Artists who come to terms with artist and his or her work can be used constructively; artists both personal limitations and the limitations of the external need the resistance of the world against which to form their world need not despair; instead, they can attempt to make personalities.
They the territory. Artists face, other pleasures and desires; they live life fully without attempt- and must overcome, inhibitions — apparent failures of will — ing to cheat or bribe death. Their creative work is intrinsically along the way. Rank understood this well and first wrote about meaningful and rewarding.
He thought Dorian Gray remains forever young. Rank, with his continuing of himself at first as one of the rare individuals Freud singled interest in folk beliefs and mythological themes, traced the idea out as constitutionally predisposed to creativity. It is clear Encyclopedia of Creativity, Second Edition , vol. Freud had had in mind. Among those we know he admired to begin with were ous. Rank briefly recanted some of his views, but by it Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and had become clear that their differences were irreconcilable; Henrik Ibsen.
Back in New York and Philadelphia that community in Paris and New York who flocked to see him, and year for lectures, Rank was now explicating his fully indepen- in whom he saw himself reflected. The separation from writings have actually survived him. Rank poured himself into what had become Freudianism was now complete. With his colleague Ferenzci, Rank included books that took a broad social and cultural perspec- published The Development of Psychoanalysis in in it they tive on religion, education, and art.
They painful experience of separation into a creative act of willing. In so doing, they paved the way toward an Psychology and the Soul, first published in , challenged approach to psychotherapy in which the real relationship other psychological interpretations. Freud had a materialistic between client and therapist is acknowledged and appreciated. The future. Returning to a theme he previously steps.
The emphasis oughly modern thinker. Rank was by this time preting the fantasies projected onto the therapist. He argued that notions like relativity and plement to the intellectual understandings possible in analysis. Encyclopedia of Creativity, Second Edition , vol. Here again, Rank challenged an lived, not more interpretation.
While scious and not just an interpretation of it , and that emotional he saw in both of these approaches an advance over authoritar- expression in therapy is nothing but a projection, a transference ian educational systems of his day, he felt neither adequately onto the therapist. Rank claimed that what is unconscious is the addressed the emerging will of the child.
Rank also pro- and that we need to allow for the irrational in life. Rank had been in poor individual learn a vocation. He traveled with Estelle Buel to the western mined job-description. Rank was himself an interdisciplinary United States. Once his divorce from Beata was finalized, he thinker and an inspiring educator who, through his teaching married Estelle in July.
Returning to New York in September, and his example, influenced numerous psychologists and social just as the Second World War was beginning, Rank learned workers to find their own integrative paths. Ironically, Rank was were well received and some of his books had been translated briefly hospitalized soon after with a kidney problem, and then into French and English. Rank resisted establishing a school of struggled at home with infection and fever. There he continued lecturing and practicing.
Various myths and instinctual drives, Rank saw conscious choice and intention rumors about Rank e. As suggested by of architects. Rank is also receiving had dealt with previously: neurosis is not the result of societal attention these days for his ideas about soul-belief and the inhibitions or repression of impulses, but the attempt by the development of spiritual traditions across cultures.
New York: Free Press. Lieberman EJ Acts of Will. New York: The Free Press. American on the early mother—child relationship, ego development, and Psychologist — Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
New York: McGraw-Hill. Rather than leaving behind a school of thought or an Rank O The Double. Tucker H trans. Edition Notes Includes bibliographical references and index. Classifications Dewey Decimal Class R33 The Physical Object Pagination xlix, , xii p. Community Reviews 0 Feedback? Loading Related Books. Knopf in English Knopf in English. January 8, August 19, Edited by IdentifierBot.
October 17, Edited by WorkBot. November 6, Created by ImportBot. Thus in Crete a peak period of imaginative art was fol lowed by frank sensorialism.
Altered in form, and yet quite similar, was the change which took place under the same laws, thousands of years afterwards, in America among the Aztecs and Incas, and again, centuries later, in Africa among the con quering races of Benin and Yoruba.
In all these cultures the way leads unmistakably from imaginative to sensorial art, from collectivism to individualism, from the dualist outlook to the unitary, and from the strongly religious world to the practical everyday society. Scheltema ex cludes this art from his survey on the ground that no further artistic development from it is possible, and that the abstract art-form of the neolithic age is primary and intrinsic in the North.
