Once established, however, the conception evidently reacted on other terms embodying theories of art, such, for example, as _original_ and _originality_ (already mentioned), _art_, _artist_, _genius_, _imagination_, _inspiration_, _poesy_, _poetry_, and others. The meaning which _inspiration_ possessed up to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries carries us right back to the old mythical outlook in Greece and elsewhere, when poets and prophets were understood to be the direct mouthpieces of superior beings—beings such as the Muses, who inspired or “breathed into” them the divine afflatus. Through Plato and Aristotle this conception came to England at the Renaissance and lasted as an element of aesthetic theory well on into the eighteenth century, if it can be said to have died out altogether even now. But, like so many other words, this one began in the seventeenth century to suffer that process which we have called “internalization”. Hobbes poured etymologically neat scorn on the senseless convention “by which a man, enabled to speak wisely from the principles of Nature and his own meditation, loves rather to be thought to speak by inspiration, like a Bagpipe”. And we may suppose that from about this time _inspiration_, like some of the “character” words which we traced in a previous chapter, began to lose its old literal meaning and to acquire its modern and metaphorical one. Like _instinct_, it was now felt, whatever its real nature, to be something arising from within the human being rather than something instilled from without.