IDEAL

From Agepedia

IDEAL; an imaginary model of perfection. In the fine arts, the ideal is distinguished from the exact imitation of reality by avoiding the imperfections which always disfigure the individual, and givingto each excellence its highest perfection. Imagination creates ideals, in the fine arts, by abstractions from individual forms, separating the individual and casual from the general and the essential, and thus produces ideals of a particular kind. If it performs the same process on these, again abstracting the general and essential, it creates new ideals of a still higher kind ; and, if this abstraction be carried on further, we arrive at last at the pure ideal, which is incapable of any further separation and generalizationthe ideal form of the whole genus. Thus man creates forms elevated above the real forms of nature:. we do not say above nature itself, because we understand by nature not only the actual appearances of the sensible world, but also the laws and prototypes which lie at their foundation, and at which imagination arrives in the way indicated. As in thousands of crystals we do not find one which forms a perfect mathematical figure, while the effort of nature to produce such a figure is obvious in all, so is it with the beautiful. All the individual instances may be regarded as the imperfect attempts of nature to produce a faultless model. In creating the ideal of beauty, man does not follow, as some suppose, the arbitrary suggestions of fancy, but strives to discover and present the prototypes of nature. Imagination finds tlie materials of the ideal in reality, but she unites the separate traits of the grand and the beautiful, dispersed through nature in one perfect ideal. So, too, there may be ideals of the hateful, the horrid, the malignant; for the ideal aims merely at completeness, whether in the good or the bad, the grand or the mean, the graceful or the ugly, the heroic or the ridiculous. Dante often gives us the ideal of physical suffering, whilst the Koran aims to present the ideal of sensual enjoyment. The caricature is, under a certain point of view, an ideal. The characteristic, which is founded on the deviation of the individual form from the generic, is therefore opposed to the ideal, which loses by any deviation from the generic form; but, on the other hand, the representation gains in character, and thus satisfies the claims of the fine arts, which require not only the beautiful but the true. Truth must in no case be sacrificed to beauty. A medium must therefore be employed, by which the truth may be represented as beautiful. This medium is the true ideal of the imitative arts. Genius only can decide how far the characteristic and the generic are to be mingled. (See the article Copy.)