It would not then be correct to say that the Middle Ages simply identified art with theology and with philosophy. Indeed it sharply distinguished the one from the other, defining art and poetry, like Dante, with the words _fictio rhethorica_, "figure" and "rhetorical colour," "cloak," "beauty," or like Santillana with those of _fingimiento_ or _fermosa cobertura._ This pleasing falsity was justified from the practical point of view, very much in the same way as sexual union and love were justified and sanctified in matrimony. This did not exclude, indeed it implied, that the perfect state was certainly celibacy--that is to say, pure science, free from admixture of art. [Sidenote: _Hints of an Æsthetic in scholastic philosophy._] The only tendency that had no true and proper representatives was the sound scientific tendency. The _Poetics_ of Aristotle itself was hardly known or rather it was ill-known, from the Latin translation that a German of the name of Hermann made, not earlier than 1256, of the paraphrase or commentary of Averroes. Perhaps the best of the mediæval investigations into language is that supplied by Dante's _De vulgari eloquentia,_ where the word is, however, still looked upon as a sign ("_rationale signum et sensuale ... natura sensuale quidem, in quantum sonus est, rationale vero in quantum aliquid significare videtur ad piacitum_").[8] The study of the expressive, æsthetic, linguistic faculty would, however, have found an appropriate occasion and a point of departure in the secular debate between nominalism and realism, which could not avoid touching to some extent the relations between the word and the flesh, thought and language. Duns Scotus wrote a treatise _De modis significandi seu_ (the addition is due perhaps to the editors) _grammatica speculativa_.[9] Abelard had defined sensation as _confusa conceptio,_ and _imaginatio_ as a faculty that preserved sensations; the intellect renders discursive what is intuitive in the preceding stage, and we have finally the perfection of knowledge in the intuitive knowledge of the discursive. We find the same importance attached to intuitive knowledge, perception, of the individual or _species specialissima,_ in Duns Scotus, together with the progressive denominations of the different sorts of knowledge as _confusæ, indistinctæ_ and _distinctæ._ We shall see this terminology reappear, big with consequences, at the very commencement of modern Æsthetic.[10] [Sidenote: _Renaissance. Philography and philosophical and empirical inquiries concerning the beautiful._]