e appropriateness
of a stimulus to touch the springs of reaction in the soul.
And they of course have beauty, because in them is embodied
the greatest of our imaginative delights, -- that of giving body to
our latent capacities, and of wandering, without the strain and
contradiction of actual existence, into all forms of possible being.

_The religious imagination._

Sec. 47. The greatest of these creations hare not been the work of any
one man. They have been the slow product of the pious and poetic
imagination. Starting from some personification of nature or some
memory of a great man, the popular and priestly tradition has
refined and developed the ideal; it has made it an expression of
men's aspiration and a counterpart of their need. The devotion of
each tribe, shrine, and psalmist has added some attribute to the god
or some parable to his legend; and thus, around the kernel of some
original divine function, the imagination of a people has gathered
every possible expression of it, creating a complete and beautiful
personality, with its history, its character, and its gifts. No poet has
ever equalled the perfection or significance of these religious
creations. The greatest characters of fiction are uninteresting and
unreal compared with the conceptions of the gods; so much so that
men have believed that their gods have objective reality.

The forms men see in dreams might have been a reason for
believing in vague and disquieting ghosts; but the belief in
individual and well-defined divinities, with which the visions of
the dreams might be identified, is obviously due to the intrinsic
coherence and impressiveness of the conception of those deities.
The visions would never have suggested the legend and attributes
of the god; but when the figure of the god was once imaginatively
conceived, and his name and aspect fixed in the imagination, it
would be easy to recognize him in any hallucination, or to interpret
any event as due to his power. These manifestations, which
constitute the evidence of his actual existence, can be regarded as
manifestations of him, rather than of a vague, unknown power,
only when the imagination already possesses a vivid picture of him,
and of his appropriate functions. This picture is the work of a
spontaneous fancy.

No doubt, when the belief is once specified, and the special and
intelligible god is distinguished in the night and horror of the
all-pervading natural power, the belief in