The third reaches the sphere of philosophical consciousness. In it the esthetical writer combines a correct appreciation of art as a grand total, with all its essential details. He sees distinctly its inner element based on immutable general laws, and comprehends the necessary organism, without which an artistic work cannot exist. Poetry and philosophy, like art, passed through these developments in Greece. First we have the epic and lyric poets: Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Alkæus, and Pindar; next the dramatic poets: Æschylus, Sophokles, and Euripides. At last the philosophers and historians: Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thukydides, and Xenophon. In analogy with these purely mental phases we have in art: the architect, who constructs a small world of organic coherence out of inorganic matter by means of his imagination; the sculptor, who reproduces with discernment the organic world around him in inorganic matter, but endows it with individual expression and feeling; the painter at last, who creates with his colours a union of spirit and matter, of idea and form. Beauty was in all Greek products the vital element. ‘True beauty, the companion of the gods, must be sought for,’ says Pausanias, and makes no advances; it is too elevated to communicate itself,’ And Plato propounds: ‘The Supreme has no image; he converses only with the wise; with the vulgar he shows himself proud and forbidding; always equal, he expresses the emotion of the souls, he wraps himself in the delicious calm of that divine nature of which the great masters in the arts, according to ancient writers, endeavoured to seize the type.’ This delicious calm may be traced everywhere in Greek art, and forms its essential element. The temples of the Greeks were national and public buildings. They were not mere shrines destined as exclusive dwelling-places for some visible or invisible, concrete or abstract, theocratic monster. They were the central spots for their national assemblies, their gatherings, and for the celebration of their public festivities.