felt the emotional significance of pure form; they are not stupid nor are they generally insensitive, but they use their eyes only to collect information, not to capture emotion.  This habit of using the eyes exclusively to pick up facts is the barrier that stands between most people and an understanding of visual art.  It is not a barrier that has stood unbreached always, nor need it stand so for all future time.

In ages of great spiritual exaltation the barrier crumbles and becomes, in places, less insuperable.  Such ages are commonly called great religious ages:  nor is the name ill-chosen.  For, more often than not, religion is the whetstone on which men sharpen the spiritual sense.  Religion, like art, is concerned with the world of emotional reality, and with material things only in so far as they are emotionally significant.  For the mystic, as for the artist, the physical universe is a means to ecstasy.  The mystic feels things as “ends” instead of seeing them as “means.”  He seeks within all things that ultimate reality which provokes emotional exaltation; and, if he does not come at it through pure form, there are, as I have said, more roads than one to that country.  Religion, as I understand it, is an expression of the individual’s sense of the emotional significance of the universe; I should not be surprised to find that art was an expression of the same thing.  Anyway, both seem to express emotions different from and transcending the emotions of life.  Certainly both have the power of transporting men to superhuman ecstasies; both are means to unearthly states of mind.  Art and religion belong to the same world.  Both are bodies in which men try to capture and keep alive their shyest and most ethereal conceptions.  The kingdom of neither is of this world.  Rightly, therefore, do we regard art and religion as twin manifestations of the spirit; wrongly do some speak of art as a manifestation of religion.

If it were said that art and religion were twin manifestations of something that, for convenience sake, may be called “the religious spirit,” I should make no serious complaint.  But I should insist on the distinction between “religion,” in the ordinary acceptation of the word, and “the religious spirit” being stated beyond all possibility of cavil.  I should insist that if we are to say that art is a manifestation of the religious spirit, we must say the same of every respectable religion that ever has existed or ever can exist.  Above all, I should insist that whoever said it should bear in mind, whenever he said it, that “manifestation” is at least as different from “expression” as Monmouth is from Macedon.