In such a case religious conversion is the object of the preacher; but whether such a conversion follows as a result of all the edification and excellence of his eloquent exhortations, and thus the end proposed is carried out, is a point of view which the sermon itself cannot deal with; it must be perforce relegated to subsequent conditions. (_γγ_) In all these directions the notion of eloquence will fall rather under the main principle of utility than maintain itself within the free and organized whole of the poetical art-product. In short the orator must necessarily and above all make it his mark to subordinate the whole, no less than the parts, to that purpose in his mind, from which his effort proceeds, a process in which the self-consistent independence of his exposition disappears, and in lieu of which we must assume a relation of service to a definite end that ceases to be of artistic significance. And above all, inasmuch as the object in view is one of practical influence upon human life, he must keep throughout before his mind the nature of the place in which he speaks, the degree of education, the receptive powers, and, in short, the general atmosphere of his audience, that he may not fall short of the practical success desired through an inability to meet the local conditions of the moment, and the idiosyncrasies of his audience. By reason of this very attachment to external conditions it is impossible that either the entirety of his address or its parts can any longer originate in a free artistic activity[15]; it will constantly tend in its detailed elaboration to appropriate utilitarian points of association, and be dominated by conceptions of cause and effect, and other categories more proper to science. (_c_) And, _thirdly_, we may, as flowing from the above distinction between what is really poetical and the creations of the historian and the orator, establish the following points pertinent to the poetical composition itself. (_α_) We found that in history the element of prose consisted above all in this that however much the content thereof could be ideally substantive and possessed of a downright penetrative power, the actual form of the same was, however, invariably accompanied with many conditions of relative validity, massed together with much that was contingent, and finally often referable to caprice simply as its ground, aspects of immediate objective fact which the historian was not entitled to translate into the terms of a reality of profounder grasp.