and nationality are in the main identical, language and nationality are
by no means so--we have the great practical difficulty in the case of
Greece and Rome that in the earliest period of which we have knowledge
these two religions bear so little resemblance that we must either
assert for the time of Indo-Germanic unity a religious development much
more primitive than that which comparative philology has sketched, or we
must suppose the presence of a strong decadent influence in Rome's case
after the separation, which is equally difficult. If we realise that in
a primitive religion the name of the god is usually the same as the name
of the thing which he represents, the existence of a Greek god and a
Roman god with names which correspond to the same Indo-Germanic word
proves linguistically that the _thing_ existed and had a name before the
separation, but not at all that the thing was deified or that the name
was the name of a god at that time. We must therefore be content to
begin our study of religion much more humbly and at a much later period.

In fact we cannot go back appreciably before the dawn of political
history, but there are certain considerations which enable us at least
to understand the phenomena of the dawn itself, those survivals in
culture which loom up in the twilight and the understanding of which
gives us a fair start in our historical development. For this knowledge
we are indebted to the so-called "anthropological" method, which is
based on the assumption that mankind is essentially uniform, and that
this essential uniformity justifies us in drawing inferences about very
ancient thought from the very primitive thought of the barbarous and
savage peoples of our own day. At first sight the weakness of this
contention is more apparent than its strength, and it is easy to show
that the prehistoric primitive culture of a people destined to
civilisation is one thing, and the retarded primitive culture of modern
tribes stunted in their growth is quite another thing, so that, as has