studies the orange, the laurel, the pine, and the birch, with equal interest; it is itself a species of botany, applied not to plants, but to the works of man. By virtue of this it keeps pace with the general movement of the day, which now affiliates the moral sciences with the natural sciences, and which, giving to the first the principles, precautions, and directions of the second, gives to them the same stability, and assures them the same progress. II. I wish to apply at once this method to the first and principal question by which a course of æsthetics is opened out, and which is a definition of art. What is art, and in what does its nature consist? Instead of establishing a formula, I wish to familiarize you with facts, for facts exist here as elsewhere--positive facts open to observation; I mean _works_ of _art_ arranged by families in galleries and libraries, like plants in an herbarium, and animals in a museum. Analysis may be applied to the one as to the others; a work of art may be investigated generally, as we investigate a plant or an animal generally. There is no more need of discarding experience in the first case than in the second; the entire process consists in discovering, by numerous comparisons and progressive eliminations, traits common to all works of art, and, at the same time, the distinctive traits by which works of art are separated from other productions of the human intellect. To this end we will, among the five great arts of poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture, and music, set aside the last two, of which the explanation is more difficult, and to which we will return afterwards; we shall at present consider only the three first. All, as you are aware, possess a common character, that of being more or less _imitative_ arts. At the first glance, it seems that this is their principal character, and their object is imitation as exact as possible. For it is plain that a statue is meant to imitate accurately a really living man; that a picture is intended to portray real persons in real attitudes, the interior of a house and a landscape, such as nature presents. It is no less evident that a drama, a romance, attempts to represent faithfully characters, actions, and actual speech, and to give as precise and as accurate a picture of them as is possible. When, accordingly, the image is inadequate or inexact, we say to the sculptor, "This breast or this limb is not well executed;" and to the painter, "The figures of your background are too large--the coloring of your trees is faulty;" and we say to the author, "Never did man feel or think as you have imagined him."