Here, too, the symbols have a meaning other than what appears to the uninitiated eye, and the province of art, which approaches the mind through the senses, is closely circumscribed.

A statue or other work of art which needs explanation of its allusions, which does not express an ideal that appeals directly to the imagination of the people, has lost touch with religion, and cannot to any appreciable extent influence it or be influenced by it.

The age of idolatry in the higher sense, of a religious imagination that enables the artist to bring the people nearer to their gods, or even the gods nearer to the heart of the people, has passed away, and in its place we find either a superstitious clinging to the magic power of the early objects of worship, or a mere acceptance, as conventional symbols, of forms that bear no direct relation to anything that is believed in as real.
Our brief historical survey has shown us how the Greeks, starting from a belief, such as is common to many primitive religions, in the superhuman powers or sanctity of certain objects, were enabled by their vivid anthropomorphic imagination first to think of the gods as in like form to themselves, and then to make their images in human shape.

And as their art progressed towards the power of making a physical type of perfect beauty to serve as the means of expression of this "human form divine," and also to skill in expressing character by means of human features and figures, it became possible for them to embody in their great statues the various ideals of divinity which belonged to their chief gods.

Here the skill of the artist would have availed little or nothing if he had not shared with the people for whom he worked a belief in the reality of these ideals, not merely as philosophic aspects of the divine nature, but as real beings who were able to help and to inspire, and to manifest themselves to their worshippers in this human form.