But on the other hand, it seems to be clear from all that we can learn, that their habitual way of regarding works of art was not to judge them simply and exclusively by their aesthetic value. On the contrary, in criticising two works otherwise equally beautiful, they would give a higher place to the one or the other for its ethical or quasi-ethical qualities. This indeed is what we should expect from the comprehensive sense which, as we have seen, attached in their tongue to the word which we render "beautiful." The aesthetic and ethical spheres, in fact, were never sharply distinguished by the Greeks; and it follows that as, on the one hand, their conception of the good was identified with that of the beautiful, so, on the other hand, their conception of the beautiful was identified with that of the good. Thus the most beautiful work of art, in the Greek sense of the term, was that which made the finest and most harmonious appeal not only to the physical but to the moral sense, and while communicating the highest and most perfect pleasure to the eye or the ear, had also the power to touch and inform the soul with the grace which was her moral excellence. Of this really characteristic Greek conception, this fusion, so instinctive as to be almost unconscious, of the aesthetic and ethical points of view, no better illustration could be given than the following passage from the Republic of Plato, where the philosopher is describing the effect of beautiful works of art, and especially of music, on the moral and intellectual character of his imaginary citizens: "'We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own soul. Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to discern the true nature of the beautiful and graceful: then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a healthgiving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason.' "'There can be no nobler training than that,' he replied.