It cannot be necessary to argue on the other side in any detail in order to show, that for much of his supernatural machinery, Homer was indebted to invention, whether his own or that of generations, or nations, which had preceded him. Had his system been one purely traditional in its basis, had it only broken into many rays the integral light of one God, it would have presented to us no such deity as Juno, who is wholly without prototype, either abstract or personal, in the primitive system, and no such mere reflections of human passions as are Mars and Venus: not to speak of those large additions, which we are to consider as belonging not so much to the basis and general outline of the system, as to the later stages of its development. Let us now endeavour to inquire what mental, moral, and physical influences would be likely, in early times, to give form and direction to that alterative process, which the primitive ideas of religion, when removed beyond the precinct of Revelation and the knowledge of the Sacred Records, had to undergo. This law of decline we may examine, first ideally, according to the influences likely to operate on the course of thought with respect to religion: and then with reference to that which is specifically Greek, by sketching in outline the actual mode of handling the material at command, which resulted in the creation of the Homeric or Olympian system. The first belongs to the metaphysical genesis of the system: the second to its historical formation. ~_Tendency of primitive religion to decay._~