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At this stage of our enquiry, which has now brought us to the point at which the realm of art begins to overlap the realm of religion, we may fittingly condense our findings into a formal definition of the nature of art before attempting to gain admittance to the fascinating domain of the Religion of Art or to continue our journey through its unexplored interior.

Art is the organization of sensuous impressions into pleasurable formal relations that express the artist’s sensibility and communicate to his audience a sense of values that can transform their lives.

The completeness of this definition becomes clearly apparent when we compare it with fragmentary definitions according to which art is ‘an attempt to create pleasing forms’ (Herbert Read), ‘significant form’ (Clive Bell), or, most simply of all, ‘intuition’ (Croce). It moreover illuminates the significance of definitions of beauty as modern as Herbert Read’s ‘Beauty is the unityThe Religion of Art of formal relations among sense perceptions’, or as ancient as the scholastic ‘Beauty is the splendour of form reflected on the proportioned parts of matter’.

Having now formed a clear, even if rather abstract, idea of the nature of religion and the nature of art as independent lines of human activity, we must now trace out the parallels between them, as well as determine, if possible, their exact points of intersection. First of all we shall have to examine the relation between egolessness and art; but the examination will be fruitful only if we load every rift of our conception with the ore of concrete meaning.