t regards the
individual thing, not as an individual, but in its universal aspects,
as the fleeting embodiment of an eternal thought. Hence it is that the
sculptor depicts not the individual man, but rather the type-man, the
perfection of his kind. Hence too, in modern times, the portrait
painter is not concerned to paint a faithful image of his model, but
takes the model merely as a suggestion, and seizes upon that essential
and eternal {328} essence, that ideal thought, or universal, which he
sees shining through the sensuous materials in which it is imprisoned.
His task is to free it from this imprisonment. The common man sees
only the particular object. The artist sees the universal in the
particular. Every individual thing is a compound of matter and form,
of particular and universal. The function of art is to exhibit the
universal in it.

Hence poetry is truer, more philosophical, than history. For history
deals only with the particular as the particular. It tells us only of
the _fact_, of what has happened. Its truth is mere correctness,
accuracy. It has not in it, as art has, the living and eternal truth.
It does not deal with the Idea. It yields us only the knowledge of
something that, having happened, having gone by, is finished. Its
object is transient and perishable. It concerns only the endless
iteration of meaningless events. But the object of art is that inner
essence of objects and events, which perishes not, and of which the
objects and events are the mere external drapery. If therefore we
would arrange philosophy, art, and history, in order of their
essential nobility and truth, we should place philosophy first,
because its object is the universal as it is in itself, the pure
universal. We should place art second, because its object is the
universal in the particular, and history last, because it deals only
with the particular as such. Yet because each thing in the world has
its own proper function, and errs if it seeks to perform the functions
of something else, hence, in Aristotle's opinion, art must not attempt
to emulate philosophy. It must not deal with the abstract universal.
The poet must not use his verses as a vehicle of abstract thought. His
proper {329} sphere is the universal as it manifests itself in the
particular, not the universal as it is in itself. Aristotle, for this
reason, censures didactic poetry. Such a poem as that of Empedocles,
who unfolded his philosophical system in metre,