for example Cartaut de la Villate[30] observes, "_Le grand talent d'un écrivain qui veut plaire, est de tourner ses réflexions en sentiments_;" and Trublet, "_C'est un principe sûr, que la poésie doit être une expression de sentiment._"[30] Nor were the English slow in emphasizing the concept of "emotion" in their theories of literature. [Sidenote: _Tendency to unite these terms._] In the writings of this period _imagination_ was often identified with _wit, wit_ with _taste, taste_ with _feeling,_ and _feeling_ with first apprehensions or _imagination_;[31] we have already noted that taste is sometimes critical and sometimes productive: this fusion, identification and subordination of terms apparently distinct shows how they gravitate round one single concept. [Sidenote: _Difficulties and contradictions in their definition._] A German critic, one of the very few who have sought to penetrate the darkness surrounding the origins of modern Æsthetic, considers the concept of taste (which we owe, he thinks, to Gracian) "the most important æsthetic doctrine which remained for modern times to discover."[32] But without going so far as to say that taste is the chief doctrine of the science, and the foundation of all the rest, instead of only a particular doctrine, and without recapitulating what we have already said of Gracian's relation to the theory of taste, it is well to repeat that taste, wit, imagination, feeling, and so on, instead of new concepts scientifically grasped, were simply new words corresponding to vague impressions: at most they were problems, not concepts: apprehensions of ground still to be conquered, not yet annexed and brought into subjection. It must not be forgotten that the very men who made use of these terms could scarcely grope after the ideas they suggested without falling back into the old traditions, the only ones on which they had an intellectual grasp. To them the new words were shades, not bodies: when they tried to embrace them their arms returned empty to their own breasts. [Sidenote: _Wit and intellect._]