One important identification is absent in all those early attempts at truth. The beautiful is never identified with art, and the artistic fact is always clearly distinguished from beauty, mimetic from its content. Plotinus first identified the two, and with him the beautiful and art are dissolved together in a passion and mystic elevation of the spirit. The beauty of natural objects is the archetype existing in the soul, which is the fountain of all natural beauty. Thus was Plato (he said) in error, when he despised the arts for imitating nature, for nature herself imitates the idea, and art also seeks her inspiration directly from those ideas whence nature proceeds. We have here, with Plotinus and with Neoplatonism, the first appearance in the world of mystical Aesthetic, destined to play so important a part in later aesthetic theory. Aristotle was far more happy in his attempts at defining Aesthetic as the science of representation and of expression than in his definitions of the beautiful. He felt that some element of the problem had been overlooked, and in attempting in his turn a solution, he had the advantage over Plato of looking upon the ideas as simple concepts, not as hypostases of concepts or of abstractions. Thus reality was more vivid for Aristotle: it was the synthesis of matter and form. He saw that art, or mimetic, was a theoretic fact, or a mode of contemplation. "But if Poetry be a theoretic fact, in what way is it to be distinguished from science and from historical knowledge?" Thus magnificently does the great philosopher pose the problem at the commencement of his _Poetics_, and thus alone can it be posed successfully. We ask the same question in the same words to-day. But the problem is difficult, and the masterly statement of it was not equalled by the method of solution then available. He made an excellent start on his voyage of discovery, but stopped half way, irresolute and perplexed. Poetry, he says, differs from history, by portraying the possible, while history deals with what has really happened. Poetry, like philosophy, aims at the universal, but in a different way, which the philosopher indicates as something more (_mallon tha katholon_) which differentiates poetry from history, occupied with the particular (_malon tha kath ekaston_). What, then, is the possible, the something more, and the particular of poetry? Aristotle immediately falls into error and confusion, when he attempts to define these words. Since art has to deal with the absurd and with the impossible, it cannot be anything rational, but a mere imitation of reality, in accordance with the Platonic theory--a fact of sensual pleasure. Aristotle does not, however, attain to so precise a definition as Plato, whose erroneous definition he does not succeed in supplanting. The truth is that he failed of his self-imposed task; he failed to discern the true nature of Aesthetic, although he restated and re-examined the problem with such marvellous acumen.