the mental
conception of a material object, is, in the primary sense of the word
ideal; that is to say, it represents an idea, and not a thing. Any work
of art which represents or realizes a material object, is, in the
primary sense of the term, unideal.

Ideal works of art, therefore, in this first sense, represent the result
of an act of imagination, and are good or bad in proportion to the
healthy condition and general power of the imagination, whose acts they
represent.

Unideal works of art (the studious production of which is termed
realism) represent actual existing things, and are good or bad in
proportion to the perfection of the representation.

All entirely bad works of art may be divided into those which,
professing to be imaginative, bear no stamp of imagination, and are
therefore false, and those which, professing to be representative of
matter, miss of the representation and are therefore nugatory.

It is the habit of most observers to regard art as representative of
matter, and to look only for the entireness of representation; and it
was to this view of art that I limited the arguments of the former
sections of the present work, wherein having to oppose the conclusions
of a criticism entirely based upon the realist system, I was compelled
to meet that criticism on its own grounds. But the greater part of works
of art, more especially those devoted to the expression of ideas of
beauty, are the results of the agency of imagination, their worthiness
depending, as above stated, on the healthy condition of the imagination.

Hence it is necessary for us, in order to arrive at conclusions
respecting the worthiness of such works, to define and examine the
nature of the imaginative faculty, and to determine first what are the
signs or conditions of its existence at all; and secondly, what are the
evidences of its healthy and efficient existence, upon which examination
I shall enter in the second section of the present part.

Sec. 3. Or to perfection of type.

But there is another sense of the word ideal besides this, and it is
that with which we are here concerned. It is evident that, so long as we
use the word to signify that art which represents ideas and not things,
we may use it as truly of the art which represents an idea of Caliban,
and not real Caliban, as of the art which represents an idea of
Antinous, and not real Antinous. For that is as much imagination which
conceives the monster as which