To effect an alliance between art and philosophy or art and theology in the specific region of either religion or speculation is, therefore, an impossibility.

In like manner there are many feelings which cannot properly assume a sensuous form; and these are precisely religious feelings, in which the soul abandons sense, and leaves the actual world behind, to seek her freedom in a spiritual region.[9] Yet, while we recognise the truth of this reasoning, it would be unscientific to maintain that, until they are brought into close and inconvenient contact, there is direct hostility between religion and the arts.

The sphere of the two is separate; their aims are distinct; they must be allowed to perfect themselves, each after its own fashion.

In the large philosophy of human nature, represented by Goethe's famous motto, there is room for both, because those who embrace it bend their natures neither wholly to the pietism of the cloister nor to the sensuality of art.

They find the meeting-point of art and of religion in their own humanity, and perceive that the antagonism of the two begins when art is set to do work alien to its nature, and to minister to what it does not naturally serve.
At the risk of repetition I must now resume the points I have attempted to establish in this chapter.