Read the following passage carefully and choose the most appropriate answer to the question out of the four alternatives. All art is, in an important sense, an escape. There is a sense in which the capacity to escape from his present experience, to use his accumulated consciousness of the past to project a vision of the future, is man's greatest and distinguishing ability. We must not forget the force of Aristotle's argument that poetry is valuable precisely because it shows men not simply as they are, but as they ought to be or (in terms more sympathetic to us today) as they are capable of becoming. The author believes that man's greatest and distinguishing ability is