In any case, not only is the conception of the beautiful, taken as a whole, identified with art in none of them; but sometimes art and beauty, mimesis and pleasing or displeasing material of mimesis, are clearly distinguished. Aristotle notes in his _Poetics_ that it pleases us to see the most faithful images of things that are repugnant to us in reality, such, for instance, as the most contemptible forms of animals, or corpses (τάς εικόνας τάς μάλιστα ήκριβωμενας χαίρομεν θεωρουντες).[24] Plutarch demonstrates at length that works of art please us not as beautiful but as _resembling_ (ούχ ως καλόν, άλλ,' ως ομοιον); he affirms that if the artist beautified things that are ugly in nature he would be offending against fitness and resemblance (το πρεπον και το eίκός); and he proclaims the principle that _the beautiful is one thing and beautiful imitation another_ (oύ yaρ εστι ταυτό, το καλον και καλως τι μιμεισθαι). Paintings of horrible events are pleasing, such as _Medea slaying her sons_ by Timomachus, _Orestes the matricide_ by Theon, and the _Pretended madness of Ulysses_ by Parrhasius; and if the grunting of a pig, the grating of a machine, the noise of the winds and the tumult of the sea are unpleasing, they pleased on the contrary in the case of Parmenon, who imitated the pig perfectly, and in Theodorus, who was not less expert in rendering the grating of machines.[25] If the ancients had really wanted to place the beautiful and art in relation, a secondary and partial connexion of the two conceptions was to hand in the shape of the category of the _relatively_ as distinguished from the _absolutely_ beautiful. But where the word _καλόν_ or _pulchrum_ is applied to artistic productions in the writings of literary critics, it does not seem to be more than a linguistic usage, as we find, for instance, in the case of Plutarch's _beautiful_ imitation, or also in the terminology of the rhetoricians, who sometimes called elegance and adornment of discourse _beauty_ of elocution (το τής φράσεως κάλλος). [Sidenote: _Fusion of the two by Plotinus._] It is only with Plotinus that the two divided territories are united and _the beautiful and art are fused into a single concept,_ not by means of a beneficial absorption of the _equivocal_ Platonic conception of beauty into the _unequivocal_ conception of art, but by absorption of the clear into the confused, of _imitative art_ in the so-called _beautiful._ And thus we reach an altogether new view: the beautiful and art are now both alike melted into a mystical passion and elevation of the spirit.