16 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
beliefs as illusory or false. It can become art only for him
who no longer believes in it and avails himself of mythology
as a metaphor, of the austere world of the gods as of a
beautiful world, of God as of an image of sublimity. Con-
sidered, then, in its genuine reality, in the soul of the believer
and not of the unbeliever, it is religion and not simple fancy;
and religion is philosophy, philosophy in process of becom-
ing, philosophy more or less imperfect, but philosophy, as
philosophy is religion, more or less purified and elaborated,
in continuous process of elaboration and purification, but
religion or thought of the Absolute or Eternal. Art lacks
the thought that is necessary ere it can become myth and
religion, and the faith that is born of thought; the artist
neither believes nor disbelieves in his image: he produces
it. And, for a different reason, the concept of art as in-
tuition excludes, on the other hand, the conception of art as
the production of classes and types, species and genera, or
again (as a great mathematician and philosopher had occa-
sion to say of music), as an exercise of unconscious arith-
metic; that is, it distinguishes art from the positive sciences
and from mathematics, in both of which appears the con-
ceptual form, though without realistic character, as mere
general representation or mere abstraction. But that ideal-
ity which natural and mathematical science would seem to
assume, as opposed to the -world of philosophy, of religion
and of history, and which would seem to approximate it to
art (and owing to which scientists and mathematicians of
our day are so ready to boast of creating worlds, of fictiones,
resembling the fictions and figurations of the poets, even in
their vocabulary), is gained with the renunciation of con-
crete thought, by means of generalisation and abstraction,
which are capricious, volitional decisions, practical acts, and,