c brings an ideal object before
the mind which needs, to some extent, translation into terms no longer
musical--terms, for instance, of skill, dramatic passion, or moral
sentiment. But in music pre-eminently, and very largely in all the arts,
external propriety is adventitious; so much can the mere presence and
weight of a symbol fill the mind and constitute an absolute possession.

[Sidenote: Religion and science indirectly cognitive and directly
ideal.]

In religion and science the overt purpose of symbols is to represent
external truths. The inventors of these symbols think they are merely
uncovering a self-existent reality, having in itself the very form seen
in their idea. They do not perceive that the society of God or Nature
is an ideal society, nor that these phantoms, looming in their
imagination, are but significant figments whose existent basis is a
minute and indefinite series of ordinary perceptions. They consequently
attribute whatever value their genial syntheses may have to the object
as they picture it. The gods have, they fancy, the aspect and passions,
the history and influence which their myth unfolds; nature in its turn
contains hypostatically just those laws and forces which are described
by theory. Consequently the presence of God or Nature seems to the
mythologist not an ideal, but a real and mutual society, as if
collateral beings, endowed with the conceived characters, actually
existed as men exist. But this opinion is untenable. As Hobbes said, in
a phrase which ought to be inscribed in golden letters over the head of
every talking philosopher: _No discourse whatsoever can end in absolute
knowledge of fact_. Absolute knowledge of fact is immediate, it is
experiential. We should have to _become_ God or Nature in order to know
for a fact that they existed. Intellectual knowledge, on the other hand,
where it relates to existence, is faith only, a faith which in these
matters means trust. For the forces of Nature or the gods, if they had
crude existence, so that we might conceivably become what they are,
would lose that causal and that religious function which are their
essence respectively. They would be merely collateral existences, loaded
with all sorts of irrelevant properties, parts of the universal flux,
members of a natural society; and while as such they would have their
relative importance, they would be embraced in turn within an
intelligible system of relations, while their rights and