Is art, mimesis, a rational or an irrational fact? Does it belong to the noble region of the soul, where philosophy and virtue are found, or does it dwell in that base lower sphere, with sensuality and crude passionality? This is the question asked by Plato,[6] who thus states the problem of Æsthetic for the first time. The sophist Gorgias was able to note, with his sceptical acuteness, that tragic representation is a deception, which (strangely enough) turns out to the honour both of him who deceives and of him who is deceived, in which it is shameful not to know how to deceive oneself and not to let oneself be deceived.[7] With that remark he could rest content. That was for him a fact like another. But Plato, the philosopher, was bound to solve the problem: if it were a deception, then down with tragedy and the rest of mimetic productions: down with them among the other things to be despised, among the animal qualities of man. But if it were not deception, what was it? What place did art occupy among the lofty activities of philosophy and of good action?

The answer that he gave is well known. Mimetic does not realize the ideas, that is to say the truth of things, but reproduces natural or artificial things, which are pale shadows of them; it is a diminution of a diminution, a third-hand work. Art, then, does not belong to the lofty and rational region of the soul (του λογιστικοϋ ἐν ψυχή) but to the sensual; it is not a strengthening but a corruption of the mind (λώβη τής διάνοιας); it can serve only sensual pleasure, which troubles and obscures. For this reason, mimetic, poetry and poets, must be excluded from the perfect Republic.

Plato is the most consistent example of those who do not succeed in discovering any other form of knowledge but the intellectual. It was correctly observed by him that imitation stops at natural things, at the image (το φάντασμα), and does not reach the concept, logical truth (άλήθεια), of which poets and painters are altogether ignorant. But his error consisted in believing that there is no other form of truth below the intellectual; that there is nothing but sensuality and passionality outside or prior to the intellect, that which discovers the ideas. Certainly, the fine æsthetic sense of Plato did not echo that depreciatory judgement of art; he himself declared that he would have been very glad to have been shown how to justify art and to place it among the forms of the spirit. But since none was able to give him this assistance, and since art with its appearance that yet lacks reality was repugnant to his ethical consciousness, and reason compelled him (ό λόγος ήρει) to banish it and place it with its peers, he resolutely obeyed his conscience and his reason.[8]

Others were not troubled with these scruples, and although art was always looked upon as a mere thing of pleasure among the later hedonistic schools of various sorts, among rhetoricians and worldly people the duty of combating or of abolishing it was not felt. Nevertheless, this opposite extreme was also not calculated to meet with the endorsement of public opinion, for the latter, if tender towards art, is no less tender towards rationality and morality. For this reason both rationalists and moralists, compelled to recognize the force of such a condemnation as Plato's, sought for a compromise, a half measure. Away with the sensual and with art: certainly. But can we expel the sensual and the pleasurable without more ado? Can fragile human nature nourish itself exclusively with the strong food of philosophy and morality? Can we obtain observance of the true and of the good from the young and from the people, without allowing them at the same time some amusement? And has not man himself always something of the child, has he not always something of the people in him, is he not to be treated with the same precautions? Is there not a risk that the over-bent bow will break?—These considerations prepared the way for the justification of art, for they showed that if it were not rational in itself, it could on the other hand serve a rational end. Hence the search for the external end of art, which takes the place of the search for the essence or internal end. When art had been lowered to the level of a simple pleasurable illusion, an inebriation of the senses, it was necessary to subordinate the practical action of producing such an illusion and inebriation, like any other action, to the moral end. Art, being deprived of any dignity of its own, was obliged to assume a reflected or secondhand dignity. Thus the moralistic and pedagogic theory was constructed upon a hedonistic basis. The artist, who, for the pure hedonist, was comparable to a hetaira, became for the moralist a pedagogue. Hetaira and pedagogue, these are the symbols of the two conceptions of art that were disseminated in antiquity, and the second was grafted upon the first.

