Moreover, they hold their
deities to be quite regardless of motives. With them it is the thing
done which is everything, and the motive goes for nothing.
Thus they hold it strictly forbidden for a man to go without common air
in his lungs for more than a very few minutes; and if by any chance he
gets into the water, the air-god is very angry, and will not suffer it;
no matter whether the man got into the water by accident or on purpose,
whether through the attempt to save a child or through presumptuous
contempt of the air-god, the air-god will kill him, unless he keeps his
head high enough out of the water, and thus gives the air-god his due.
This with regard to the deities who manage physical affairs. Over and
above these they personify hope, fear, love, and so forth, giving them
temples and priests, and carving likenesses of them in stone, which they
verily believe to be faithful representations of living beings who are
only not human in being more than human. If any one denies the objective
existence of these divinities, and says that there is really no such
being as a beautiful woman called Justice, with her eyes blinded and a
pair of scales, positively living and moving in a remote and ethereal
region, but that justice is only the personified expression of certain
modes of human thought and action--they say that he denies the existence
of justice in denying her personality, and that he is a wanton disturber
of men's religious convictions.
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