the grandest
and wholesomest functions of the human soul; and that the essence of
evil idolatry begins only in the idea or belief of a real presence of
any kind, in a thing in which there is no such presence.

46. I need not say that the harm of the idolatry must depend on the
certainty of the negative. If there be a real presence in a pillar of
cloud, in an unconsuming flame, or in a still small voice, it is no sin
to bow down before these.

But, as matter of historical fact, the idea of such presence has
generally been both ignoble and false, and confined to nations of
inferior race, who are often condemned to remain for ages in conditions
of vile terror, destitute of thought. Nearly all Indian architecture and
Chinese design arise out of such a state: so also, though in a less
gross degree, Ninevite and Phoenician art, early Irish, and
Scandinavian; the latter, however, with vital elements of high intellect
mingled in it from the first.

But the greatest races are never grossly subject to such terror, even in
their childhood, and the course of their minds is broadly divisible into
three distinct stages.

47. (I.) In their infancy they begin to imitate the real animals about
them, as my little girl made the cats and mice, but with an
under-current of partial superstition--a sense that there must be more
in the creatures than they can see; also they catch up vividly any of
the fancies of the baser nations round them, and repeat these more or
less apishly, yet rapidly naturalizing and beautifying them. They then
connect all kinds of shapes together, compounding meanings out of the
old chimeras, and inventing new ones with the speed of a running
wildfire; but always getting more of man into their images, and
admitting less of monster or brute; their own characters, meanwhile,
expanding and purging themselves, and shaking off the feverish fancy, as
springing flowers shake the earth off their stalks.

48. (II.) In the second stage, being now themselves perfect men and
women, they reach the conception of true and great gods as existent in
the universe; and absolutely cease to think of them as in any wise
present in statues or images; but they have now learned to make these
statues beautifully human, and to surround them with attributes that may
concentrate their thoughts of the gods. This is, in Greece, accurately
the Pindaric time, just a little preceding the Phidian; the Phidian is
already dimmed with a faint shado