually it broke off from Juppiter and formed the abstract
noun _Fides_, the goddess of good faith, where the sex of the deity as a
goddess was entirely determined by the grammatical gender of abstract
nouns as feminine.

This is all strange enough but there is one more step in the development
even more curious yet. This abstract goddess _Fides_ did not stay long
in the purely abstract sphere; she began very soon to be made concrete
again, as the Fides of this particular person or of that particular
group and as this Fides or that, until she became almost as concrete as
Juppiter himself had been, and hence we have a great many different
_Fides_ in seeming contradiction to the old grammatical rule that
abstract nouns had no plural. Now all this development in the field of
religion throws light upon the character of the Roman mind and its
instinctive methods of thought, and we see why it is that the Romans
were very great lawyers and very mediocre philosophers. Both law and
philosophy require the ability for abstract thought; in both cases the
essential qualities of a thing must be separated from the thing itself.
But in the case of philosophic thought this abstraction, these
qualities, do not immediately seek reincarnation. They continue as
abstractions and do not immediately descend to earth again, whereas for
law such a descent