The justification, however, of bringing formative art (by analogy) under a common head with gesture in a speech, lies in the fact that through these figures the spirit of the artist furnishes a bodily expression for the substance and character of his thought, and makes the thing itself speak, as it were, in mimic language a very common play of our fantasy that attributes to lifeless things a spirit suitable to their form, and that uses them as its mouthpiece.