We have already remarked how unfamiliar the abstract god which the Brahmans had placed at the head of their theory remained to the people, both in his impersonal and personal form. They had been more deeply influenced by the degradation of the old gods, introduced by the Brahmans in consequence of their religious system (p. 287). Yet it was not so much these doctrines which caused the old gods to lose their primitive power, and complete charm over the hearts of men, as the fact that the motives which now governed the life of the Aryas were wholly different from those which had filled them in old days on the Indus. Indra, the hurler of the thunder-bolt, had fought with the tribes whose offering of Soma he had drunk. The storm of the elements characteristic of the Panjab was unknown on the Ganges; and in the civilised conditions of a peaceful, obedient, quiet life the old slayer of the demons could no longer excite the lively feelings of the people. The Brahmans might recede ever further from nature; the people, the peasants and herdmen, remained in constant contact with her, and with the phenomena of the sky and the vegetative life of the earth; they felt themselves continually surrounded by the mighty operations of nature. The feeling and faith of the people required a more personal, present, living power, which assured them of help and protection. While the Brahmans wearied themselves with abstractions and philosophic systems, the needs of the multitude, the poetical vein of the Indian nation, its realism as opposed to the spiritualism of the priests and Brahmans, struck out new paths. So it came about that as the supreme deities of the most ancient and the early periods faded away more and more, as Mitra and Varuna, Indra and Ushas passed into the background, forms hitherto little regarded rose up out of the circle of these spirits, which were akin to the present instincts and needs of the nation, the immediate modes of feeling, and in closer relation to them. This movement was not confined to the people; within the circles of the Brahmans, who were not wholly given up to abstractions, the want of a living power, governing the world, could not but be felt.[410]