But the field of investigation toward which Aristotle had turned was generally neglected in antiquity: the very _Poetics_ of Aristotle does not seem to have been widely known or influential. Ancient psychology knew fancy or imagination as a faculty midway between sense and intellect, but always as conservative and reproductive of sensuous impressions or conveying conceptions to the senses, never properly as a productive autonomous activity. That faculty was rarely and with little result placed in relation with the problem of art. Several historians of Æsthetic attach singular importance to certain passages in the _Life of Apollonius of Tyana_ by the elder Philostratus, in which they believe that they discover a correction of the theory of _mimesis_ and the first affirmation in history of the conception of _imaginative creation._ Phidias and Praxiteles (says the extract in question) did not need to go to heaven to see the gods, in order to be able to depict them in their works, as would have been necessary according to the theory of imitation. Imagination, without any need of models, made them able to do what they did: imagination, which is a wiser agent than simple imitation (φαντασία ... σοφωτόρα μιμήσεως δημιουργός), and gives form, like the other, not only to what has been seen, but also to what has never been seen, imagining it on the basis of existing things and in that way creating Jupiters and Minervas.[35] However, the imagination of which Philostratus speaks here is not something different from the Aristotelian mimesis, which, as has been noted, was concerned not only with real things but also and chiefly with possible things. And had not Socrates observed (in the dialogue with the painter Parrhasius, preserved for us by Xenophon) that painters work by collecting what they need to form their figures from several bodies (εκ πολλων συνάγοντες τα εξ εκάστου καλλιστα)?[36] And was not the anecdote of Zeuxis, who was supposed to have taken the best of five Crotonian maidens in order to paint his Helen, and other anecdotes of a like sort, sufficiently widespread in antiquity? And had not Cicero eloquently explained, some years before Philostratus, how Phidias, when he was carving Jupiter, did not copy anything real, but kept his looks fixed upon "_species pulcritudinis eximia quaedam,_" which he had in his soul and which directed his art and his hand?[37] Nor can it be said that Philostratus opened the way to Plotinus, for whom the superior or intellectual imagination (νοητή), or eye of supersensible beauty, when it is not a new designation for beautiful imitation, is mystical intuition.