Once more, I do not wish to insist, either, that every particular and individual god, national or naturalistic, must necessarily represent a particular ghost--the dead spirit of a single definite once-living person. It is enough to show, as Mr. Spencer has shown, that the idea of the god, and the worship paid to a god, are directly derived from the idea of the ghost, and the offerings made to the ghost, without necessarily holding, as Mr. Spencer seems to hold, that every god is and must be in ultimate analysis the ghost of a particular human being. Once the conception of gods had been evolved by humanity, and had become a common part of every man’s imagined universe--of the world as it presented itself to the mind of the percipient--then it was natural enough that new gods should be made from time to time out of abstractions or special aspects and powers of nature, and that the same worship should be paid to such new-made and purely imaginary gods as had previously been paid to the whole host of gods {037}evolved from personal and tribal ancestors. It is the first step that costs: once you have got the idea of a god fairly evolved, any number of extra gods may be invented or introduced from all quarters. A great pantheon readily admits new members to its ranks from, many strange sources. Familiar instances in one of the best-known pantheons are those of Concordia, Pecunia, Aius Locutius, Rediculus Tutanus. The Romans, indeed, deified every conceivable operation of nature or of human life; they had gods or goddesses for the minutest details of agriculture, of social relations, of the first years of childhood, of marriage and domestic arrangements generally. Many of their deities, as we shall see hereafter, were obviously manufactured to meet a special demand on special occasions. But at the same time, none of these gods, so far as we can judge, could ever have come to exist at all if the ghost-theory and ancestor-worship had not already made familiar to the human mind the principles and practice of religion generally. The very idea of a god could not otherwise have been evolved; though, when once evolved, any number of new beings could readily be affiliated upon it by the human imagination.