But I do not think the question can be disposed of so simply. For one thing, we cannot divide off the Northern neolithic so sharply from the Southern, for all their differ ences; and, for another, it remains doubtful whether the natu ralism of the glacial age really represents the beginning of all artistic activity, whether, in fact, there are not more abstract art-forms, completely lost to us, which preceded it.
It is risky to reconstruct the mentality of these people on no other evi dences than the artistic remains of the glacial age which have been accidentally preserved. But it is nevertheless noteworthy that the sole explanation of the appearance of such highly developed drawing and pictorial art as this palaeolithic has handed down to us comes from a physiologist, Max Verworn.
In his book: Zur Psychologie der primitiven Kunst the scholar declares this art to be a physioplastic reproduction of nature which, in contrast to the later ideoplastic treat- 1Herbert Kuhn: Kunst der Primitiven, p. Introduction xlvi ment, has a certain spontaneity, instinctiveness, and non reflectiveness.
It does not seem to me that this view does much more than give us a terminology that strikingly expresses the dualism which lies at the base of all artistic production, although it does at least imply an attempt at evaluation instead of a mere description. For even if we accept Verworns terminology, we are still obliged to assume that glacial man, although in the main physioplastic in his rendering, must also have had ideo- plastic possibilities of no rudimentary order; otherwise he would not have been in a position to produce a work of art intui tively.
All art, whether primarily naturalistic or primarily ab stract, unites both elements within itself, and indeed itself arises as we shall see from a conflict between the two tendencies, of which first one, then the other, gains the upper hand. The decision does not, however, depend only on the culture and its economic environment, but equally upon the creative individual, in whom the same dualistic conflict ex ists, whether, as at a primitive stage, between life and death, or, at a later one, between body and soul, matter and spirit, individual and society.
Leaving aside, therefore, for the moment all attempts such as those above mentioned to assign values to the style-contrasts, and looking at the problem from its psychological aspect, we may say following up an idea of Kuhns that naturalistic art has always flourished where and when individualism was the order of the day or had obtained the mastery.
This was not the case only in definite master-cultures with whose struc ture we are familiar, such as Crete, Mycenae, Classical Greece, and the Renaissance; it applies also to primitive man at least in the wider sense of the term. For even if this primitive man was no individualist in the sense in which those masterful natures were so or even in the sense of our decadent psy chologism he was a lordly person relying upon his own strength before he became sedentary and united to collective bodies of men through agriculture.
In any case, abstract art, in contrast to sensory or organic art, is usually collective, as is Pi I ntroducti on xlvii demonstrated by Northern and also primitive ornamentation as well as by religious Gothic. In these facts a paradoxical phenomenon discloses itself, which will not startle the psy chologist and indeed will facilitate our approach to the under standing of the spiritual dynamism in artistic creativity.
We shall see presently how this compensatory func tion of the art-form brings the development of personality and its dynamic need of equalization into unison.
Here I would merely point out in pursuance of an idea already put for ward that in neither of the two art-forms is it a question of an absolute style-principle, but only of a more or a less, while at the same time both style-forms alike possess the tendency to reproduce something absent, which in certain cases happens to be a natural object, while in others it pictures an idea. The obvious purpose in this tendency is domination, whether this takes the form of a naturalistic representation of an animal as a hunting spell or of the symbolic representation of a human ab straction.
Behind both there is the creative will of the personal ity, which only now and then manifests itself directly, and at other times reacts to the compulsion of collective society and gives expression thereto. Undoubtedly this second art-form here one agrees with Scheltema is more capable of develop ment, not only for stylistic and aesthetic, but for psychological reasons as well.
For the abstraction at the base of this mechanical art represents even in itself a rising above nature, and it can be still further intensified and varied, whereas in naturalistic or organic art the objects within a given cultural environment are limited, so that the artistic effort to deal with them other wise than in their natural setting does not find them very malleable. Nevertheless, for both we must assume a creative force in the individual himself, which has to be studied in its various forms before we can arrive at a deeper understanding of the art-forms produced by it.
These figures are not made; they form themselves completely into what they are; they become that which they will to be, and to that they remain true. Yet even for the psychological approach it is not the one side or the other that matters, but the fundamental dualism which appears as the basis of all cultural development in man.
