concrete experience--the union of life and
peace.

[Sidenote: The ideal, when incarnate, becomes subject to civil society.]

[Sidenote: Plato's strictures: he exaggerates the effect of myths.]

The ideal, however, would not come down from the empyrean and be
conceived unless somebody's thought were absorbed in the conception. Art
actually segregates classes of men and masses of matter to serve its
special interests. This involves expense; it impedes some possible
activities and imposes others. On this ground, from the earliest times
until our own, art has been occasionally attacked by moralists, who have
felt that it fostered idolatry or luxury or irresponsible dreams. Of
these attacks the most interesting is Plato's, because he was an artist
by temperament, bred in the very focus of artistic life and discussion,
and at the same time a consummate moral philosopher. His aethetic
sensibility was indeed so great that it led him, perhaps, into a
relative error, in that he overestimated the influence which art can
have on character and affairs. Homer's stories about the gods can
hardly have demoralised the youths who recited them. No religion has
ever given a picture of deity which men could have imitated without the
grossest immorality. Yet these shocking representations have not had a
bad effect on believers. The deity was opposed to their own vices; those
it might itself be credited with offered no contagious example. In spite
of the theologians, we know by instinct that in speaking of the gods we
are dealing in myths and symbols. Some aspect of nature or some law of
life, expressed in an attribute of deity, is what we really regard, and
to regard such things, however sinister they may be, cannot but chasten
and moralise us. The personal character that such a function would
involve, if it were exercised willingly by a responsible being, is
something that never enters our thoughts. No such painful image comes to
perplex the plain sense of instinctive, poetic religion. To give moral
importance to myths, as Plato tended to do, is to take them far too
seriously and to belittle what they stand for. Left to themselves they
float in an ineffectual stratum of the brain. They are understood and
grow current precisely by not being pressed, like an idiom or a
metaphor. The same aesthetic sterility appears at the other end of the
scale, where fancy is anything but sacred. A Frenchman once saw in
"Punch and Judy" a shocking proof o