ception of true and great gods as existent in
the universe; and absolutely cease to think of them as in any wise
present in statues or images; but they have now learned to make these
statues beautifully human, and to surround them with attributes that may
concentrate their thoughts of the gods. This is, in Greece, accurately
the Pindaric time, just a little preceding the Phidian; the Phidian is
already dimmed with a faint shadow of infidelity; still, the Olympic
Zeus may be taken as a sufficiently central type of a statue which was
no more supposed to _be_ Zeus, than the gold or elephants' tusks it was
made of; but in which the most splendid powers of human art were
exhausted in representing a believed and honoured God to the happy and
holy imagination of a sincerely religious people.

49. (III.) The third stage of national existence follows, in which, the
imagination having now done its utmost, and being partly restrained by
the sanctities of tradition, which permit no farther change in the
conceptions previously created, begins to be superseded by logical
deduction and scientific investigation. At the same moment, the elder
artists having done all that is possible in realizing the national
conceptions of the Gods, the younger ones, forbidden to change the
scheme of existing representations, and incapable of doing anything
better in that kind, betake themselves to refine and decorate the old
ideas with more attractive skill. Their aims are thus more and more
limited to manual dexterity, and their fancy paralyzed. Also, in the
course of centuries, the methods of every art continually improving, and
being made subjects of popular inquiry, praise is now to be got, for
eminence in these, from the whole mob of the nation; whereas
intellectual design can never be discerned but by the few. So that in
this third aera, we find every kind of imitative and vulgar dexterity
more and more cultivated; while design and imagination are every day
less cared for, and less possible.

50. Meanwhile, as I have just said, the leading minds in literature and
science become continually more logical and investigative; and, once
that they are established in the habit of testing facts accurately, a
very few years are enough to convince all the strongest thinkers that
the old imaginative religion is untenable, and cannot any longer be
honestly taught in its fixed traditional form, except by ignorant
persons. And at this point the fate of the peo