Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1877 edition. Excerpt: ... religion is not that of the leaders. The imaginations of the uneducated are incapable of being animated by the enthusiasms that inspire our men of genius. The essential religion of the leaders is not sufficiently sensuous to reach them; and the only remedy I can conceive is the education of the masses. As to Art, the love of it, except as the result of a special and systematic culture, and as an acquisition of the educated, must grow up in a people with Art itself, and with a sentiment of it as a distinction in which the people have a conscious pride. To be a persistent and effective sentiment, other than a love of the beautiful in general, it must be like a mother's love for her children, greater because they are hers than because they are beautiful. And, speaking of the sensuous in religion, the Roman Church bases her power on its catholicity. Is not this "the power of bells and banners over the human soul," of which you speak, -- the power, namely, of the senses over the human soul? The startling, vivid, pungent effects on the senses are connected by an original endowment of our natures with a whole circle of emotions. Terror, anger, mirth, enthusiasm, are in turn excited by them. The first essential psychological principle of the bell or the banner is that which causes terror in the birds or anger in the bull, mirth in the child, or enthusiasm in the devotee, according as other and subordinate sensuous effects and mental associations determine the specific character of the emotions. You see that I have followed the question-and-answer system, or rather the answer system, in spite of your injunction, "that a letter should bear some impress of one's circumstances;" but I am not sure that I have in fact violated the rule, since the only...
