subdues the world about him first by force and then by reason; and when the material world is mastered and lies at his beck, he needs brute force no longer, and needs reason no more to make tools for conquest.  He is free to think for thought’s sake, he may trust intuition once again, and above all dare to lose himself in contemplation, dare to be more and more an artist.  Only here there lurks an almost ironical danger.  Emotion towards life is the primary stuff of which art is made; there might be a shortage of this very emotional stuff of which art herself is ultimately compacted.

Science, then, helps to make art possible by making life safer and easier, it “makes straight in the desert a highway for our God.”  But only rarely and with special limitations easily understood does it provide actual material for art.  Science deals with abstractions, concepts, class names, made by the intellect for convenience, that we may handle life on the side desirable to us.  When we classify things, give them class-names, we simply mean that we note for convenience that certain actually existing objects have similar qualities, a fact it is convenient for us to know and register.  These class-names being abstract—­that is, bundles of qualities rent away from living actual objects, do not easily stir emotion, and, therefore, do not easily become material for art whose function it is to express and communicate emotion.  Particular qualities, like love, honour, faith, may and do stir emotion; and certain bundles of qualities like, for example, motherhood tend towards personification; but the normal class label like horse, man, triangle does not easily become material for art; it remains a practical utility for science.

The abstractions, the class-names of science are in this respect quite different from those other abstractions or unrealities already studied—­the gods of primitive religion.  The very term we use shows this. Abstractions are things, qualities, dragged away consciously by the intellect, from actual things objectively existing.  The primitive gods are personifications—­i.e. collective emotions taking shape in imagined form.  Dionysos has no more actual, objective existence than the abstract horse.  But the god Dionysos was not made by the intellect for practical convenience, he was begotten by emotion, and, therefore, he re-begets it.  He and all the other gods are, therefore, the proper material for art; he is, indeed, one of the earliest forms of art.  The abstract horse, on the other hand, is the outcome of reflection.  We must honour him as of quite extraordinary use for the purposes of practical life, but he leaves us cold and, by the artist, is best neglected.

* * * * *

There remains the relation of Art to Religion.[56] By now, it may be hoped, this relation is transparently clear.  The whole object of the present book has been to show how primitive art grew out of ritual, how art is in fact but a later and more sublimated, more detached form of ritual.  We saw further that the primitive gods themselves were but projections or, if we like it better, personifications of the rite.  They arose straight out of it.