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 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