Æsthetic emotion has its origin in a surplus of activity expending itself in a particular direction, under the influence of the creative imagination; and it preserves this fundamental character from the drawings scratched on flints by quaternary man, or the symbolic dances of savages, through the classic ages, to the quintessential refinements of the decadents. It is true that all are not disposed to admit this: a person of delicate artistic temperament, brought up in a very cultured environment, and suddenly thrown into the midst of savage æsthetics, would deny any community of nature, but in this he would be mistaken. Those centuries which had no sense of evolution, of the continuity of development (the seventeenth and eighteenth), could see nothing in the origin of art but incomprehensible crudities, not worth notice. The transition from simplicity to complexity took place through the accumulation of knowledge, of ideas, and technical skill, and of causes or occasions of new ways of feeling: thus were formed juxtaposed aggregates acting by quality and quantity. This progress from simplicity to complexity is seen better than anywhere else in the development of the feeling for music, the most emotional of all the arts. The religious sentiment is not of simple origin. It results: (1) from the fusion of two primary emotions—fear, and love in the larger sense (tender emotion); it is therefore a binary compound; (2) from a process of evolution which we shall have to follow in detail and which depends on intellectual conditions: predominance, first, of images, then of inferior concepts, then of superior concepts. Here, too, the continuity escapes the notice of many who do not see the bond connecting fetichism with the most idealistic of religions. How many travellers and ethnographers, after having ascertained the existence, among a given tribe, of magic, amulets, funeral rites, seriously affirm that these people are devoid of all religious feelings! It is because for them complex and highly organised forms are the only ones that count, and because they are accustomed to think of religious feelings as formulated by the great established religions. II. _Evolution in heterogeneous form._—The primary feeling is transformed to such a degree as to become unrecognisable, and can, in many cases, only be recovered by laborious analysis. This case resembles that of the morphological development of animals: the forms of the adult give no hint of the forms of embryonic and fœtal life. The best example I can give is the genesis of the benevolent emotions, which, however, will be more suitably placed in the next chapter. We can, however, examine another case.