118 KEALISM AND IDEALISM 



reunite those excellences, to apply the principles of those 

 perfected types, becomes his aim. He cannot rival Nature 

 by producing anything exactly like her work, but he can 

 create something which shall show what Nature strives after. 

 BovXerat ftcv aXX' ov Swarat, wrote Aristotle about Nature ; 

 ' she has the will but not the power to realise perfection.' 

 The mind of man comprehends her effort, and though the 

 skill of man cannot compete with her in the production 

 of particulars, he is able by art to anticipate her desires, 

 and to exhibit an image of what she was intending. As 

 Tennyson wrote in ' The Two Voices ' : 



That type of perfect in his mind 

 Can he in Nature nowhere find. 



This, at least, is how the matter appears to man ; although 

 it can hardly be doubted that Nature in her entirety is more 

 perfect than our imagination, could man but attain to 

 full and sympathetic comprehension of the universal scheme. 

 Perhaps it may be a defect in our perceptive faculty which 

 makes us discern and seek to remedy defect in nature. 

 Perhaps the truth may be that man's intelligence, being 

 at present the highest known thing in the universe, appre- 

 hends the relative inferiority of things below it in the scale 

 of being. Anyhow, the fact remains that we can observe 

 and correct ideally many blemishes in natural objects as, 

 for example, a thick ankle or a -disproportioned leg, the 

 squint in the eyes of an otherwise symmetrical face, a hare- 

 lip, an unwieldy branch in some fine oak, an ungraceful 

 combination of lines in a mountain landscape. It is clearly 

 not the artist's duty to copy these apparent defects in 

 the object because they occur in nature, when his faculty 

 of generalisation enables him to rectify them by the analogy 

 of other objects in nature which are to us more pleasing, 

 and which more completely realise 'that type of perfect' 

 existing in our intelligence. It is the same with ugliness 

 as with what we call sin, evil, pain, disease. All of these 

 qualities seem to us imperfections, and we are justified in 

 attempting to remove ugliness from the aesthetic sphere, 

 sin from the moral, pain and disease from the physical. 



