Hence poetry is truer, more philosophical, than history. For history deals only with the particular as the particular. It tells us only of the _fact_, 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 transient 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 functions 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 particular, 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 metre, 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 universal. 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. Philosophy 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 But this does not mean that art is to be superseded and done away with.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 Aristotelian 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 mistake precisely parallel to the moral error of asceticism. In treating of Aristotle's ethics we saw that, although the activity of reason is held in highest esteem, the attempt to uproot the passions was censured as erroneous. So here,