For if this dualism is as fundamental as we have assumed, it must make itself evident in the various stages of artistic creation as well as in the growth of personality, and will very likely reveal certain essential relations between the two.
This, however, only be comes possible by taking a genetic view of the significances of the various ideologies from which both the style of a period and artistic creativeness in it are born. This comparative method, which we shall frequently adopt in all parts of this work, seeks, however, not so much to establish similarities or dependences as to establish a concatenation of meaning extend ing from the prehistoric cave-man to the individualistic artist- type of today with his neurotic psychology.
I f such a dual ism really does exist in human nature, its existence must be just as demonstrable psychologically in the modern artist as it has been shown cesthetically in the history of style or ethni cally in the history of culture. Our account may thus put readers of? Fortunately we have at least this much start, that a recent discovery has taken us up to the threshold of our own prob lems.
I refer to the revolution in the understanding of artistic creativity which was set going by the Viennese art-historian Alois Riegl, and which since its first appearance in his Stilfra- gen has dominated all modern studies of art. Riegl posed it as a principle which illuminates the artistic creation of every age, that the peculiarities of style at various epochs are not to be explained by defective ability, but are only in telligible as the expression of a particular will to form.
This view may seem self-evident to the psychologist, but it was unattain able either by psychology proper or by a psychologizing aes thetic. It could only come from viewing style, as Riegl does, as a manifestation of collective ideology. Unfortunately Riegl only lived long enough to illustrate his subtle and far-reaching theory in a single specialized department, that of Late Roman arts and crafts.
Rejecting the tradi tional mode of regarding art as a matter of objects and ico nography, and understanding it as form and colour in surface and in space, he ascribed to these crafts, even to the orna mentation prevailing in them, the same significance as vessels of the will to form as he did to sculpture, painting, and architec ture thus opening a wholly new chapter in art-history as well 1Die spatrdmische KunstIndustrie, nach den Funden in 6stcrreich-Ungarn, im Zusammen- bange mit der Gesamtentwicklung der bildenden Kunste bei den Mittelmeermlkern Vienna, When we remem ber what an important part was played in prehistory by this form of art, hitherto a neglected stepchild, we may well admit that without Riegls magnificent achievement the essence of primitive ornament and thus of abstract art in general would have remained unintelligible.
Of course further work was nec essary in order to give Riegls idea the broad historical and aesthetic foundation which was far beyond the attainment of a single and all too short life. It is therefore comprehensible that Riegl himself should not have been able to free himself entirely from the shackles of his own tradition and the aesthetic views of his age, and that in the application of his ideas he was restricted by academic prejudice.
Though his account of the Classical art as an an tithesis to Late Roman remains a permanent achievement of an almost spiritual attitude to art, he nevertheless succumbed to historicism in summarily declaring everything Late Ro man which showed the same criteria of style, without think ing of the possibility of a psychological content in this concep tion.
On the other hand he took the denaturalization of the art-form, as it developed from the Classical to the decadent Late Roman civilization, as a law inherent in all artistic de velopment, again without considering the possibilities of va rious other conjunctures influencing it. As Scheltema who fully appreciates Riegls main achievement has shown, there are in the North similar abstract forms which have developed, not from any desiccation of natural forms, but in the reverse direction. The similarity of forms is explained by the simi larity of the will, but this was not Late Roman in the North, nor Nordic in the South, but in both cases resulted from a collective ideology which characterized in the South the end, and in the North the beginning, of the development of a culture.
Riegl did so on the craft-art, and thus at any rate re mained within the sphere of art himself, which has obvious advantages, but as we have seen from his mistakes disad vantages as well.
Other students also have discussed the col lective ideology of particular periods, which decides its will to form also, in terms of its religious or philosophical tendencies, in order later to show these as taking effect in the art-forms. All these works of the Riegl school, which go more or less beyond their masters, are extremely valuable contributions to a new view of art, and will come to be regarded as such. But they all suffer from a certain one-sidedness, which is the more intelligible that the idea of Riegls art-will, however col lectively we may take it, yet contains in its very name a strong psychological element which absolutely demands the inclu sion of the personality of the creative artist.
