In reality, the reasoning of the ancients on art was quite unlike ours. As Benard, in his book on the æsthetics of Aristotle, quite justly remarks: “_Pour qui veut y regarder de près, la théorie du beau et celle de l’art sont tout à fait séparées dans Aristote, comme elles le sont dans Platon et chez tous leurs successeurs_” (_L’esthétique d’Aristote et de ses successeurs_, Paris, 1889, p. 28).[63] And indeed the reasoning of the ancients on art not only does not confirm our science of æsthetics, but rather contradicts its doctrine of beauty. But nevertheless all the æsthetic guides, from Schasler to Knight, declare that the science of the beautiful—æsthetic science—was commenced by the ancients, by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; and was continued, they say, partially by the Epicureans and Stoics: by Seneca and Plutarch, down to Plotinus. But it is supposed that this science, by some unfortunate accident, suddenly vanished in the fourth century, and stayed away for about 1500 years, and only after these 1500 years had passed did it revive in Germany, A.D. 1750, in Baumgarten’s doctrine. After Plotinus, says Schasler, fifteen centuries passed away during which there was not the slightest scientific interest felt for the world of beauty and art. These one and a half thousand years, says he, have been lost to æsthetics and have contributed nothing towards the erection of the learned edifice of this science.[64] In reality nothing of the kind happened. The science of æsthetics, the science of the beautiful, neither did nor could vanish because it never existed. Simply, the Greeks (just like everybody else, always and everywhere) considered art (like everything else) good only when it served goodness (as they understood goodness), and bad when it was in opposition to that goodness. And the Greeks themselves were so little developed morally, that goodness and beauty seemed to them to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life was erected the science of æsthetics, invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten’s theory. The Greeks (as anyone may see who will read Benard’s admirable book on Aristotle and his successors, and Walter’s work on Plato) never had a science of æsthetics. Æsthetic theories arose about one hundred and fifty years ago among the wealthy classes of the Christian European world, and arose simultaneously among different nations,—German, Italian, Dutch, French, and English. The founder and organiser of it, who gave it a scientific, theoretic form, was Baumgarten.