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 unsatisfactory. 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 objects 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 conceivably be regarded as imitating trees, rivers, or men, but the musician for the most part produces what is unlike anything 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 as an individual, but in its universal aspects, as the fleeting 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 modern 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.