the Greek city-states.
- Aesthetics, or the Theory of Art.
Plato had no systematic philosophy of Art, and his views
had to be collected from scattered references. Aristotle like-
wise has scarcely a system, though his opinions are more
connected, and though he devoted a special tretise, the “Po-
etics”, to the subject. And this {326} book, which has come
down to us in a fragmentary condition, deals exclusively
with poetry, and even in poetry only the drama is consid-
ered in detail. What we have from Aristotle on the sub-
ject of aesthetics may be divided roughly into two classes,
firstly, reflections on the nature and significance of art in
general, and, secondly, a more detailed application of these
principles to the art of poetry. We shall deal with these
two classes of opinions in that order.
In order to know what art is, we must first know what it
is not. It must be distinguished from kindred activities.
And firstly, it is distinguished from morality in that moral-
ity is concerned with action, art with production. Morality
consists in the activity itself, art in that which the activity
produces. Hence the state of mind of the actor, his mo-
tives, feelings,etc., are important in morality, for they are
part of the act itself. But they are not important in art,
the only essential being that the work of art should turn
out well, however it has been produced. Secondly, art is
distinguished from the activity of nature, which it in many
respects resembles. Organic beings reproduce their own
kind, and, in the fact that it is concerned with production,
generation resembles art. But in generation, the living be-
ing produces only itself. The plant produces a plant, man
begets man. But the artist produces something quite other
than himself, a poem, a picture, a statue.Art is of two kinds, according as it aims at completing the
work of nature, or at creating something new, an imaginary
world of its own which is a copy of the real world. In the
former case, we get such arts as that of {327} medicine.
Where nature has failed to produce a healthy body, the
physician helps nature out, and completes the work that
she has begun. In the latter case, we get what are, in
modern times, called the fine arts. These Aristotle calls
the imitative arts. We saw that Plato regarded all art as
imitative, and that such a view is essentially unsatisfac-
tory. Now Aristotle uses the same word, which he perhaps
borrowed from Plato, but his meaning is not the same as
Plato’s, nor does he fall into the same mistakes. That in
calling art imitative he has not in mind the thought that
it has for its aim merely the faithful copying of natural ob-
jects is proved by the fact that he mentions music as the
most imitative of the arts, whereas music is, in fact, in this
sense, the least imitative of all. The painter may conceiv-
ably be regarded as imitating trees, rivers, or men, but the
musician for the most part produces what is unlike any-
thing in nature. What Aristotle means is that the artist
copies, not the sensuous object, but what Plato would call
the Idea. Art is thus not, in Plato’s contemptuous phrase,
a copy of a copy. It is a copy of the original. Its object is
not this or that particular thing, but the universal which
manifests itself in the particular. Art idealizes nature, that
is, sees the Idea in it. It regards the individual thing, not