One other matter requires a brief consideration, and then we can leave the general outline of our theory and proceed to a more detailed treatment of certain parts of it. This is the old, unsolved problem whether beauty is subjective or objective; whether a thing is beautiful in itself, or whether it is only our thinking that makes it so. Croce has made it perfectly clear that the thing or the scene which we erroneously call beautiful, meaning that it is beautiful in itself, physically beautiful, is simply the “stimulus to aesthetic reproduction, which presupposes previous production. Without preceding aesthetic intuitions of the imagination, nature cannot arouse any at all.” Perhaps Croce’s own thesis would gain in clearness and coherence if, starting from the sense of beauty aroused by a work of art as the re-creation of the artist’s intuition by the spectator, he had accepted the religious implication, and argued that appreciation of so-called natural beauty, was the re-creation by man of God’s intuition. But, with his prejudice against religion, he naturally could not boldly accept God as the Primal Artist, even though to do so would have made his theory far more complete, and would have saved him from relegating the chief factor of man’s life to the realm of psychological illusion. To return to the immediate question, there can, of course, be no doubt that since beauty is an activity of the spirit, the expression of an intuition, beauty itself must be purely subjective. Equally, there can be no doubt that without the objective Reality the intuition could never be called into being. (We call it definitely objective for man, since all our argument in previous works has driven us to the conclusion that there is a necessary dualism for man as long as freedom is incomplete, love imperfect; as long, that is, as man is becoming.)