ABSTRACT
Man is always reaching out beyond the world he sees and hears. In every age since history began, he has tried to express, even amid the confusions of his thought and the crudities of his language, something of that other world he only feels and does not touch or see — the world of thoughts and ideals. Yet the tools man works with are only crude, and this world of aspirations and ideals demands perfection; and so there must necessarily remain much that transcends the thought and language of man. It is with the sense of this limitation that he has fashioned symbols. He has looked at Nature and seen in its bountiful sky, in its life-giving sun, and in its majestic storms, the embodiment, the symbol of his aspirations. He has gone further — he has created his own myths of the gods of Olympus, he has fashioned his own Ark of the Covenant, and then he has filled the work of his own hands with the intensity of symbolic meaning which, as abstract truth, was beyond his power to express. Symbolism therefore is a great inherent demand of mankind for the expression of the intangible world of his ideals.
