as an individual, but in its universal aspects, as the fleet-
ing embodiment of an eternal thought. Hence it is that
the sculptor depicts not the individual man, but rather the
type-man, the perfection of his kind. Hence too, in mod-
ern times, the portrait painter is not concerned to paint
a faithful image of his model, but takes the model merely
as a suggestion, and seizes upon that essential and eternal
{328} essence, that ideal thought, or universal, which he
sees shining through the sensuous materials in which it is
imprisoned. His task is to free it from this imprisonment.
The common man sees only the particular object. The
artist sees the universal in the particular. Every individual
thing is a compound of matter and form, of particular and
universal. The function of art is to exhibit the universal in
it.
Hence poetry is truer, more philosophical, than history. For
history deals only with the particular as the particular. It
tells us only of thefact, of what has happened. Its truth
is mere correctness, accuracy. It has not in it, as art has,
the living and eternal truth. It does not deal with the Idea.
It yields us only the knowledge of something that, having
happened, having gone by, is finished. Its object is tran-
sient and perishable. It concerns only the endless iteration
of meaningless events. But the object of art is that inner
essence of objects and events, which perishes not, and of
which the objects and events are the mere external drapery.
If therefore we would arrange philosophy, art, and history,
in order of their essential nobility and truth, we should
place philosophy first, because its object is the universal
as it is in itself, the pure universal. We should place art
second, because its object is the universal in the particular,
and history last, because it deals only with the particular
as such. Yet because each thing in the world has its own
proper function, and errs if it seeks to perform the func-
tions of something else, hence, in Aristotle’s opinion, art
must not attempt to emulate philosophy. It must not deal
with the abstract universal. The poet must not use his
verses as a vehicle of abstract thought. His proper {329}
sphere is the universal as it manifests itself in the partic-
ular, not the universal as it is in itself. Aristotle, for this
reason, censures didactic poetry. Such a poem as that of
Empedocles, who unfolded his philosophical system in me-
tre, is not, in fact, poetry at all. It is versified philosophy.
Art is thus lower than philosophy. The absolute reality,
the inner essence of the world, is thought, reason, the uni-
versal. To contemplate this reality is the object alike of
philosophy and of art. But art sees the Absolute not in its
final truth, but wrapped up in a sensuous drapery. Philos-
ophy sees the Absolute as it is in itself, in its own nature,
in its full truth; it sees it as what it essentially is, thought.
Philosophy, therefore, is the perfect truth. But this does
not mean that art is to be superseded and done away with.
Because philosophy is higher than art, it does not follow
that a man should suppress the artist in himself in order
to rise to philosophy. For an essential thought of the Aris-
totelian philosophy is that, in the scale of beings, even the
lower form is an end in itself, and has absolute rights. The
higher activities presuppose the lower, and rest upon them.
The higher includes the lower, and the lower, as an organic
part of its being, cannot be eradicated without injury to the
whole. To suppress art in favour of philosophy would be a