Here we have what is essentially superstition, because we are concerned with limited finite ends and objects, and those are treated as absolute which, so far as their content is concerned, are limited. Superstition, put generally, consists in giving to finitude, externality, common immediate reality as such, the value of power and substantiality. It originates in the sense of oppression felt by the spirit, in the feeling of dependence it has in connection with its ends.
Thus the Romans were always conscious of a thrill of fear in presence of anything unknown, anything which had no well-defined nature or consciousness. Everywhere they saw something full of mystery and experienced a vague kind of horror, which led them to feign the existence of something irrational which was reverenced as a kind of higher being. The Greeks on the contrary made everything clear, and constructed a beautiful and brilliant set of myths, which covered all the relations of life and Nature.
Cicero extols the Romans as being the most pious of nations, since in all departments of life they think on the gods, do everything under the sanction of religion, and thank the gods for everything. This is as a matter of fact actually the case. This abstract inwardness, this universality of the end, which is the fate in which the particular separate individual and the morality and humanity of the individual are suppressed, and in which they cannot be present in a concrete form and cannot develop—this universality, this inwardness is the basis of the Roman religion, and consequently since everything is related to this inwardness, religion is in everything. Thus Cicero, in complete accordance with the Roman spirit, derives religion from religare, for religion in all its relations has as a matter of fact become to the Roman something which binds and sways.
But this inwardness, this higher thing, this universal, is at the same time only form: the subject or content,
