tomb itself is always a religious symbol, and, with temples, altars, shrines, sacred enclosures, and holy structures of all vari eties, finds its motive not in the direction of use or pleasure, but iu the satisfaction of the sentiments of piety.
Influence of Religious Sentiment on the Development of the Arts.— These sentiments, as we shall see on a later page, differ both in kind and degree in races and nations, and correlatively with them does the atten tion paid to arts of religious purpose. The result is conspicuous, and offers some extremely difficult problems in the study of the evolution of the arts in general. Indeed, it has been, and remains, an undecided point in the history of art whether its association with religious aspirations has benefited or retarded it. On the one hand, we have the school of those who point to the bloom of Greek Art in the age of Pericles and of Mod ern Art in the days of Raphael and Michelangelo, and claim that such work as was then produced could only arise out of the deep aspirations of religion and from meditation on glories and beauties beyond those of earth; while, on the other hand, we have the school at the head of which stood the great Goethe, who proclaimed that the true impulse of art is the universal in humanity, that it is above all state policy or religious doctrine, and that it is derogatory to its claims to bind it to the promulgation of any creed or theory. Art for its own sake, l' art our art, is the motto
of that school.
The question is still open. It cannot be decided by assertion or by a Priori reasoning. Its answer lies in the past history of art studied in the light of the psychology of races and nations. It is with art as it is with language: there are no laws of its development which hold good in all ages and throughout all nations. Each instance must be studied by itself. Associations which with one nation advanced artistic culture in another may have impeded it. Religions—eminently so Christianity itself— which have at certain periods favored art have at others used their utmost endeavors to vitiate or destroy it.