Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/315

Rh Inferior buildings or ill-favoured localities, on the contrary, which nature has neglected or art has spoiled, perform this task in a very slight degree or not at all; yet even from them these universal, fundamental Ideas of nature cannot altogether disappear. To the careful observer they present themselves here also, and even bad buildings and the like are capable of being æsthetically considered; the Ideas of the most universal properties of their materials are still recognisable in them, only the artificial form which has been given them does not assist but hinders æsthetic contemplation. Manufactured articles also serve to express Ideas, only it is not the Idea of the manufactured article which speaks in them, but the Idea of the material to which this artificial form has been given. This may be very conveniently expressed in two words, in the language of the schoolmen, thus, — the manufactured article expresses the Idea of its forma substantialis, but not that of its forma accidentalis; the latter leads to no Idea, but only to a human conception of which it is the result. It is needless to say that by manufactured article no work of plastic art is meant. The schoolmen understand, in fact, by forma substantialis that which I call the grade of the objectification of will in a thing. We shall return immediately, when we treat of architecture, to the Idea of the material. Our view, then, cannot be reconciled with that of Plato if he is of opinion that a table or a chair express the Idea of a table or a chair (De Rep., x., pp. 284, 285, et Parmen., p. 79, ed. Bip.), but we say that they express the Ideas which are already expressed in their mere material as such. According to Aristotle (Metap. xi., chap. 3), however, Plato himself only maintained Ideas of natural objects: ὁ Πλατων εφη, ὁτι ειδη εστιν ὁποσα φυσει (Plato dixit, quod ideæ eorum sunt, quæ natura sunt), and in chap. 5 he says that, according to the Platonists, there are no Ideas of house and ring. In any case, Plato's earliest disciples, as Alcinous informs us (