of truth and beauty, and unconsciously sets that fulness before it as an object, a not-itself which is against itself as this or that man. And so the self goes on to realize what it obscurely foreknows as real; it realizes it, although, and because, it is aware of it as real. And in this, so far, art, philosophy, and religion are the same.
But, as we saw, they are also different. In art and science the will of the man who realizes is not of the essence. The essence of the matter is that a certain result should be produced, that, of the unseen object which is divined to be real, a part at least should become visible, that in short, however it comes about, some element of the real should be seen to be realized. Here the end is the sight of the object, as such, and the will which procures that sight is not taken into account. No doubt it would be a great mistake to forget that art and science involve will, and the will of particular persons, and that it is this will which realizes the object; and that hence, since the object of science and art is at least partly identical with the object of religion, both science and art may so far be said to imply religion, since they imply the relation of the particular will to the real ideal. For suppose that the human-divine life is one process, and suppose again that art and science and religion are distinguishable elements or aspects of this one whole process. Then, if this is so, neither art nor science nor religion can exist as a thing by itself, and the two former will necessarily imply the latter. But on the other hand, though we may not divide, yet we have to distinguish; and when by an abstraction we consider one side, e.g. the side of science or that of art, by itself, and take them as mere theoretic activities, then we must say that in this character neither of them is religion; and they are not religion because the will of this or that man, over against the real ideal as will, is not an element in the scientific or artistic process as such. The real ideal of science and art is not will, and the relation of my will to it falls outside them; and we must say, and we think that the reader will agree, that, so soon as the philosopher or artist is conscious of his will in relation to the real ideal, as a will which has demands on him, he ceases to be a mere philosopher or artist as such (which after all no human being is), and becomes also religious or irreligious.
To proceed, we find in the religious consciousness the ideal
