the mind,—­it is the purging of the sensual eye, enabling it to see through the mind as the mind first saw through it, which renders the world of art the new vision it is, the revelation accomplished by the mind for the senses.  If the world of art were only a reduplication of life, it would give only the pleasures that have been mentioned; but its true pleasure is that which it yields from its supersensual element, the reason which has entered into it with ordering power.  In the world thus created there will remain the imperfections which are due to the limitation of the artist, in knowledge, skill, and choice.

It will be said at once that all these concrete representations necessarily fail to realize the artist’s thought, and are inadequate, inferior in exactness, to scientific and philosophic knowledge; in a measure this is true, and would be important if the method of art were demonstrative, instead of being, as has been said, experimental and inductive.  So, too, all thinkers, using the actual world in their processes, are at a disadvantage.  The figures of the geometer, the quantities of the chemist, the measurements of the astronomer, are inexact approximations to their equivalent in the mind.  Art, as an embodiment in mortal images, is subject to the conditions of mortality.  Hence arises its human history, the narrative of its rise, climax, and decline in successive ages.  The course of art is known; it has been run many times; it is a simple matter.  At first art is archaic, the sensible form being rudely controlled by the artist’s hand; it becomes, in the second stage, classical, the form being adequate to the thought, a transparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more than the thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account.  The peculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail; technique is at first a hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a caprice; and always as it goes on it loses sight of the general in its rendering, and dwells with a near eye on the specific.  Nor is this attention to detail confined to the manner; the hand of the artist draws the mind after it, and it is no longer the great types of manhood, the important fates of life, the primary emotions in their normal course, that are in the foreground of thought, but the individual is more and more, the sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling.  This tendency to detail, which is the hallmark of realism, constitutes decline.  It arises partly from the exhaustion of general ideas, from the search for novelty of subject and sensation, from the special phenomena of a decaying society; but, however manifold may be the causes, the fact of decline consists in the lessened scope of the matter and the increased importance of the form, both resulting in luxuriant detail.  Ideas as they lose generality gain in intensity, but in the history of art this has not proved a compensation.  In Greece the three stages are clearly marked both in matter and manner,