Thus we see the reason why all the people who come forward to define art—each with his own little measuring-rod quite different from everybody else’s—inevitably make themselves ridiculous. It is true they are all of them right. That is just why they are ridiculous: each has mistaken the one drop of water he has measured for the whole ocean. Art cannot be defined because it is infinite. It is no accident that poetry, which has so often seemed the typical art, means a _making_. The artist is a maker. Art is merely a name we are pleased to give to what can only be the whole stream of action which—in order to impart to it selection and an unconscious or even conscious aim—is poured through the nervous circuit of a human animal or some other animal having a more or less similar nervous organisation. For a cat is an artist as well as a man, and some would say more than a man, while a bee is not only an obvious artist, but perhaps even the typical natural and unconscious artist. There is no defining art; there is only the attempt to distinguish between good art and bad art. Thus it is that I find no escape from the Aristotelian position of Shakespeare that “Nature is made better by no mean But Nature makes that mean.... This is an art Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but The art itself is Nature.” And that this conception is Aristotelian, even the essential Greek conception, is no testimony to Shakespeare’s scholarship. It is merely the proof that here we are in the presence of one of these great ultimate facts of the world which cannot but be sensitively perceived by the finest spirits, however far apart in time and space. Aristotle, altogether in the same spirit as Shakespeare, insisted that the works of man’s making, a State, for example, are natural, though Art partly completes what Nature is herself sometimes unable to bring to perfection, and even then that man is only exercising methods which, after all, are those of Nature. Nature needs Man’s art in order to achieve many natural things, and Man, in fulfilling that need, is only following the guidance of Nature in seeming to make things which are all the time growing by themselves.[125] Art is thus scarcely more than the natural midwife of Nature.