Even before Plato's peremptory negation had directed thought to this way of issue, the literary criticism of Aristophanes was already full of the pedagogic idea: "What schoolmasters are to children, poets are to young men" (τοΐς ήβώσιν δὲ ποιηταί), he says in a celebrated verse[9] But we can find traces of it in Plato himself (in the dialogues in which he seems to withdraw from the too rigid conclusions of the Republic) and in Aristotle, both in the Politics, where he determines the use of music in education, and perhaps in the Poetics, where he speaks obscurely of a tragical catharsis; although as regards this latter, it is not to be altogether denied that he may have had a sort of glimpse of the modern idea of the liberating power of art.[10] Later on, the pedagogic theory takes a form that was much affected by the Stoics. Strabo develops and defends this at great length, in the introduction to his geographical work, where he combats Eratosthenes, who has made poetry consist in mere pleasure without any notion of teaching. Strabo, on the contrary, maintained the opinion of the ancients, that it was "a first philosophy (φιλοσοφίαν τινα πρωτήν), which educated young men for life, and created customs, affections and actions, by means of pleasure." Therefore, he said, poetry has always been a part of education; one cannot be a good poet unless one is a good man (άνδρα άγαθόν). Legislators and founders of cities were the first to employ fables to admonish and to terrify: then this duty, which must be performed for women and children and even for adults, passed to the poets. We caress and dominate the multitude with fiction and with falsehood.[11] "The poets tell many lies" (πολλά ψεύδονται άοιδοί) is a hemistich recorded by Plutarch, who describes minutely in one of his lesser works how the poets should be read to youths.[12] For him too poetry is a preparation for philosophy; it is a disguised philosophy, and therefore delights us in the same way as do fish and meat at feasts, so prepared as not to seem to be fish and meat; it is philosophy softened with fables, like the vine that grows close to the mandragora, and produces a wine that is the giver of sweet slumbers. It is not possible to pass from dense darkness to sunlight; one should first accustom the eyes to moderate light. Philosophers, in order to exhort and instruct, take their examples from true things; poets aim at a like result, when they create fictions and fables.[13] Lucretius, in Roman literature, gives us the well-known comparison of the boys for whom the doctors "prius or as pocula circum Contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore," in order to administer the bitter wormwood.[14] Horace, in certain verses of the Epistle to the Pisones which have become proverbial (perhaps his source for them was the Greek of Neoptolemus of Paros?), offers both views (that of art as courtesan and of art as pedagogue) in his "Aut prodesse volunt aut deledare poetae ... omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci."[15]

Thus looked at, the office of the poet was confounded with that of the orator, for he too was a practical man aiming at practical effects; hence there arose discussions as to whether Virgil was to be considered as a poet or as an orator ("Virgilius poeta an orator?"). To both was assigned the triple end of delectare, movere, docere; in any case this tripartition was very empirical, for we clearly perceive that the delectare is here a means-and the docere a simple part of the movere: to move in the direction of the good, and therefore, among other goods, towards that of instruction. In like manner, it was said of the orator and poet (recording the meretricious basis of their task, and with a metaphor significant in its naïveté) that they were bound to avail themselves of the allurements (lenocinium) of form.

The mystical view, which considers art as a special mode of self-beatification, of entering into relation with the Absolute, with the Summum Bonum, with the ultimate root of things, appeared only in late antiquity, almost at the entrance to the Middle Ages. Its representative is the founder of the neo-Platonic school, Plotinus.

It is strange that Plato should be usually selected as the founder and head of this æsthetic tendency, and that for this very reason to him should be attributed the honour of being the father of Æsthetic. But how could he, who had expounded with such great limpidity and clearness the reasons for which he was not able to accord to art a high place among the activities of the spirit, be credited with having accorded to it one of the highest places, equal, if not superior, to philosophy itself? This misunderstanding has evidently arisen out of the enthusiastic effusions about the Beautiful that we read in the Gorgias, the Philebus, the Phædrus, the Symposium, and other Platonic dialogues. It is well to dissipate it by declaring that the Beauty of which Plato discourses has nothing to do with art or with artistic beauty.

