Tradition, of course, very largely laid the foundation of this mode of thinking, and, from the Greeks to Ruskin, few seem to have realized how much beauty Art had already laid in Nature, before even the imitative artist could consider Nature as beautiful. As Croce rightly observes: "Antiquity seems generally to have been entrammelled in the meshes of the belief in mimetic, or the duplication of natural objects by the artist;"[3] but when we remember that, as Schelling points out, in Greece speculation about Art began with Art's decline,[4] we ought to feel no surprise at this remote underestimation of the artistic fact.[5] In reviewing the work of æstheticians from Plato to Croce, however, what strikes me as so significant is the fact that, from the time of Plotinus--who practically marks the end of the declension which started in Plato's time--to the end of the seventeenth century, scarcely a voice of any magnitude was raised in Europe on the subject of Art.[6] That there was no real "talk" about Art, at the time when it was revived in the Middle Ages, and at the time when it flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that all the old Hellenic discussions on the subject should have been taken up again at a period when the last emaciated blooms of the Renaissance and of the counter-Renaissance were bowing their heads, only shows how very sorry the plight of all great human functions must be when man begins to hope that he may set them right by talking about them. When it is remembered, however, that, from the end of the seventeenth century onward, Art was regarded either as imitation pure and simple or as idealized imitation by no less than fifteen thinkers of note--that is to say, roughly speaking, by the Earl of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Home, Burke and Hume in England, by Batteux and Diderot in France, by Pagano and Spaletti in Italy, by Hemsterhuis in Holland, and by Leibnitz, Baumgarten, Kant, Schiller and Fichte in Germany; and that if Winckelmann and Lessing opposed these ideas, it was rather with the recommendation of another kind of imitation--that of the antique-- than with a new valuation of Art; we can feel scarcely any surprise at all at the sudden and total collapse of the dignity of Art in the nineteenth century, under the deadly influence of the works of men like Semper and his followers.