From Greek and Roman Mythology & Heroic Legend, by Professor H. Steuding, Translated from the German and Edited by Lionel D. Barnett. The Temple Primers, London: J. M. Dent; 1901; p. 5.
[5]Greek and Roman Mythology & Heroic Legend
GREEK MYTHOLOGY
Beginnings of Greek Belief and Worship
III. Nature and Elemental Powers. § 6. Man’s innate striving to grasp the causes connecting the occurrences observed by him is not limited to the experiences which concern his own person; he also contemplates Nature, in which he lives and whose influence he feels. As the child ascribes life as an attribute to things surrounding him as soon as they seem to exert any activity, so the primitive man regards as living everything that puts forth a force, possessed by a soul-like being (nature-dæmon), which is the ground of its activity.
Sometimes the display of force observed in a process of nature is too great and too prolonged for an ordinary man or beast to have produced it; and then its assumed origin, the nature-dæmon, also rises above the level of beast or man in power and permanence. According again as it appears to man as hostile or friendly, forcible or gentle, creative or receptive, he ascribes to the being causing it hostile or friendly feelings, male or female sex, without however distinguishing it at first from similar dæmons by a series of particular properties; indeed, such a distinction was not made even by the later Greeks as regards the troops of river-gods, nymphs, Nereids, Satyrs, Etc.
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Greek Religion from the Beginning of the Homeric Age :
IV: Worship.