Certainly we do not mean a psychological interpretation of the laws of style, by which their importance would be reduced to mere psychologiz ing; but we can only hope for a real step forward in our un derstanding of art if we can settle more definitely the part played by the creative individual in the collective work and then put the result into the great equation of all the factors which have any bearing, direct or indirect, on the creation of the art-forms.
Of course, for such an undertaking, which tackles the prob lem of art primarily from the psychological end, a different starting-point is required from that which is called for in a study of art from the stylistic or cultural-historical angle. Even if by art we understand, not the part played by the creator in the psychological sense, but the product, the work, or even the content of all art at least for the particular period we can for the time being sum up the relation of the artist to his art as follows: the artist, as a definite creative individual, uses the art-form that he finds ready to his hand in order to express a something personal; this personal must therefore be some how connected with the prevailing artistic or cultural ideology, 6 since otherwise he could not make use of them, but it must also differ, since otherwise he would not need to use them in order to produce something of his own.
While this aspect brings us again to the dualism in the artist, there is, as we know already, a similar dualism at the bottom of the cultural ideology, as one of the manifestations of which the style of the age must be regarded. But the general ideology of the culture, which determines its religion, morals, and society as well as its art, is again only the expression of the human types of the age, and of this the artist and the creative personality generally are the most definite crystallization.
The circular argument here is only apparent, for we may not disregard the creative process, which presents itself as an essential factor between the ideology of the art, the style, and the creative personality, the artist. We must admit, however, that we know almost nothing of this process in the artist, since here, more than any where, the hopes held out by modern psychology have proved delusive.
We shall quote later the authors who have been honest enough to admit the failure of scientific psychology to explain artistic creativity; but we would say at once here that this fact has been contributory to our own attempt to understand the problem of the artist purely in relation to that of art the artist representing only one, the individual factor, while we have to regard art as the collective expression of their contem porary cultural ideology.
The artist, as it were, takes not only his canvas, his colours, or his model in order to paint, but also the art that is given him formally, technically, and ideo logically, within his own culture; this probably emerges most clearly in the case of the poet, whose material is drawn from the cultural possessions already circulating and is not dead matter, as is that used by the plastic arts.
In any case we can say of all artistic creation that the artist not only creates his art, but also uses art in order to create.
For the solution of this fundamental psychological question we have naturally to keep to the present, where we have a definite artistic type before us as a living phenomenon, and not merely his historical biography and completed work. But the prevalent psychology has already failed in the task of finding a satisfactory explanation for the birth of an individual work, even when the artist is historically known and his artistic per sonality has been studied biographically where in fact the stages of growth can still be traced.
Still less, then, is it likely that it could achieve an understanding of primitive collective art or the amazing achievements of the psychologically crude stone-age man.
I f any psychology is to explain this at all adequately, it will in any case have to be a new one and one that, while taking its bearings by primitive art, avoids, on the one hand, the predication of our own feelings in it and, on the other, the interpretation of our own aesthetic sensibility by reference to it.
The merit of developing Riegls ideas to their logical issue and placing the aesthetic understanding of alien styles on a new basis goes in particular to a historian, Wilhelm Worrin- ger; and his fundamental work: Abstraction und Einfiihlung, ein Beitrag zur Stihpsychologie Munich, ; quoted ac cording to the tenth edition, , is doubly important for us as a starting-point because it also works out the psychological core of Riegls attitude, at least as far as is necessary and possible in relation to the aesthetic problem.
And if Worringer, as I should like to remark at once, was limited in his purely psy chological penetration of the problem by the natural bound aries of his own interests, he did take aesthetic to the very verge beyond which it must give place to psychology.
For myself I became acquainted with Worringers ideas when I had already settled my own interpretation of the prob- 8 lem of art; still I owe him many valuable suggestions, though yet again I should have been unable to use these had I not of myself gone beyond the traditional view of aesthetic, which Worringer so splendidly criticizes and so fruitfully completes. The idea of the will to form, when I came across it in the form in which Riegl first expounded it and Worringer extended it, sounded to me at once like something familiar.
Not only had I long ago come to the conclusion from my analysis of creative artists that their productivity and the varying quality of their work were not a matter of capacity; but I had got beyond the individual psychology in my ideas about the creative per sonality and of the determining ideology, before I returned to the problem of art.
