Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: form of the Beautiful, it is generally accompanied by facility to deal with the special material of the Art it finds itself most at home in, which shows itself as a strong and positive taste.] There is an opinion which insists that the design of Art is the imitation of nature. This amounts to saying that what exists in nature man makes a second time as well as the means at hand allow. But one may say that this repetition is useless and lost labor, since what is offered to us in a picture we may behold just as well in our gardens or in our houses; and besides, this superfluous painstaking convicts man of vanity and folly, for only one sense is duped by the imperfect illusions which Art presents. In place of the real and living it puts an hypocritical deception of reality and of life. Instead of praising successes of this kind we ought rather to blame those who can produce only results so manifestly inferior to those of nature. One may, indeed, find pleasure in looking upon a fair imitation of what exists already, but the pleasure is less than that derived from the contemplation of the original, indeed colder, the more perfect the imitation. There have been portraits of which it may be said that they were disgusting in their resemblance. The chant of the nightingale, as Kant observes, imitated by man, displeases us, or at least lowers the quality of our pleasure, as soon as we perceive that it is a man who produces the imitation. It is neither a work of nature nor a work of art. A true creation gives a far higher delight. In this sense theleast invention in the mechanic arts is more noble than anything which is a mere imitation. As the principle of imitation is purely external and superficial, it cannot, as such, go beyond mere faithfulness. And to say that it selects the beautif...