and the Virgin Mary have received ideal representation at the hands of more recent painters. But it is of no use. Our knees no longer bow to them. The sphere of conscious life nearest to that of art is that of religion. The form which belongs to the religious consciousness is that of the _imaginative concept._ The Absolute is here removed from the externality of artistic production, and received in a more spiritual way by the imagination, so that the heart and emotions, the inner life of the individual that is to say, become its vehicle. This progress in spiritual insight from art to religion may be further defined by the statement that art is only one aspect of the religious consciousness. In other words, when a work of art objectifies the truth or mind for sense-perfection, and apprehends this form of the Absolute as the one appropriate to its vision, religion blends with the same the devotional attitude that flows from the inner life confronted with the absolute reality as thus presented. Devotion is a type of emotional existence which is, strictly speaking, outside the province of art. It originates in the fact that the individual suffers that object which art has rendered visible to sense to penetrate the arcana of his emotional life, and so completely identifies himself with it that this inward presence, which the imagination and the inherent might of feeling has rendered possible, becomes an essential phase in the manifestation of absolute reality. Devotion is this cultus of the community in its purest, most intimate, and subjective form; a culture, in which the principle of objectivity is at the same time consumed and absorbed, and the content thereof is transmuted without such objectivity into the possession of heart and soul.