It
must be distinguished from kindred activities. And firstly, it is
distinguished from morality in that morality is concerned with action,
art with production. Morality consists in the activity itself, art in
that which the activity produces. Hence the state of mind of the
actor, his motives, feelings, etc., are important in morality, for
they are part of the act itself. But they are not important in art,
the only essential being that the work of art should turn out well,
however it has been produced. Secondly, art is distinguished from the
activity of nature, which it in many respects resembles. Organic
beings reproduce their own kind, and, in the fact that it is concerned
with production, generation resembles art. But in generation, the
living being produces only itself. The plant produces a plant, man
begets man. But the artist produces something quite other than
himself, a poem, a picture, a statue.

Art is of two kinds, according as it aims at completing the work of
nature, or at creating something new, an imaginary world of its own
which is a copy of the real world. In the former case, we get such
arts as that of {327} medicine. Where nature has failed to produce a
healthy body, the physician helps nature out, and completes the work
that she has begun. In the latter case, we get what are, in modern
times, called the fine arts. These Aristotle calls the imitative arts.
We saw that Plato regarded all art as imitative, and that such a view
is essentially unsatisfactory. Now Aristotle uses the same word, which
he perhaps borrowed from Plato, but his meaning is not the same as
Plato's, nor does he fall into the same mistakes. That in calling art
imitative he has not in mind the thought that it has for its aim
merely the faithful copying of natural objects is proved by the fact
that he mentions music as the most imitative of the arts, whereas
music is, in fact, in this sense, the least imitative of all. The
painter may conceivably be regarded as imitating trees, rivers, or
men, but the musician for the most part produces what is unlike
anything in nature. What Aristotle means is that the artist copies,
not the sensuous object, but what Plato would call the Idea. Art is
thus not, in Plato's contemptuous phrase, a copy of a copy. It is a
copy of the original. Its object is not this or that particular thing,
but the universal which manifests itself in the particular. Art
idealizes nature, that is, sees the Idea in it. I