nation of the growth of religious
symbolism, and also its gradual decay into decorative art and mnemonic
design. The tendency of related symbolism is toward the identification
of the symbol with that for which it stands, toward personification or
prosopopeia; while what I may call the _secularization_ of symbols is
brought about by regarding them more and more as accidental connections,
by giving them conventional forms, and treating them as elements of
architectural or pictorial design, or as aids to memory.

This tendency of related symbolism depends on a law of applied thought
which has lately been formulated by a distinguished logician in the
following words: "What is true of a thing, is true of its like."[204-1]
The similarity of the symbol to its prototype assumed, the qualities of
the symbol, even those which had no share in deciding its selection, no
likeness to the original, were lumped, and transferred to the divinity.
As those like by similarity, so those unlike, were identified by
contiguity, as traits of the unknown power. This is the active element
in the degeneracy of religious idealism. The cow or the bull, chosen
first as a symbol of creation or fecundity, led to a worship of the
animal itself, and a transfer of its traits, even to its horns, to the
god. In a less repulsive form, the same tendency shows itself in the
pietistic ingenuity of such poets as Adam de Sancto Victore and George
Herbert, who delight in taking some biblical symbol, and developing from
it a score of applications which the original user never dreamt of. In
such hands a chance simile grows to an elaborate myth.

Correct thought would prevent the extension of the value of the symbol
beyond the original element of similarity. More than this, it would
recognize the fact that similarity does not suppose identity, but the
reverse, to wit, defect of likeness; and this dissimilitude must be the
greater, as the original and symbol are naturally discrepant. The
supernatual,[TN-11] however, whether by this term we mean the unknown or
the universal--still more if we mean the incomprehensible--is utterly
discrepant with the known, except by an indefinitely faint analogy. In
the higher thought, therefore, the symbol loses all trace of identity
and becomes merely emblematic.

The ancients defended symbolic teaching on this very ground, that the
symbol left so much unexplained, that it stimulated the intellect and
trained it to profounder thinki