Graeco-Roman antiquity was occupied with the problem in all these forms. In Greece, the problem of art and of the artistic faculty arose for the first time after the sophistic movement, as a result of the Socratic polemic. With the appearance of the word _mimesis_ or _mimetic_, we have a first attempt at grouping the arts, and the expression, allegoric, or its equivalent, used in defence of Homer's poetry, reminds us of what Plato called "the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry." But when internal facts were all looked upon as mere phenomena of opinion or feeling, of pleasure or of pain, of illusion or of arbitrary caprice, there could be no question of beautiful or ugly, of difference between the true and the beautiful, or between the beautiful and the good. The problem of the nature of art assumes as solved those problems concerning the difference between rational and irrational, material and spiritual, bare fact and value, etc. This was first done in the Socratic period, and therefore the aesthetic problem could only arise after Socrates. And in fact it does arise, with Plato, _the author of the only great negation of art which appears in the history of ideas_. Is art rational or irrational? Does it belong to the noble region of the soul, where dwell philosophy and virtue, or does it cohabit with sensuality and with crude passion in the lower regions? This was the question that Plato asked, and thus was the aesthetic problem stated for the first time. His Gorgias remarks with sceptical acumen, that tragedy is a deception, which brings honour alike to deceived and to deceiver, and therefore it is blameworthy not to know how to deceive and not to allow oneself to be deceived. This suffices for Gorgias, but Plato, the philosopher, must resolve the doubt. If it be in fact deception, down with tragedy and the other arts! If it be not deception, then what is the place of tragedy in philosophy and in the righteous life? His answer was that art or mimetic does not realize the ideas, or the truth of things, but merely reproduces natural or artificial things, which are themselves mere shadows of the ideas. Art, then, is but a shadow of a shadow, a thing of third-rate degree. The artificer fashions the object which the painter paints. The artificer copies the divine idea and the painter copies him. Art therefore does not belong to the rational, but to the irrational, sensual sphere of the soul. It can serve but for sensual pleasure, which disturbs and obscures. Therefore must mimetic, poetry, and poets be excluded from the perfect Republic. Plato observed with truth, that imitation does not rise to the logical or conceptual sphere, of which poets and painters, as such, are, in fact, ignorant. But he _failed to realize_ that there could be any form of knowledge other than the intellectual. We now know that Intuition lies on this side or outside the Intellect, from which it differs as much as it does from passion and sensuality.