The search for the meaning and scientific content of the word "beautiful" could not but early attract the attention of the subtle and elegant Greek dialecticians. Indeed, we find Socrates engaged in discussing this question in one of the discourses that have been preserved for us by Xenophon; and we find him disposed to stop for the moment at the conclusion that the beautiful is that which is convenient and which answers to the end desired, or at the other conclusion that it is that which one loves[16] Plato too examines this sort of problem and proposes various sorts of solutions or attempts at solutions of it. He sometimes speaks of a beauty that dwells not only in bodies, but also in laws, in actions, in the sciences; sometimes he seems to conjoin and almost to identify it with the true, the good and the divine; now he returns to the view of Socrates and confuses it with the useful; now he distinguishes between a beautiful in itself (καλά καθ' αυτά) and a relatively beautiful (πρός τι καλά); or he makes true beauty consist in pure pleasure (ήδονη καθαρά), free from all shadow of pain; or he places it in measure and proportion (μετριότης καί ξνμμετρία); or talks of colours and sounds as possessing a beauty in themselves.[17] It was impossible to find an independent dominion for the beautiful, if the artistic or mimetic activity were deserted. This explains his wandering among so many different conceptions, among which it is just possible to say that the identification of the Beautiful with the Good prevails. Nothing better describes this uncertainty than the dialogue of the Hippias maior (which, if it be not Plato's, is Platonic). He here wishes to find out not what things are beautiful things, but what the beautiful is; that is to say, what it is that makes beautiful, not only a beautiful virgin, but also a beautiful mare, a beautiful lyre, a beautiful pot with two graceful ears of clay. Hippias and Socrates himself propose in turn the most various solutions; but the latter ends by confuting them all. "That which makes things beautiful is the gold that is added to them by way of ornament." No: gold only embellishes where it is fitting (πρέπων): for instance, a pot should have a wooden rather than a golden handle. "That is beautiful which cannot seem ugly to any one." But it is not a question of seeming: the question is to define what the beautiful is, whether it seems so or not. It is the fitting which makes things seem to be beautiful. But in that case, the fitting (which makes them appear, not be) is one thing, and the beautiful another. "The beautiful is what leads to the end, that is to say, the useful (χρήσιμον)." But if that were so, then evil would also be beautiful, because the useful leads also to the evil. "The beautiful is the helpful, that which leads to the good (ωφέλιμον)." But in this case, the good would not be beautiful nor the beautiful good; for the cause is not the effect, and the effect is not the cause. "The beautiful is that which delights the sight and hearing." But this fails to persuade for three reasons: firstly, because beautiful studies and laws are beautiful, which have nothing to do with the eye or with the ear; secondly, because we cannot discover a reason for limiting the beautiful to those senses, while excluding the pleasure of eating and smelling, and the extremely vivid pleasures of sex; thirdly, because, if the foundation of the beautiful were visibility, it would not be audibility, and if it were audibility it would not be visibility; hence that which constitutes the beautiful cannot dwell in either of the two qualities. And the question which has been repeated so insistently in the course of the dialogue: what is the beautiful? (τί εστι το καλόν;) remains unanswered.[18]

Later writers also conducted inquiries into the beautiful, and we possess the titles of several treatises upon the theme, which have been lost. Aristotle shows himself changeable and uncertain upon the point. In the scanty references which he makes to it, he at one time confounds the beautiful with the good, defining it as that which is both good and pleasing;[19] at another he notes that the good consists of action (εν πράξει) and the beautiful also in things that are immoveable (εν τοΐς άκινήτοις), drawing from this the argument that mathematics should be studied in order to determine its characters, order, symmetry and limit;[20] sometimes he places it in bigness and in order (εν μεγεθει καί τάξει);[21] at others he was led to look upon it as something apparently indefinable.[22] Antiquity also established canons of beautiful things, such as that attributed to Polycletus on the proportions of the human body. And Cicero said of the beauty of bodies that they were "quaedam apta figura membrorum cum coloris quadam suavitate."[23] All these affirmations, even when they are not mere empirical observations, or verbal glosses and substitutions, meet with unsurmountable obstacles.

In any case, not only is the conception of the beautiful, taken as a whole, identified with art in none of them; but sometimes art and beauty, mimesis and pleasing or displeasing material of mimesis, are clearly distinguished. Aristotle notes in his Poetics that it pleases us to see the most faithful images of things that are repugnant to us in reality, such, for instance, as the most contemptible forms of animals, or corpses (τάς εικόνας τάς μάλιστα ήκριβωμενας χαίρομεν θεωρουντες).[24] Plutarch demonstrates at length that works of art please us not as beautiful but as resembling (ούχ ως καλόν, άλλ,' ως ομοιον); he affirms that if the artist beautified things that are ugly in nature he would be offending against fitness and resemblance (το πρεπον και το eίκός); and he proclaims the principle that the beautiful is one thing and beautiful imitation another (oύ yaρ εστι ταυτό, το καλον και καλως τι μιμεισθαι). Paintings of horrible events are pleasing, such as Medea slaying her sons by Timomachus, Orestes the matricide by Theon, and the Pretended madness of Ulysses by Parrhasius; and if the grunting of a pig, the grating of a machine, the noise of the winds and the tumult of the sea are unpleasing, they pleased on the contrary in the case of Parmenon, who imitated the pig perfectly, and in Theodorus, who was not less expert in rendering the grating of machines.[25] If the ancients had really wanted to place the beautiful and art in relation, a secondary and partial connexion of the two conceptions was to hand in the shape of the category of the relatively as distinguished from the absolutely beautiful. But where the word καλόν or pulchrum is applied to artistic productions in the writings of literary critics, it does not seem to be more than a linguistic usage, as we find, for instance, in the case of Plutarch's beautiful imitation, or also in the terminology of the rhetoricians, who sometimes called elegance and adornment of discourse beauty of elocution (το τής φράσεως κάλλος).

