Note 109 — Chapter XVII · ANCIENT AND MODERN TRAGEDY.

The word κάθαρσις may possibly have been borrowed from medicine by Aristotle, and his meaning may, therefore, be that the surplus of the passions of which he speaks is literally purged out of the mental system by the action of tragedy. This suggestion was, I think, made by Bernays. It has been pointed out to me by my friend, Mr. E. Abbot, of Balliol College, that Aristotle, in another passage of the Poetics (xvii. 8), uses the word in a lustral meaning. The reference to it in a weighty passage of the Politics (viii. 7, 4) seems to prove that the purification was for the individual, not, as Goethe thought, for the passions as exhibited in the work of art itself.