Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/477

 ^HAP. I. NEW BELIEFS PHILOSOPHY. 471 ment, all were municipal. The city was th« single living force; there was nothing above and nothing be low it; neither national unity nor individual liberty. It remains for us to relate how this system dis- appeared, — that is to say, how, the principle of human association being changed, government, religion, and law threw off this municipal character which they had borne in antiquity. The ruin of the governments which Greece and Italy had created was due to two principal causes. One be longed to the order of moral and intellectual facts, the other to the order of material facts ; the first is the transformation of beliefs, the second is the Roman conquest. These two great facts belong to the same period ; they were developed and accomplished to- gether during the series of six centuries which preceded our era. The primitive religion, whose symbols were the im- movable stone of the hearth, and the ancestral tomb, — a religion which had established the ancient family, and had afterwards organized the city, — changed with time, and grew old. The human mind increased in strength, and adopted new beliefs. Men began to have an idea of immaterial nature ; the notion of the human soul became more definite, and almost at the same time that of a divine intelligence sprang up in their minds. Could they still believe in the divinities of the prim- itive ages, of those dead men who lived in the tomb, of those Lares who had been men, of those holy ances- tors whom it was necessary to continue to nourish Avith food ? Such a faith became im])ossible. Such beliefs were no longer on a level with the human mind. It is quite true that these prejudices, though rude, were not easily eradicated from the vulgar mind. They still