If we try to explain why it is that the subordination of all characters under one “faculté maîtresse,” although unfavourable to scientific comprehension, is nevertheless so useful for artistic representation, we shall be unavoidably led to that distinction between scientific and artistic purposes which has been overlooked in the intellectualistic systems of æsthetic. The work of art does not claim to give us, nor do we expect to receive from it, increased knowledge as to the real nature or predominant characters of things and events. We only wish to get the clearest and strongest impression of the feelings with which an object has been contemplated by the artist. It is therefore to the psychological conditions for conveying a feeling-state by help of intellectual mediation that we should look for the explanation of those laws of artistic composition which Vischer and Taine have interpreted in a manner exclusively intellectualistic, and therefore unæsthetic. The desire to fix a passing emotional state—in order to facilitate either the revival of the same state or its transmission to outsiders—by help of intellectual elements with which the feelings have been associated, is not restricted to the purely artistic mental processes. In religion and in love this endeavour to evade the transience of feeling is especially evident. And here we may observe a selection of the intellectual elements and a mode of treating them, which, although it cannot be called artistic, is nevertheless somewhat analogous to the selective treatment of nature which takes place in artistic representation. The institutors of religion have all been well aware of the fact that it is not immaterial what kind of ideas and sensations are chosen to embody a feeling. They have understood how impossible it is to impress an emotional state on the mind by the mediation of complex conceptions, which, to be fully apperceived, necessitate a particular activity of the intellectual functions. When seeking a means of conveying and perpetuating their deepest teaching, they have always, more instinctively perhaps than by any process of conscious search, been led to intellectual notions of the simplest possible kind. A single impression of sight, touch, or even of taste, may thus, by artificial association, be made the bearer of an emotional content which could not possibly be conveyed with anything like the same fulness by a less concentrated medium. In virtue, therefore, of their very simplicity, the vehicles and symbols of religious ritualism are the most powerful of all means of emotional suggestion. They offer us a simple impression which we can easily embrace with our senses, and by the aid of which we can infuse into our mind a rich complex of all the moods, such as reverence, ecstasy, and awe, which enter in the religious state.