With him
_euchae_ is the term proper to designate desires and aspirations,
which are the vehicle of poetry and of oratory. (It must be remembered
that for Aristotle words, like poetry, belonged to mimetic.) The
profound remark about the third mode of proposition would, one would
have thought, have led naturally to the separation of linguistic
from logic, and to its classification with poetry and art. But the
Aristotelian logic assumed a verbal and formal character, which set
back the attainment of this position by many hundred years. Yet the
genius of Epicurus had an intuition of the truth, when he remarked
that the diversity of names for the same things arose, not from
arbitrary caprice, but from the diverse impression derived from the
same object. The Stoics, too, seem to have had an inkling of the
non-logical nature of speech, but their use of the word _lekton_
leaves it doubtful whether they distinguished by it the linguistic
representation from the abstract concept, or rather, generically, the
meaning from the sound.
[5] In the Appendix will be found further striking quotations from
and references to Aristotle.--(D.A.)
II
AESTHETIC IDEAS IN THE MIDDLE AGE AND IN THE RENAISSANCE
Well-nigh all the theories of antique Aesthetic reappear in the Middle
Ages, as it were by spontaneous generation. Duns Scotus Erigena
translated the Neoplatonic mysticism of the pseudo-Dionysus.
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