Less gross than the preceding, this theory is no less false and dangerous. Let us here distinguish two things: the idea and the expression—the content and the form. Now, if Art is designed for expression solely—if expression is its essential object—its content is indifferent. Provided that the picture be faithful, the expression lively and animated, the good and the bad, the vicious, the hideous, the ugly, have the same right to figure here as the Beautiful. Immoral, licentious, impious, the artist will have fulfilled his obligation and reached perfection, when he has succeeded in faithfully rendering a situation, a passion, an idea, be it true or false. It is clear that if in this system the object of imitation is changed, the procedure is the same. Art would be only an echo, a harmonious language; a living mirror, where all sentiments and all passions would find themselves reflected, the base part and the noble part of the soul contending here for the same place. The true, here, would be the real, would include objects the most diverse and the most contradictory. Indifferent as to the content, the artist seeks only to represent it well. He troubles himself little concerning truth in itself. Skeptic or enthusiast indifferently, he makes us partake of the delirium of the Bacchanals, or the unconcern of the Sophist. Such is the system which takes for a motto the maxim, _Art is for art_; that is to say, mere expression for its own sake. Its consequences, and the fatal tendency which it has at all times pressed upon the arts, are well known. A third system sets up _moral perfection_ as the aim of art. It cannot be denied that one of the effects of art is to soften and purify manners (_emollit mores_). In mirroring man to himself, it tempers the rudeness of his appetites and his passions; it disposes him to contemplation and reflection; it elevates his thought and sentiments, by leading them to an ideal which it suggests,—to ideas of a superior order. Art has, from all time, been regarded as a powerful instrument of civilization, as an auxiliary of religion. It is, together with religion, the earliest instructor of nations; it is besides a means of instruction for minds incapable of comprehending truth otherwise than under the veil of a symbol, and by images that address themselves to the sense as well as to the spirit.