Art. The power of producing anything. When we quit the region of ordinary handicrafts which we do not often dignify with the title of Arts, we find it difficult to distinguish between an art and a science. For the possession of the method by which anything is produced, means to imply less or more of science of which the mastery of method is the very essence, the knowledge not merely of the ὅτι but of the ειότι. Accordingly the same pursuit has been called by some a science and by some an art, and even Aristotle, who has laid down the distinction with great clearness, has not succeeded in always observing it.
In the concluding chapter of the Posterior Analytics he tells us that many recollections constitute one experience ἐμπειρία, and that an universal being established in the mind through experience, a sense of the one over and above the many, of that one which is the same in the several particulars, we have the principle of art and science—of art if the case be a matter of production, of science if it be one of existence, i.e. of the knowledge of reality: ἐαν δὲ περὶ το ὀν. Yet in the first book of the Metaphysics, cap. I., when contrasting art with new experience, we find him pronouncing the former to be science.
The case stands thus: Art and science are distinct in the abstract, but in the concrete the pursuit of the former involves science, and he who follows it is engaged in studies and investigations which must be called scientific.
