The concept of cosmic Harmony, which has also been called pure Beauty or absolute Beauty, and indeed God, has been much employed in old philosophy, and notably in the old aesthetic (old always being understood in its logical-historical sense, which is still tenacious of life and reappears in our own day, where it might be least expected), and has made an elaboration of the new theory, which conceives of art as lyrical intuition or expression, very laborious. For many reasons that it would occupy too much time and be out of place to detail here, Harmony or Beauty came to be considered as the true essence of Art; hence the impossibility of accounting, not only for many works of art, but for art in general, and the artificial attempts made by the upholders of this doctrine and by criticism to pervert facts in support of a partial and incorrect principle. For the reasons given above, it is easy for us to discern the origin of the error, which lay in transferring one of the classes of particular contents which Art is able to elaborate, to serve as the end and essence of Art. And the one selected was precisely that which owing to its religious and philosophical dignity, appeared to have the power to absorb Art into itself together with everything else and to dissolve the whole in a sort of mysticism. This is confirmed by the historical course of the doctrine, the first conspicuous form of which was Neoplatonism, which reappeared on several occasions in the Middle Ages, at the time of the Renaissance and during the Romantic period. De Sanctis himself, owing to the romantic origins of his thought, was never altogether free from it; and his judgment upon Ariosto bears traces of the transcendental conception of Art as an actualisation of pure Beauty.