Born in the artist's soul, of the subjective activity of his ego, the symbol addresses itself much less to the pure intellect than to the inner life and to the emotions of those who contemplate it. It awakes and sets in motion the subjective activity of the ego; it has produced its whole effect when it has produced in us the emotions, the transport, the enthusiasm, the faith, that the poet himself experienced in engendering it. Such is the source and the explanation of "the magic of art," of eloquence, of religious inspiration. All the creators of living symbols pour their soul into our soul, their life into our life. They subjugate and ravish us. By symbols, much better than by scientific notions, the community and fraternity of spirits is realised, and the fusion of souls into a collective consciousness effected; a consciousness which includes all individual minds and tunes them into harmony; the consciousness of a nation, of a church, of humanity. It is not science that rules the world--it is symbols. Inferior to the exact ideas of science in logical clearness, symbolic forms are superior to them in power and reach. Science is forcibly arrested at the surface of things, at the appearances continually arising in the universe. In it is found neither the principle of energy, nor, consequently, the secret of life, or the key to our destiny. You seek the meaning and the end of your action; you ask for some sufficient reason for living; do you not feel that it is contradictory to address yourself to the science of phenomena, seeing that, from the strictly scientific point of view, phenomena have not in themselves their own _raison d'etre_? That which you seek is beyond phenomena, and it is symbols alone that can, not make you comprehend it, but reveal it to you. Since Nature may become and does become, in art and in religion, the constant symbol of the inner life of spirit and of its normal development,--since it is susceptible of this perpetual and glorious transfiguration by spirit,--it is impossible not to admit the inner correspondence of the laws of Nature and the laws of conscious life, and to believe in their deep unity. It is, in fact, secret and powerful analogies which rule and inspire symbolical creations. Art and religion are more than conventions; they are revelations of that which is hidden at once in spirit and in Nature, of the principle of Being itself, of the absolute energy which is manifested, parallelly, in the unfolding of the physical universe and of the moral universe. All things cover some mystery; phenomena are simply veils. That is why, by their very destination, they become symbols.