It is only with Plotinus that the two divided territories are united and the beautiful and art are fused into a single concept, not by means of a beneficial absorption of the equivocal Platonic conception of beauty into the unequivocal conception of art, but by absorption of the clear into the confused, of imitative art in the so-called beautiful. And thus we reach an altogether new view: the beautiful and art are now both alike melted into a mystical passion and elevation of the spirit.

Beauty, observes Plotinus, resides chiefly in things visible; but it is also to be found in things audible, such as verbal and musical compositions, and it is not lacking in things supersensible, such as works, offices, actions, habits, sciences and virtues. What is it that makes beautiful sensible and supersensible things alike? Not, he answers, the symmetry of their parts among themselves, and with the whole (συμμετρία των μερών προς αλληλα και προς το ολον) and their colour (ενχροια), according to one of the definitions most in vogue, which we have quoted above in the words of Cicero; because there are proportions in things ugly, and there are things that are simply beautiful without any relation of proportion: beauty, then, is one thing and symmetry another.[26] The beautiful is what we welcome as akin to our own nature; the ugly is what repels us as our opposite, and the affinity of beautiful things with our souls that perceive them has its origin in the Idea, which produces both. That is beautiful which is formed; the ugly is what is unformed, that is to say, something which is capable of receiving form, but does not receive it or is not entirely dominated by it. A beautiful body is such, because of its communion (κοινωνία) with the Divine; beauty is the Divine, the Idea, shining through; and matter is beautiful, not in itself, but only when it is illuminated by the Idea. Light and fire, which are nearest to this state, shed beauty upon visible things, as the most spiritual among bodies. But the soul must purify itself, in order to perceive the beautiful, and make the power of the Idea that lies in it efficacious. Moderation, strength, prudence, and every other virtue, what else are they, according to the oracle, but purification? Thus there opens another eye in the soul, beside that of sensible beauty, which permits it to contemplate divine Beauty coincident with the Good, which is the supreme condition of beatitude.[27] Art enters into such contemplation, because beauty, in things made by man, comes from the mind. Compare two blocks of stone, the one placed beside the other: one rough and crude, the other reduced to the statue of a god or of a man, for example of a Grace or of a Muse, or of a human being of such a shape, as art has collected from many particular beauties. The beauty of a block of this shape does not consist in its being of stone, but in the form that art has been able to give to it (παρά του ειδους o ενηκεν η τέχνη); and when the form is fully impressed upon it, the thing of art is more beautiful than any other natural thing. Hence he who despised the arts (Plato), because they imitated nature, was wrong; whereas the truth is, in the first place, that nature itself imitates the idea, and then that the arts do not simply limit themselves to imitating what the eyes see, but go back to those reasons or ideas from which nature itself is derived (ώς ούχ απλώς το όρώμενον μεμούνται, αλλ' άνατρέχουσιν επι τούς λόγους έξ ων η φύσις). Art therefore does not belong to nature, but adds beauty where it is wanting in nature: Phidias did not represent Jove because he had seen him, but such as he would appear if he wished to reveal himself to mortal eyes.[28] The beauty of natural things is the archetype existing in the soul, the sole source of natural beauty.[29]

