In this instance we can study the soul of three Cultures working upon very similar tasks in very dissimilar ways. The Apollinian Culture recognized as actual only that which was immediately present in time and place—and thus it repudiated the background as pictorial element. The Faustian strove through all sensuous barriers towards infinity—and it projected the centre of gravity of the pictorial idea into the distance by means of perspective. The Magian felt all happening as an expression of mysterious powers that filled the world-cavern with their spiritual substance—and it shut off the depicted scene with a gold background, that is, by something that stood beyond and outside all nature-colours. Gold is not a colour. As compared with simple yellow, it produces a complicated sense-impression, through the metallic, diffuse refulgence that is generated by its glowing surface. Colours—whether coloured substance incorporated with the smoothed wall-face (fresco) or pigment applied with the brush—are natural. But the metallic gleam, which is practically never found in natural conditions, is unearthly.[311] It recalls impressively the other symbols of the Culture, Alchemy and Kabbala, the Philosophers’ Stone, the Holy Scriptures, the Arabesque, the inner form of the tales of the “Thousand and One Nights.” The gleaming gold takes away from the scene, the life and the body their substantial being. Everything that was taught in the circle of Plotinus or by the Gnostics as to the nature of things, their independence of space, their accidental causes—notions paradoxical and almost unintelligible to _our_ world-feeling—is implicit also in the symbolism of this mysterious hieratic background. The nature of bodies was a principal subject of controversy amongst Neo-Pythagoreans and Neo- Platonists, as it was later in the schools of Baghdad and Basra. Suhrawardi distinguishes extension, as the primary existence of the body, from width and height and depth as its accidents. Nazzâm pronounced against the corporeal substantiality and space-filling character of the atom. These and the like were the metaphysical notions that, from Philo and Paul to the last great names of the Islamic philosophy, manifested the Arabian world-feeling. They played a decisive part in the disputes of the Councils upon the substantiality of Christ.[312] And thus the gold background possesses, in the iconography of the Western Church, an explicit dogmatic significance. It is an express assertion of the existence and activity of the divine spirit. It represents the _Arabian_ form of the Christian world-consciousness, and with such a deep appropriateness that for a thousand years this treatment of the background was held to be the only one metaphysically— and even ethically—possible and seemly in representations of the Christian legend. When “natural” backgrounds, with their blue-green heavens, far horizons and depth perspective, began to appear in early