For me the problem of willing, in a philo sophical sense of the word, had come to be the central prob lem of the whole question of personality, even of all psychol ogy, and it only remained to apply it to the particular case of the creative artist.
Riegls revolutionary treatment of art, in the aesthetic and psychological form in which Worringer for mulated it, gave me the courage to attempt an understanding of the specific ideology of the artist that is, his style in a similar sense to that which my psychology of the will had opened up in dealing with other ideologies.
The general prin ciples and interpretation which are valid for the growth and meaning of general ideologies must be applicable to the ide ology of art, which we had recognized the peculiarities of style to be. Further, the aesthetic laws deduced from the his tory of style must either coincide to a considerable extent with, or at least be somehow related to, both the significance of the whole cultural ideology and the manifestations of the creative personality. There was one point in particular in Worringers work which seemed to me to confirm my own notions of the origin and significance of the general cultural ideology for the prob lem of artistic creation.
The particular way in which this showed it self in style, however, remained, for the time being, beyond my grasp, until I had come to know Riegls views of style and Wor- ringers aesthetic.
For Riegl, it is true, who deals particularly with collective phenomena, the art-will is purely instinctive; according to the materialistic conception of Verworn, it is physioplastic while for Worringer, who interprets it more philosophically, it is an almost cosmic something arising spontaneously from the abstract linear art which corresponds to crystalline form. So far, therefore, it has nothing to do with the individual will of the conscious artistic personality, though we might regard it as being in a Schopenhauerian sense its precursor.
But the matter is not quite so simple that we could assume this instinctive art-impulse to have merely become individually conscious; for increasing individualization alters the whole cultural ideology and therefore art with it; and consequently abstract linear ornament is not now created consciously by the individual will of the artists as heretofore instinctively by the primitive impulse to abstraction, but re placed by new forms of expression.
For with this individualization the general art-form changes in its essence some authorities think, in the direction of naturalism , but the creative personality also becomes other than it was. The question: How did the individual artist-type grow up at all in our Western culture if the artistic creation of earlier men and times was abstract and collective Pis almost identical with the problem of the development of individuality and personality itself.
But this is not a problem that can be solved by psychology alone; rather we may hope for a deeper knowledge of the development of personality from a better understanding of the development of art. As I have shown else where, the immortality-belief in its various forms and cultural variations has certainly participated in it; and it is here, as already remarked, that I find the decisive point of contact with Worringers aesthetic to which we may relate our study.
He says of primitive and also of Orien tal cultures, whose style he is discussing: The kind of satis faction which they looked to obtain from art was not, as in Western art, that of sinking themselves in the external world, and finding enjoyment in it, but that of depriving the indi vidual thing in the external world of its arbitrary and appar ently haphazard character; that is to immortalize the object in giving it an abstract form and so finding a resting-place in the flight of phenomena.
Their strongest impulse was to bring it close to its absolute value op. The most important as well as the best-authenticated instance of this is the development of religion, as I have tried to expound it in Seelenglaube und Psychologie. Primitive religion, as a belief in souls as we know it , is originally so abstract that it has been called irreligious by comparison with higher religions, in which the gods have already assumed concrete form.
But from a study of these abstract preliminary stages of religion, which are a matter of spirits and demons, we see also that the urge for abstraction in primitives is rooted in the soul- belief that, in the intellectualized form of the East, culminates in the absolute abstract of the soul.
Compared with the idea of the soul or its primitive predecessors even the abstractest form of art is concrete, just as on the other hand the most 1We cannot at present enter upon the criticism of Worringers exaggeration of his own principle of elucidation which in essence he seeks to exemplify by reference to the Gothic style. He appears therein to have succumbed to the same compulsion as Riegl, in that he calls everything "Gothic that comes within the style-criteria of his own "Gothic and thus reaches a universal Gothic, which perhaps ought to be de fined in terms of personality rather than in those of esthetics.
I f primitive art, then, is in its origins a concreted repre sentation of an abstract idea of the soul and is at the same time the nucleus of what becomes at a later stage the figuration of God, we cannot possibly understand the change and growth of art-forms without following the change of the idea of the soul in human history. Here we may state, more definitely than we have as yet, that the main task of this book is to expound the development and change in meaning of art-forms from similar changes in the idea of the soul, which decides the development of personality, even as it is itself influenced thereby.