This affirmation of Plotinus and of neo-Platonism is the first true and proper affirmation of mystical Æsthetic, destined to such high fortunes in modern times, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century. But the attempts at a true Æsthetic, excluding certain luminous but incidental observations to be found even in Plato: for instance, that the poet should weave fables, not arguments (μύθους άλλ' ού λόγους),[30] go back to Aristotle and are altogether independent of his few and feeble speculations as to the beautiful. Aristotle by no means agreed with the Platonic condemnation; he felt (as indeed Plato himself had suspected) that such a result could not be altogether true, and that some aspect of the problem must have been neglected. When in his turn he attempted to find a solution, he found himself in more advantageous conditions than his great predecessor, since he had already overcome the obstacle that arose from the Platonic doctrine of ideas, a hypostasis of concepts and abstractions. The ideas were for him simply concepts, and reality presented itself in a far more lively manner, not as a diminution of ideas, but as a synthesis of matter and form, it was thus much more easy for him to recognize the rationality of mimesis in his general philosophical doctrine and to assign to it its right place; and indeed it seems generally clear to Aristotle that mimesis, being proper to man by nature, is contemplation or theoretic activity; although he sometimes seems to forget this (as when he confuses imitation with the case of boys, who acquire their first knowledge by following an example[31]), and although his system, which admits practical sciences and poietic activities (distinguished from the practical as leaving a material object behind them), disturbed the firm and constant consideration of artistic mimesis and poetry as a theoretical activity. But if it is a theoretical activity, by what characteristic is poetry distinguished both from scientific knowledge and from historical knowledge? This is the way Aristotle states the problem concerning the nature of art, and this is the true and only way of stating it. Even we moderns ask ourselves in what way art is distinguished from history and from science, and what this artistic form can be, which has the ideality of science and the concreteness and individuality of history. Poetry, answers Aristotle, differs from history, because, while the latter draws things that have happened (τα γενόμενα), poetry draws things that may possibly happen (οια αν γένοιτο), and differs from science, because, although it regards the universal and not the particular (τα καθ' εκαστον) like history, it does not regard it in the same way as science, but in a certain measure, which the philosopher indicates by the word rather (μαλλον τα καθόλου). The point then is to establish the precise meaning of the possible, the rather and the historical particular. But no sooner does Aristotle attempt to determine the meaning of these words, than he falls into contradictions and fallacies. That universal of poetry, which is the possible, seems to identify itself for him with the probable or the necessary (τα κατά το είκος η το άναγκαΐον), and the particular of history is not explained at all, except by giving instances: "that which Alcibiades did and what happened to him."[32] Aristotle, in fact, after having made so good a beginning in the discovery of the purely imaginative, proper to poetry, remains half-way, perplexed and uncertain. Thus he sometimes makes the truth of imitation consist in a certain learning and syllogizing that takes place when we look at imitations, by which we recognize that "this is that," that a copy answers to the original;[33] or, worse, he loses the grains of truth that he has found and forgets that poetry has for its content the possible, admitting, not only that it may also depict the impossible (το αδύνατον), and even the absurd (το άτοπον), seeing that both are credible and that they do not injure the end of art, but even that we must prefer impossible probabilities to incredible possibilities.[34] Art, since it has to do even with the impossible and absurd, will not therefore have in it anything of the rational, but in accordance with the Platonic theory it will be an imitation of the appearance in which empty sense indulges itself; that is to say, a thing of pleasure. Aristotle does not attain to this result, because he does not attain to any clear and precise result in this part of the subject, but it is one of the results that can be deduced from what he has said, or that, at any rate he is not able to exclude. This means that he did not fulfil his tacitly assumed task, and that although he re-examined the problem with marvellous acuteness after Plato, he failed truly to rid himself of the Platonic definition, by substituting a firmly-established one of his own.

