conscious and their striving more energetic. At last appeared the man
who was the pupil of nobody, the heir of everybody, who felt profoundly
and powerfully what to his precursors had been vague instinct, who saw
and expressed the meaning of it all. The seed that produced him had
already flowered into a Giotto, and once again into a Masaccio; in him,
the last of his race, born in conditions artistically most propitious,
all the energies remaining in his stock were concentrated, and in him
Florentine art had its logical culmination.

[Page heading: ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ART]

Michelangelo had a sense for the materially significant as great as
Giotto's or Masaccio's, but he possessed means of rendering, inherited
from Donatello, Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio and Leonardo,--means that had
been undreamt of by Giotto or even by Masaccio. Add to this that he saw
clearly what before him had been felt only dimly, that there was no
other such instrument for conveying material significance as the human
nude. This fact is as closely dependent on the general conditions of
realising objects as tactile values are on the psychology of sight. We
realise objects when we perfectly translate them into terms of our own
states, our own feelings. So obviously true is this, that even the least
poetically inclined among us, because we keenly realise the movement of
a railway train, to take one example out of millions, speak of it as
_going_ or _running_, instead of _rolling on its wheels_, thus being no
less guilty of anthropomorphising than the most unregenerate savages. Of
this same fallacy we are guilty every time we think of anything
whatsoever with the least warmth--we are lending this thing some human
attributes. The more we endow it with human attributes, the less we
merely know it, the more we realise it, the more does it approach the
work of art. Now there is one and only one object in the visible