Though we have later to give an account of the relation between the prevailing style in art and the contemporary belief in the soul, we can even now see how religion has always drawn art along in its wake from the earliest times to the present day.
The urge for abstraction, which owed its origin to a be lief in immortality and created the notion of the soul, cre ated also the art which served the same ends, but led beyond the purely abstract to the objectivizing and concretizing of the prevailing idea of the soul.
Everything produced objectively in any period by the contemporary idea of the soul was beau tiful, and the aesthetic history of the idea of the beautiful is probably no more than a reflection of the changes in the idea of the soul under the influence of increasing knowledge.
The most illuminating demonstration that the source of the beauty- ideal lies in the contemporary ideal of the soul is found in the religious art of all times and peoples, but most conspicuously in the higher cultures, where the already unified idea of the soul was ideally embodied in the forms of their gods.
Thus Anubis with his animal head was as much an ideal of beauty for the Egyptians as was Zeus with a leonine mane for the Greeks, or the tortured and martyred body of Jesus for the Christians. The concept of the beautiful, which inspires the works of art of a period, is derived, not from the abstract sig- 12 nificance of the soul-concept in the way in which, for in stance, the Romantics spoke of the beautiful soul , but from its concretization.
That is, the religious art portrayed the idea of the soul in concrete form for the men of the time, in the shape of gods, and so, psychologically speaking, proved their existence. It is precisely the concreteness of art as compared with the idea of the soul that makes it convincing; for it creates something visible and permanent in contrast to some thing which was merely thought or felt, which was at first handed down from one generation to another only by means of mystic tradition and was only fixed in literature of religious form at a very late stage.
This close association, in fact fundamental identity, of art and religion, each of which strives in its own way to make the absolute eternal and the eternal absolute, can be already seen at the most primitive stages of religious development, where there are as yet neither representations of gods nor copies of nature.
Almost all students of the art of primitive peoples get the unanimous impression that, as the first historian of primitive art, Franz Kugler, put it as early as , the inten tion of primitive art was far less towards the imitation of nature than towards the representation of particular ideas. More than fifty years later so great an authority as Leo Frobenius says the same of African art: We cannot say that there was any direct extrovert effort at the attainment of some perfec tion of form.
We shall show later in detail how almost all these ideas turn more or less on the idea of the soul, which itself arises from the problem of death. Here we need only note that the redeeming power of art, that which entitles it to be regarded aesthetically as beautiful, resides in the way in which it lends concrete existence to abstract ideas of the soul. Vatter shows that the plastic of primitive peoples is unintelligible unless it is regarded as an expression of religious ideas.
Thus primitive art must be, like the primitive idea of the soul, collective in order to achieve its aim, the continua tion of the individual existence in the species. And it follows, too, that primitive art must be abstract in order to reproduce this abstract idea of the soul as faithfully as may be.
Worringer was certainly right in denying that art began with the imitation of nature, or even had this object; but it was imitation all the same, though in a wider sense.
The most definite representation possible of an idea is imitation, in the ideoplastic sense; and we might explain this very character of abstraction of primitive art by the fact that it faithfully repre sents an idea which is itself abstract. That is, the soul was de picted as abstractly as possible, in order that it might be like this abstract, and the further the divinizing of the soul in dif ferent personifications proceeded, the more concrete, or, as we should say, naturalistic, art became.
I f in this wise the obsti nately defended theory of imitation though not strictly in the sense of imitation of nature is found to have a deeper signifi cance in the soul, we may use the second disputed principle of the old aesthetic also to support our new structure. The ac cusation of aimlessness made against an art which exists only for beautys sake cannot be sustained, either in respect of primi tive art or in respect of the individual creative dynamism of the modern artist.
Art unquestionably has an end, probably even serves a variety of ends but the ends are not concrete and practical, they are abstract and spiritual. Primitive art above all has obviously some object, as Vatter points out op. In this is its value, its function, and hence comes the satisfaction it provides, which at later stages of aesthetic appreciation is deduced from the idea of beauty an idea which originally, and even in Greek philosophy, was coin- 14 cident with the idea of the good, the satisfying, and the useful.
