in the triumph of good, them despair over the triumph of evil, and
their raptures in the consciousness of the approaching bliss of man,
on viol and tabret, in images and words. Always, down to the most
recent times, art has served science and life,--only then was it
what has been so highly esteemed of men. But art, in its capacity
of an important human activity, disappeared simultaneously with the
substitution for the genuine science of destiny and welfare, of the
science of any thing you choose to fancy. Art has existed among all
peoples, and will exist until that which among us is scornfully
called religion has come to be considered the only science.

In our European world, so long as there existed a Church, as the
doctrine of destiny and welfare, and so long as the Church was
regarded as the only true science, art served the Church, and
remained true art: but as soon as art abandoned the Church, and
began to serve science, while science served whatever came to hand,
art lost its significance. And notwithstanding the rights claimed
on the score of ancient memories, and of the clumsy assertion which
only proves its loss of its calling, that art serves art, it has
become a trade, providing men with something agreeable; and as such,
it inevitably comes into the category of choreographic, culinary,
hair-dressing, and cosmetic arts, whose practitioners designate
themselves as artists, with the same right as the poets, printers,
and musicians of our day.

Glance backward into the past, and you will see that in the course
of thousands of years, out of milliards of people, only half a score
of Confucius', Buddhas, Solomons, Socrates, Solons, and Homers have
been produced. Evidently, they are rarely met with among men, in
spite of the fact that these men have not been selected from a