Delsarte defines art in several ways.  He has been reproached for his over-amplitude of definition, and his development of it in a sense too metaphysical for a science which he himself calls “positive.”  I give here only such definitions as seem to me most clear and important.

“Art is at once the knowledge, the possession and the free direction of the agents by virtue of which are revealed the life, soul and mind.  It is the appropriation of the sign to the thing.  It is the relation of the beauties scattered through nature to a superior type.  It is not, therefore, the mere imitation of nature.”

The word life, in the sense employed above, is the equivalent of sensation, of physical manifestations.

Man being the object of art, it is from the working of the various faculties of the human organism that Delsarte deduces the task of the artist; as from the knowledge of the essential modalities of the ego, he deduces his law of general aesthetics.

Delsarte teaches, therefore, that man is a triplicity of persons; that is, he contains in his indestructible unity, three principles or aspects, which he calls life, soul and mind; in other words, physical, moral and intellectual persons.

In this statement this master agrees with the philosophers who give a triplicity of essential principles as the base of ontology.  Pierre Leroux names them as follows:  sensation, sentiment, consciousness.

That which is personal to Delsarte is the derivation of the law of aesthetics from this conception of being.

The primal faculties once ascertained, he devotes himself to an analysis of the organism; he describes the harmony of each of these faculties with the apparatus which serves it as agent for manifesting itself, and demonstrates the fitness of each organ for the task assigned it.  The master establishes that the inflections of the voice betray more especially the sensitive nature; that gesture is the interpreter of emotion; that articulation—­a special element of speech—­is in the direct service of intelligence and thought.  He gave the name of vocal to the active apparatus of sensation; dynamic to that of sentiment; buccal to that of articulation.

From the union of the faculties and their agents arise three modes of expression:  the language of affection, the language of ellipsis (or gesture) and the language of philosophy.  They respond to the three states which Delsarte recognizes in man, and which the artist is to translate:  the sensitive state, corresponding to the life; the moral state, to the soul; the intellectual state, to the mind.

But this division into three modalities or into three states is far from giving the number of the manifestations of being.  Nature is not reduced to this indigence.  From the fusion of these three states, in varying and incessant combination, and from the predominance of one of the primitive modalities, whether accidental or permanent, countless individualities are formed, each with its personal constitution, its shades of difference of education, habits, age, character, etc.