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One thing will have struck our readers throughout the foregoing argument. It has been impossible to avoid a certain tendency towards confusing terms. For instance, stress has been laid upon three factors in Greek life, as exercising an immense influence upon Hellenic sculpture—civic pride, a deep tolerance in religious opinion, and an intense feeling for physical strength and beauty. Yet, directly we have come to grips with these conceptions, they have appeared to be inextricably commingled. The Greek’s pride in his city-state, his absorption in physical beauty, are religious in their fervour and in the way in which they are utilized to uphold a strenuous moral ideal. Again, the actions which are most akin to what we term religion nowadays, closely resemble philosophy in their rigid rejection of everything approaching mysticism.

In relating any art to the social and political circumstances which gave it birth, it is all-important to remember that the distinctions between such terms as science, art, religion, and philosophy are more or less arbitrary. In the earliest times men did not distinguish between any of the four. When the skin-clad dweller in the forests gazed upon the lightning flashing among the oak branches, and imaged the angry ruler of earth and sky, he did not separate the explanation of the natural phenomenon from the symbolical incarnation, or both from the religious belief. Nor was this less so when the human mind rose to more complex conceptions. The Pueblo Indian, for instance, recognizes a Sky-god and an Earth-goddess, the parents of all living things. The Sky-god passes across the heavens with the blazing shield of the sun’s disc in his hand, to vanish beyond the portals of the dark underworld where the spirits of the dead are at rest. This is at once the science, the art, and the religion of the Pueblo Indian. It satisfies two elemental cravings of his nature. In the first place it translates the phenomena of the natural world into terms which his reason can grasp. In the second place it satisfies his yearning for some superior will—we call this God—to which he may attribute the purpose and order which he instinctively assumes in the world.