At a certain period the Greeks were contented with shapeless divinities; a pointed stone, a square piece of wood, the deformed root of a tree, a pillar with a circular finish, or a cone, sufficed for their piety. Even Plato indulged in the untenable proposition that art was mere mimicry, and therefore a falsehood, and detrimental to virtue; as truth ought to be the only aim of humanity. The Beautiful with Plato was a mere abstraction, applicable exclusively to the absolute ‘good’; artistic beauty was looked down upon by him as something bad and altogether objectionable. The Kynic and Kyrenæic schools held to a certain degree the opinions of Plato. The Kynics said that anything good was beautiful--anything bad ugly; whilst the Kyrenæics propounded that everything beautiful must be good--anything ugly must be bad; and in this way the notions, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, changed places. This dialectic difference led at last to Aristotle’s deeper appreciation of art. Aristotle, who rarely started from pre-conceived, _à priori_ ideas, but attached his deep reasonings and admirable inductions to something tangible and really existent, pronounced, in opposition to the idealistic Plato, more correct thoughts on art. Imitation, mimicry (μίμησις {mimêsis}), is with him the subjective formation or creation of an idea, and therefore a process far superior to that of imperfect reality; in fact it is a sublimated, idealised representation and reproduction of reality. Next to the ‘mimesis’ he required purification from all passion (κάθαρσις {katharsis}) to be the aim and purpose of art. Genius and imagination were the means by which alone a work of art could be produced. The principal element in every work of art was with him ἦθος {êthos}, and wherever Ethos, the ethic or moral principle, was wanting, the product failed to be artistic in the highest sense of the word. The development of Greek sculpture has borne out the sublime views of Aristotle on art. As soon as the merely naturalistic and sensational began to rule supreme, the Katharsis was neglected, the Ethic no longer swayed works of art, and the Antique died out.