Continuing to correct these errors, or to make clear equivoques, we will note that the _symbol_ has sometimes been given as essence of art. Now, if the symbol be given as inseparable from the artistic intuition, it is the synonym of the intuition itself, which always has an ideal character. There is no double-bottom to art, but one only; in art all is symbolical, because all is ideal. But if the symbol be looked upon as separable--if on the one side can be expressed the symbol, and on the other the thing symbolized, we fall back again into the intellectualist error: that pretended symbol is the exposition of an abstract concept, it is an _allegory_, it is science, or art that apes science. But we must be just toward the allegorical also. In some cases, it is altogether harmless. Given the _Gerusalemme liberata_, the allegory was imagined afterwards; given the _Adone_ of Marino, the poet of the lascivious insinuated afterwards that it was written to show how "immoderate indulgence ends in pain"; given a statue of a beautiful woman, the sculptor can write on a card that the statue represents _Clemency_ or _Goodness_. This allegory linked to a finished work _post festum_ does not change the work of art. What is it, then? It is an expression externally _added_ to another expression. A little page of prose is added to the _Gerusalemme_, expressing another thought of the poet; a verse or a strophe is added to the _Adone_, expressing what the poet would like to make a part of his public swallow; while to the statue nothing more than the single word is added: _Clemency_ or _Goodness_. [Sidenote] _Critique of the theory of artistic and literary classes._ But the greatest triumph of the intellectualist error lies in the theory of artistic and literary classes, which still has vogue in literary treatises, and disturbs the critics and the historians of art. Let us observe its genesis. The human mind can pass from the aesthetic to the logical, just because the former is a first step, in respect to the latter. It can destroy the expressions, that is, the thought of the individual with the thought of the universal. It can reduce expressive facts to logical relations. We have already shown that this operation in its turn becomes concrete in an expression, but this does not mean that the first expressions have not been destroyed. They have yielded their place to the new aesthetico-logical expressions. When we are on the second step, we have left the first.