and the
destruction of that unity of motive and harmonious association so
essential to the proper exhibition of art. For it is essential that
every variety of artistic development should be associated solely
with those objects or conditions most in keeping with its
inspirations. In this way we quickest come to an understanding of its
originating idea, and sympathize with its feeling, tracing its
progress from infancy to maturity and decay, and comparing it as a
whole with corresponding or rival varieties of artistic development.
This systematized variety of one great unity is of the highest
importance in placing the spectator in affinity with art as a whole
and with its diversities of character, and in giving him sound
stand-points of comparison and criticism. In this way, as in the Louvre,
feeling and thought are readily transported from one epoch of
civilization to another, grasping the motives and execution of each
with pleasurable accuracy. We perceive that no conventional standard
of criticism, founded upon the opinions or fashions of one age, is
applicable to all. To rightly comprehend each, we must broadly survey
the entire ground of art, and make ourselves for the time members, as
it were, of the political and social conditions of life that give
origin to the objects of our investigations. This philosophical mode
of viewing art does not exclude an aesthetic point of view, but rather
heightens that and makes it more intelligible. Paganism would be
subdivided into the various national forms that illustrated its rise
and fall. Egypt, India, China, Assyria, Greece, Etruria, and Rome,
would stand each by itself as a component part of a great whole: so
with Christianity, in such shapes as have already taken foothold in
history, the Latin, Byzantine, Lombard, Mediaeval, Renaissant, and
Protestant art, subdivided into its diversified schools or leading
ideas, all graphically arranged so as to demonstrate, amid the
infinite varieties of humanity, a divine unity of origin and design,
linking together mankind in one common family.

Beside statuary and paintings, an institution of this nature should
contain specimens of every kind of industry in which art is the
primary inspiration, to illustrate the qualities and degrees of
social refinement in nations and eras. This would include every
variety of ornamental art in which invention and skill are
conspicuous, as well as those works more directly inspired by higher
motives