Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/200

178 But take a work of Greek art, the Venus of Melos. That is in no sense a symbol, a suggestion of anything beyond its own victorious fairness. The mind begins and ends with the finite image, yet loses no part of the spiritual motive. That motive is not lightly and loosely attached to the sensuous form, as the meaning to the allegory, but saturates and is identical with it. The Greek mind had advanced to a particular stage of self-reflection, but was careful not to pass beyond it. In Oriental thought there is a vague conception of life everywhere, but no true appreciation of itself by the mind, no knowledge of the distinction of man's nature; in thought he still mingles himself with the fantastic indeterminate life of the animal and vegetable world. In Greek thought the 'lordship of the soul' is recognised; that lordship gives authority and divinity to human eyes and hands and feet; nature is thrown into the background. But there Greek thought finds its happy limit; it has not yet become too inward; the mind has not begun to boast of its independence of the flesh; the spirit has not yet absorbed everything with its emotions, nor reflected its own colour everywhere. It has indeed committed itself to a train of reflection which must end in a defiance of form, of all that is outward, in an exaggerated idealism. But that end is still distant;