This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1837 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI. OP THE TWO CUSTOMARY PHRASES CHOICE OF FORMS AND UNION OF SCATTERED BEAUTIES.--AN ANALYSIS OF THOSE TWO NOTIONS. We have already had occasion to speak of the mistakes that arise in the employment of the word ideal, (see Part II. Chap, v.) more especially when applied to works of art. One of those mistakes consists in restricting the notion of it to corporeal beauty. The generality of persons commit another by considering the ideal as exclusively related to the works of the arts of design and the forms of the human body. Hence certain restrictive systems tending to explain the ideal style, the operations on which it is dependent, and the effects that result from it, by means apparently subordinate to the senses and by notions of absolute, and, in some measure, practical processes. The inadequacy of these explanations cannot be better evinced than by showing that the ideal belongs as much to the conceptions of the art of the poet as to the inventions of the arts of design. The definition of the operation's of which it is the result must then be rendered capable of application to works wholly dependent on mind as well as to those in which art is exercised on matter or bodies. This I have endeavoured to render intelligible in the two preceding chapters, where I have shown that the same effect is produced in both kinds of art, by the same faculty of the mind, by the same act of generalizing. All that is requisite to complete the proof is, to show that the two ways above alluded to, of explaining the operation of the ideal, as some are accustomed to conceive and express it with regard to the arts of design, are nothing more than an interpretation of the act of generalizing, or a circumlocutory mode of expressing that intellectual process. If in the s...