ate and inappropriate, from the Hellenic pantheon, but many
other deities whose right of admission to that pantheon is more than
doubtful. The figures of the gods no longer correspond to the belief in
any real divinities, but are either mere artistic types, repeated again
and again in accordance with convention, or else they are regarded as
symbols representing different aspects of divine power.

Symbolism of this kind is a common symptom of the decay of religious
faith. The more thoughtful or educated classes, who follow the
speculations of philosophers as to the nature of the deity, find it
possible to reconcile these speculations with the forms of popular
religion by accepting the forms in a symbolic sense. The common people,
on the other hand, finding the old forms inadequate to satisfy their
religious aspirations, import new and strange divinities, whose cult is
often mixed with magic or mystic rites. Here, too, the symbols have a
meaning other than what appears to the uninitiated eye, and the province
of art, which approaches the mind through the senses, is closely
circumscribed. A statue or other work of art which needs explanation of
its allusions, which does not express an ideal that appeals directly to
the imagination of the people, has lost touch with religion, and cannot
to any appreciable extent influence it or be influenced by it. The age
of idolatry in the higher sense, of a religious imagination that enables
the artist to bring the people nearer to their gods, or even the gods
nearer to the heart of the people, has passed away, and in its place we
find either a superstitious clinging to the magic power of the early
objects of worship, or a mere acceptance, as conventional symbols, of
forms that bear no direct relation to anything that is believed in as
real.

Our brief historical survey has shown us how the Greeks, starting from a
belief, such as is common to many primitive religions, in the superhuman
powers or sanctity of certain objects, were enabled by their vivid
anthropomorphic imagination first to think of the gods as in like form
to themselves, and then to make their images in human shape. And as
their art progressed towards the power of making a physical type of
perfect beauty to serve as the means of expression of this "human form
divine," and also to skill in expressing character by means of human
features and figures, it became possible for them to embody in their
great statues the various i