so often been said, the two bear a relation to each other not unlike
that of a healthy young child to a full-grown idiot. And yet there is a
decided resemblance between the child and the idiot, and whether
prehistoric or retarded, primitive culture shows everywhere strong
likeness, and the method is productive of good if we confine our
reasoning backwards to those things in savage life which the two kinds
of primitive culture, the prehistoric and the retarded, have in common.
To do this however we must have some knowledge of the prehistoric, and
our modern retarded savage must be used merely to illumine certain
things which we see only in half-light; he must never be employed as a
lay-figure in sketching in those features of prehistoric life of which
we are totally in ignorance. It is peculiarly useful to the student of
Roman religion because he stands on the borderland and looking backwards
sees just enough dark shapes looming up behind him to crave more light.
For in many phases of early Roman religion there are present
characteristics which go back to old manners of thought, and these
manners of thought are not peculiar to the Romans but are found in many
primitive peoples of our own day. The greatest contribution which
anthropology has made to the study of early Roman religion is "animism."

Not much more than a quarter of a century ago the word "animism" began
to be used to describe that particular phase of the psychological
condition of primitive peoples by which they believe that a spirit
(_anima_) resides in everything, material and immaterial. This spirit is
generally closely associated with the thing itself, sometimes actually
identified with it. When it is thought of as distinct from the thing, it
is supposed to have the form of the thing, to be in a word its "double."
These doubles exercise an influence, often for evil, over the thing, and
it is expedient and necessary therefore that they should be propitiated
so that their evil influence may be removed and the thing itself may