This further determination of the concept of expression is used by Croce to clarify a distinction which had already been adumbrated in the Estetica; the distinction between poetic, intellectual, and practical expression, between the word in which the pure intuition embodies itself, the word which is a sign or symbol of thought, and the word which is an instrument for the awakening of the emotions, a preparation for action. Thus the old categories of poetry, prose, and oratory reappear, but no longer as criteria of material classification, no longer to be identified with classes or genres of expression. They become synonyms, respectively, of the æsthetic, the logical, and the practical activity; to be used as instruments of literary and artistic criticism, if the critic is willing to renounce all external helps and material standards, and to penetrate into the "individuality of the act, where only it is given to him to discern the different spiritual dispositions, and what is poetry from what is not poetry. Under the semblance of prose, in a comedy or in a novel, we may find a true and deeply felt lyric; as under that of verse, in a tragedy or in a poem, nothing but reflection and oratory."[3] It is easy to perceive how this distinction will also react on Croce's theory of language as intuition and expression, not by altering its initial position, but by offering new means for the empirical analysis of the facts of language, the nature of which is obviously determined by the kind of impulse which man obeys in the individual act of expression. By the employment of such a method, the history of language as æsthetic expression can be qualified and illumined through the consideration of the moments in which language ceases to be a pure act of æsthetic creation, and is subordinated, as a symbol or instrument, to the purposes of the logical and practical mind.