e rite from
which he sprang, is a half-way house between practical life and art; he
comes into being from a half, but only half, inhibited desire.

* * * * *

Is there, then, no difference, except in degree of detachment, between
religion and art? Both have the like emotional power; both carry with
them a sense of obligation, though the obligation of religion is the
stronger. But there is one infallible criterion between the two which is
all-important, and of wide-reaching consequences. Primitive religion
asserts that her imaginations have objective existence; art more happily
makes no such claim. The worshipper of Apollo believes, not only that he
has imagined the lovely figure of the god and cast a copy of its shape
in stone, but he also believes that in the outside world the god Apollo
exists as an object. Now this is certainly untrue; that is, it does not
correspond with fact. There is no such thing as the god Apollo, and
science makes a clean sweep of Apollo and Dionysos and all such
fictitious objectivities; they are _eidola_, idols, phantasms, not
objective realities. Apollo fades earlier than Dionysos because the
worshipper of Dionysos keeps hold of _the_ reality that he and his
church or group have projected the god. He knows that _prier, c'est
elaborer Dieu_; or, as he would put it, he is "one with" his god.
Religion has this in common with art, that it discredits the actual
practical world; but only because it creates a new world and insists on
its actuality and objectivity.

Why does the conception of a god impose obligation? Just because and in
so far as he claims to have objective existence. By giving to his god
from the outset objective existence the worshipper prevents his god from
taking his place in that high kingdom of spiritual realities which is
the imagination, and sets him down in that lower objective world which
always compels practical reaction. What might have been an ideal becomes
an idol. Straightway this objectified idol compels all sorts of ritual
reactions of prayer and praise and sacrifice. It is as though another
and a more exacting and commanding fellow-man were added to the
universe. But a moment's reflection will show that, when we pass from
the vague sense of power or _mana_ felt by the savage to the personal
god, to Dionysos or Apollo, though it may seem a set back it is a real
advance. It is the substitution of a human and tolerably humane power
fo