But the field of investigation toward which Aristotle had turned was generally neglected in antiquity: the very Poetics of Aristotle does not seem to have been widely known or influential. Ancient psychology knew fancy or imagination as a faculty midway between sense and intellect, but always as conservative and reproductive of sensuous impressions or conveying conceptions to the senses, never properly as a productive autonomous activity. That faculty was rarely and with little result placed in relation with the problem of art. Several historians of Æsthetic attach singular importance to certain passages in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana by the elder Philostratus, in which they believe that they discover a correction of the theory of mimesis and the first affirmation in history of the conception of imaginative creation. Phidias and Praxiteles (says the extract in question) did not need to go to heaven to see the gods, in order to be able to depict them in their works, as would have been necessary according to the theory of imitation. Imagination, without any need of models, made them able to do what they did: imagination, which is a wiser agent than simple imitation (φαντασία ... σοφωτόρα μιμήσεως δημιουργός), and gives form, like the other, not only to what has been seen, but also to what has never been seen, imagining it on the basis of existing things and in that way creating Jupiters and Minervas.[35] However, the imagination of which Philostratus speaks here is not something different from the Aristotelian mimesis, which, as has been noted, was concerned not only with real things but also and chiefly with possible things. And had not Socrates observed (in the dialogue with the painter Parrhasius, preserved for us by Xenophon) that painters work by collecting what they need to form their figures from several bodies (εκ πολλων συνάγοντες τα εξ εκάστου καλλιστα)?[36] And was not the anecdote of Zeuxis, who was supposed to have taken the best of five Crotonian maidens in order to paint his Helen, and other anecdotes of a like sort, sufficiently widespread in antiquity? And had not Cicero eloquently explained, some years before Philostratus, how Phidias, when he was carving Jupiter, did not copy anything real, but kept his looks fixed upon "species pulcritudinis eximia quaedam," which he had in his soul and which directed his art and his hand?[37] Nor can it be said that Philostratus opened the way to Plotinus, for whom the superior or intellectual imagination (νοητή), or eye of supersensible beauty, when it is not a new designation for beautiful imitation, is mystical intuition.

The vagueness of the concept of mimesis reached its apex in those writers who gave it as a general title to any sort of work that had nature for its object, employing the Aristotelian phrase to affirm that "omnis ars naturae imitatio est,"[38] or saying, like the painter Eupompus when he blamed his servile imitators, that "natura est imitanda, non artifex."[39] And those who wished to escape this vagueness did not know how to do so, save by conceiving the activity of imitation as the practical producer of duplicates of natural objects, a prejudice bora in the bosom of the pictorial and plastic arts, against which Philostratus perhaps intended to argue, in common with the other advocates of imagination.

The speculations upon language had a close connexion with those upon the nature of art begun by the sophists, for whom it became a matter for wonder that sounds could signify colours or things inaudible; that is to say, speech presented itself as a problem.[40] It was then discussed whether language was by nature (φύσει or by convention νόμω). By nature was sometimes understood mental necessity, and by convention what we should call a merely natural fact, psychological mechanism or sensationalism. In that sense of the terms, language would have been better called φύσει than νόμω. But at other times the distinction led to the question whether language answers to objective or logical truth and to the real relations between things (όρθότης των ονομάτων); and in this case, those would seem to be nearer the truth who proclaimed it to be conventional or arbitrary in respect to logical truth: νόμω or θέσει, and not φύσει Two different questions were consequently being treated together, and both were confusedly and equivocally discussed. They find their monument in the obscure Cratylus of Plato, which seems to fluctuate between different solutions. Nor did the later affirmation that the word is a sign (σημείον) of the thought solve anything, for it still remained to be shown in what way the sign was to be understood, whether φύσει or νόμω. Aristotle, who looked upon words as imitations (μιμηματα), in the same way as poetry,[41] made an observation of first-rate importance: in addition to the enunciative propositions, which express the (logically) true or false, there are others which do not express either the (logically) true or false, as for example the expressions of aspirations and of desires (εύχή), which therefore belong, not to logical exposition, but to poetical and rhetorical exposition.[42] And in another place we find him affirming in opposition to Bryson (who had said that a base thing remained such with whatever word it were designated) that base things can be expressed both with words that place them beneath the eye in all their crudity, and with other words which surround them with a veil.[43] All this might have led to the separation of the linguistic faculty from the properly logical, and to its consideration in union with the poetical and artistic faculty; but here too the attempt stopped half-way. The Aristotelian logic assumed a verbal and formalistic character, which became more and more accentuated as time went on and formed an obstacle to the distinction between the two theoretical forms. Nevertheless, Epicurus asserted that the diversity of names designating the same thing with various peoples was due, not to convention and caprice, but to the fact that the impressions produced by things were different in each one of them.[44] And the Stoics, although they connected language with thought (διάνοια) and not with imagination, seem to have had a suspicion of the non-logical nature of language, for they interposed between thought and sound a certain something which was indicated in Greek by the word λεκτόν, and by the words effatum or dicibile in Latin. But we are not sure what they really meant, and whether that vague concept were intended by them to distinguish the linguistic representation from the abstract concept (which would bring them into touch with the modern view), or the meaning of sound in general.[45]

We cannot collect any other germ of truth from the ancient writers. A philosophical Grammar, like a philosophical Poetics, remained unattainable in antiquity.