The relations of art and religion, though so often discussed, would thus seem to call for a new treatment from our point of view; which we cannot give here, although in the course of a discussion centred on the development of personality we may be able to throw some light on hitherto unsuspected linkages. There is no doubt that even in the historical times of art religion used it as a means to represent, in objective and concrete form, the contemporary idea of the soul; but not, so to say, illustra tively, as if mankind were too immature to form abstract ideas of the soul.
It had to be made concrete, pictorial, and real, so as to prove its existence, and had to be presented in matter to demonstrate its indestructibility. Not only, therefore, have we in the art-form style the expression of a will that varies from time to time under the influence of changes in the soul-idea, but the same principle holds even of the content of art so far as it is religious and, indeed, it is religious from the start, if we may give this name to the supersensible, even where it has not condensed into the idea of a god.
It is therefore not a defective faculty of abstraction which drives to the concretiza- tion of the soul and its pictorial representation in the god, but the will to objectify it and thus to impart to it existence and, what is more, eternity.
Here we come to the interesting question to what extent the development of primitive art and its frank use by religion has itself contributed to the formation of a religion itself, and how far it was essential to it; in other words, whether the transition from animism to religion that is, from the belief in the soul to the belief in God was only possible through art, because in art lay the only mode of exhibiting the soul in objective form and giving personality to God.
In the course 1We shall refer later to the apparent exception of the Jewish people, which con demned every representation of Deity as idolatrous, and consequently produced no art. Its culmination came in the individual art- creation of the Classical style as we have it in Greek work.
There man himself in his own full naturalness, yet in ideal ized beauty too had become the vehicle of an immortal soul and was not, like the Oriental gods, a mere representative of the belief in the soul. In this sense not only did the develop ment of the soul begin with art, but the process of humaniza tion of the soul completed itself in art and not in religion. It was art, by its embodiment of man in lasting material, that finally gave him the courage to reassume the soul which, be cause of the transitoriness of its bodily form, he had abstracted into an absolute idea of the soul.
From a point of view such as this, art, though born from the same spirit as religion, appears not only as outlasting it, but actually as fulfilling it.
I f religion, as is hardly disputable, could only develop beyond soul-belief by the help of art, and if, moreover, as I would believe, the humanization of the soul, which implies the completion of religion, is accomplished by art, religion would almost sink to a transition stage of art.
This is, of course, a matter of attitude but it does seem cer tain that the development of art has always striven beyond religion, and that its highest individual achievements lie out side purely religious art, until in modern times it completely emancipates itself from that influence and even takes its place.
But this tendency towards independence corresponds to an ir- religiosity or even an anti-religiosity which is inherent and essential in all artistic creation, and which we must admit, in spite of its logically contradicting our own discussion, unless we are to sacrifice a decisive, and perhaps the most important, side of the creative impulse to a one-sided theory.
Personal crea tivity is anti-religious in the sense that it is always subservient to the individual desire for immortality in the creative per sonality and not to the collective glorification of the creator 16 of the world.
The individual artist of course uses collective forms, among which the religious, in the widest sense, take first place, so as to overcome his personal dualism by a social compensation. But at the same time he tries to save his indi viduality from the collective mass by giving his work the stamp of his own personality.
Hence it is quite rightly that Rudolf Kautzsch, in his brief but valuable paper Die bildende Kunst und das Jenseits Jena, , emphasizes the fact that on one side religion is a handicap on art; and we too have seen in our survey of prevalent theories of art that the periods of strong development of personality, or of constructive individualism like that predicated of the superman, have always been among the highest periods of artistic productivity.
Among these periods of floraison we have mentioned the prehistoric art of self-dependent palaeolithic man, Classical Greek art, and the Renaissance. All these periods, which either are individualistic or are carried along by a definite cult of personality, show in contrast to the abstract and rigid style of Egyptian, Christian, and to a certain extent even Gothic art a vivid naturalism which is certainly no imitation of nature, but rather an organic vitalization of fossilizing art-forms.
We have indicated in the Introduction the psychical significance of this antithesis and how it may be psychologically under stood. Religion is the collective ideology par excellence, which can only spring from a powerful group-need and mass-con- sciousness, which itself springs from the need of the individual for dependence and implies his subjection to higher forces.
Art also, which sprang originally from self-feeling, is then sub ordinated to religion, just as the creative personality is sub ordinated to the creator.
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