  So far, Lessing has merely rejected Winckelmann’s analysis of the Laocoön statue on the basis of his own insistence that beauty is the primary aim of visual art as well as on Mendelssohn’s distinction between arts that can represent one moment and arts that can represent a succession of moments. But he broadens his target when he says, in a passing discussion of the fact that both Homer and Milton were blind, that “if the range of my physical sight must be the measure of my inner vision, I should value the loss of the former in order to gain freedom from the limitations on the latter” (Laocoön, chapter 14, p. 74). Here his implication is that sight actually constrains the imagination, while non-visual media—in other words, poetry—free the imagination for a wider play with both ideas and emotions. This point could also be thought to depend on one of Mendelssohn’s ideas, namely his contrast between natural and arbitrary or conventional signs. Lessing touches upon this in passing, arguing that although “the symbols of speech are arbitrary,” the poet actually wants to overcome our awareness of that fact: