[Sidenote: _Criticism of the classification of the arts._]
The so-called _arts_ have no æsthetic limits, because, in order to have them, they would need to have also æsthetic existence in their particularity; and we have demonstrated the altogether empirical genesis of those partitions. Consequently, any attempt at an æsthetic classification of the arts is absurd. If they be without limits, they are not exactly determinable, and consequently cannot be philosophically classified. All the books dealing with classifications and systems of the arts could be burned without any loss whatever. (We say this with the utmost respect to the writers who have expended their labours upon them.)
The impossibility of such systematizations finds something like a proof in the strange attempts made to carry it out. The first and most common partition is that into arts of _hearing, sight,_ and _imagination_; as if eyes, ears, and imagination were on the same level and could be deduced from the same logical variable as _fundamentum divisionis._ Others have proposed the division into arts of _space_ and arts of _time,_ arts of _rest_; and _movement_; as if the concepts of space, time, rest and motion could determine special æsthetic forms and possess anything in common with art as such. Finally, others have amused themselves by dividing them into _classic_ and _romantic,_ or into _oriental, classic,_ and _romantic,_ thereby conferring the value of scientific concepts upon simple historical denominations, or falling into those rhetorical partitions of expressive forms, already criticized above; or into arts _that can only be seen from one side,_ like painting, and arts _that can be seen from all sides,_ like sculpture--and similar extravagances, which hold good neither in heaven nor on earth.
The theory of the limits of the arts was perhaps at the time when it was put forward a beneficial critical reaction against those who believed in the possibility of remodelling one expression into another, as the _Iliad_ or _Paradise Lost_ into a series of paintings, and indeed held a poem to be of greater or lesser value according as it could or could not be translated into pictures by a painter. But if the rebellion were reasonable and resulted in victory, this does not mean that the arguments employed and the systems constructed for the purpose were sound.