Abstraction and Empathy

Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy was published in 1908 and was a critical and commercial success. It consists of five chapters and two main sections, a theoretical section(our reading for the class) and a practical section that includes chapters on ornament and examples from architecture.
Worringer's main thesis is that empathy and abstraction are the two main catalysts of art and both are equally valid. Primitive societies that have a "dread of space" and are fearful of the outside world tend to abstract art because it serves as an escape from the outside world, a "refuge from appearances."(p.16) Modern societies have tended to empathy in art because "the urge to empathy is a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world." In other words man finds enjoyment in the forms he sees in the world. Worringer repeats the phrase "Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment" many times in the first chapter. Worringer announces abstraction as a valid contemporary art practice. "Having slipped down from the pride of knowledge, man is now just as lost and helpless vis-a-vis the world-picture as primitive man."
I found it interesting that he said people were confused about realism(naturalism) and the legacy of Renaissance art. Many people according to Worringer assume Renaissance artists were copying nature, a mere imitation. The reality was "not because the artist desired to depict a natural object true to life in its corporeality, not because he desired to give the illusion of a living object, but because the feeling for the beauty of organic form that is true to life had been aroused and because the artist desired to give satisfaction to this feeling."(p.27)
What ways do artists express their relationship to the world?
Can abstraction be empathetic?