This profound distinction between the human and the humanised divine was sought to be expressed by most tribes by fashioning the images of the gods in vaguely human shapes, but with non-human elements. Diana with her hundred breasts, Brahma with his dozens of arms, Janus with his double face, and scores of other instances will at once rise in the memory. Enormous size, impossible features, accessories such as wings, tails, multiple heads and limbs, indicate not, as some would have it, a depraved artistic taste, but the effort of the pious carver to express in his work the non-human and superhuman character of the being he sets before the adoring eyes of the votaries. It was only in a few gifted and glorious natures, notably the ancient Greeks, that the true distinction rose to full consciousness in the artistic soul—that in their corporeal forms the gods differ from men in their superior and matchless beauty, in their perfect symmetry and noble proportions. They recognised that there is something in beauty itself, which, in its highest expression, partakes truly and really of the divine, and leads man to the contemplation of laws beyond those of nature or of life, laws which are the expression of the deep harmonies of the universe. This was the triumph of anthropomorphism. Pursuing the merely objective, the merely animal, it was led by the unseen hand which guides man to his destiny into the path which conducted far beyond what the senses can teach, into the realm of the ideal and the eternal, to “the measures and the forms, Which the abstract intelligence supplies, Whose kingdom is where Time and Space are not.” Such are some of the numberless objects with which primitive man associated his idea of the Divine. The nature of this association must not be misunderstood. I repeat what I have already said, that it was not an identification of the spiritual with the material. The object was hallowed, not from anything in itself, but as the medium of invisible power. _8. Life and its Transmission._—What Professor Otfried Müller has so well said of the oldest forms of the Greek and Etruscan religions holds true in all primitive faiths: “To them, divinity seemed a world of Life, blossoming forth from an impenetrable depth into definite forms and individual expressions.”[199] All gods and holy objects were merely vehicles through which Life and Power poured into the world from the inexhaustible and impersonal source of both. I will illustrate this first from the very ancient religion of the Etruscans and then point out sufficient analogies in modern savage tribes.