exist, yet unable to dispense with existence, and so, after all, not
spirit, but only a superfine kind of matter; or as in a picture in the
Campo Santo at Pisa, where the world is figured as a series of
concentric circles, held up like a shield by God standing behind it.

It may be asked, Was not the appearance, and this alone, from all time,
the object of Art? But so long as the figment of a separate reality of
the finite is kept up, an antagonism subsists between this and truth,
and the appearance cannot be frankly made the end, but has only an
indirect, derivative value. In the classic it was the human form in
superhuman perfection; in the early Christian Art, God condescending to
inhabit human shape; in each case, what is given is felt to be negative
to the reality,--a fiction, not the truth.

But now the antagonism falls away, and the truth of Art is felt to be a
higher power of the truth of Nature. Perspective puts the mind in the
place of gravitation as the centre, thus naively declaring mind and not
matter to be the substance of the universe. It will see only this,
feeling well that there is no other reality. It may be said that
Perspective is as much an outward material fact as any other. So it is,
as soon as the point of sight is fixed. The mind alters nothing, but
gives to the objects that coherency that makes them into a world. The
universe has no existence for the idiot, not because it is not _there_,
but because he makes no image of it, or, as we say, does not _mind_ it.
The point of sight is the mark of a foregone action of the mind; what is
embraced in it is seen together, because it belongs to one conception.
The effect can be simulated to a certain extent by mechanical
contrivance; but before the rules of perspective were systematized, the
perspective of a picture betrays its history, tells how much of it was
seen together, and what was added. Even late in the fifteenth century
pictures are still more or less mosaics,--their piecemeal origin
confessed by slight indications in the midst even of very advanced
technical skill. Thus, in Antonio Pollaiuolo's "Three Archangels," in
the Florence Academy,--three admirably drawn figures, abreast, and about
equally distant from the frame, the line of the right wing touches the
head at the same point in each, with no allowance for their different
relations to the centre of the picture.

But there is a deeper kind of perspective, not so easily manufactured,
tho