ntelligence, a secondary and merely symbolic world.

[Sidenote: In translating existence into human terms they give human
nature its highest exercise.]

When this diversity between the truest theory and the simplest fact,
between potential generalities and actual particulars, has been
thoroughly appreciated, it becomes clear that much of what is valued in
science and religion is not lodged in the miscellany underlying these
creations of reason, but is lodged rather in the rational activity
itself, and in the intrinsic beauty of all symbols bred in a genial
mind. Of course, if these symbols had no real points of reference, if
they were symbols of nothing, they could have no great claim to
consideration and no rational character; at most they would be agreeable
sensations. They are, however, at their best good symbols for a
diffused experience having a certain order and tendency; they render
that reality with a difference, reducing it to a formula or a myth, in
which its tortuous length and trivial detail can be surveyed to
advantage without undue waste or fatigue. Symbols may thus become
eloquent, vivid, important, being endowed with both poetic grandeur and
practical truth.

The facts from which this truth is borrowed, if they were rehearsed
unimaginatively, in their own flat infinity, would be far from arousing
the same emotions. The human eye sees in perspective; its glory would
vanish were it reduced to a crawling, exploring antenna. Not that it
loves to falsify anything. That to the worm the landscape might possess
no light and shade, that the mountain's atomic structure should be
unpicturable, cannot distress the landscape gardener nor the poet; what
concerns them is the effect such things may produce in the human fancy,
so that the soul may live in a congenial world.

Naturalist and prophet are landscape painters on canvases of their own;
each is interested in his own perception and perspective, which, if he
takes the trouble to reflect, need not deceive him about what the world
would be if not foreshortened in that particular manner. This special
interpretation is nevertheless precious and shows up the world in that
light in which it interests naturalists or prophets to see it. Their
figments make their chosen world, as the painter's apperceptions are
the breath of his nostrils.

[Sidenote: Science should be mathematical and religion anthropomorphic.]

While the symbol's applicability is essential to its wo