These scattered observations must suffice to show that all the scientific problems of Linguistic are the same as those of Æsthetic, and that the truths and errors of the one are the truths and errors of the other. If Linguistic and Æsthetic appear to be two different sciences, this arises from the fact that people think of the former as grammar, or as a mixture between philosophy and grammar, that is, an arbitrary mnemonic schematism or a pedagogic medley, and not of a rational science and a pure philosophy of speaking. Grammar, or something not unconnected with grammar, also introduces into the mind the prejudice that the reality of language lies in isolated and combinable words, not in living discourse, in the expressive organisms, rationally indivisible. Those linguists or philologists, philosophically endowed, who have penetrated deepest into the problems of language, find themselves (to employ a trite but effective simile) like workmen piercing a tunnel: at a certain point they must hear the voices of their companions, the philosophers of Æsthetic, who have been at work on the other side. At a certain stage of scientific elaboration, Linguistic, in so far as it is philosophy, must merge itself in Æsthetic: and this indeed it does without leaving a residue. II HISTORY OF ÆSTHETIC I ÆSTHETIC IDEAS IN GRÆCO-ROMAN ANTIQUITY [Sidenote: _Point of view of this history of Æsthetic._] The question whether Æsthetic is to be considered as an ancient or a modern science has on several occasions been a matter of controversy; whether, that is to say, it arose for the first time in the eighteenth century, or had previously arisen in the Græco-Roman world. This is a question, not only of facts, but of criteria, as is easily to be understood: whether one answers it in this way or that depends upon one's idea of that science, an idea afterwards adopted as a standard or criterion.[1] Our view is that Æsthetic is the _science of the expressive_ (representative or imaginative) _activity._ In our opinion, therefore, it does not appear until a precise concept is formulated of imagination, representation or expression, or in whatever other manner we prefer to name that attitude of the spirit, which is theoretical but not intellectual, a producer of knowledge, but of the individual, not of the universal. Outside this point of view, we for our part are not able to discover anything but deviations and errors.