These materials are furnished by history or fable. They are the antecedents, the local particulars, which give to the gods their living individuality and originality. Some are borrowed from the symbolic religions, which preserve a vestige thereof in the new creation; the symbolic element is absorbed in the new myth. Others have a national origin, which, again, is connected with heroic times and foreign traditions. Others, finally, spring from local circumstances, relating to the propagation of the myths, to their formation, to the usages and ceremonies of worship, etc. All these materials fashioned by art, give to the Greek gods the appearance, the interest, and the charm, of living humanity. But this traditional side, which in its origin had a symbolic sense, loses it little by little; it is designed only to complete the individuality of the gods, to give to them a more human and more sensuous form, to add, through details frequently unworthy of divine majesty, the side of the arbitrary and accidental. Sculpture, which represents the pure ideal, ought, without wholly excluding it in fact, to allow it to appear as little as possible; it represents it as accessory in the head-dress, the arms, the ornaments, the external attributes. Another source for the more precise determination of the character of the gods is their intervention in the actions and circumstances of human life. Here the imagination of the poet expands itself as an inexhaustible source in a crowd of particular histories, of traits of character and actions, attributed to the gods. The problem of art consists in combining, in a natural and living manner, the actions of divine personages and human actions, in such a manner that the gods appear as the general cause of what man himself accomplishes. The gods, thus, are the internal principles which reside in the depths of the human soul; its own passions, in so far as they are elevated, and its personal thought; or it is the necessity of the situation, the force of circumstances, from whose fatal action man suffers. It is this which pierces through all the situations where Homer causes the gods to intervene, and through the manner in which they influence events. But through this side, the gods of classic art abandon, more and more, the silent serenity of the ideal, to descend into the multiplicity of individual situations, of actions, and into the conflict of human passions. Classic art thus finds itself drawn to the last degree of individualization; it falls into the agreeable and the graceful. The divine is absorbed in the finite which is addressed exclusively to the sensibility and no longer satisfies thought. Imagination and art, seizing this side and exaggerating it more and more, corrupt religion itself. The severe ideal gives place to merely sensuous beauty and harmony; it removes itself more and more from the eternal ideas which form the ground of religion and art, and these are dragged down to ruin.