(visual, as it was auditive for the poem) on which the original image fixed itself is directly present to me; and yet, again, that material object is not the æsthetic vision, but a mere stimulus for its reproduction. Starting from the material object, Croce symbolized the inverse process of æsthetic reproduction in the following series: _e_, the physical stimulus; _d-b_, the perception of physical facts (sound, colours, etc.), which is at the same time the æsthetic synthesis previously produced; _c_, the æsthetic pleasure or pain. Here, again, the only moment of true æsthetic activity is in _b_ where, at least in the hypothesis of a perfect understanding, my vision coincides with the orignal creation. It must be understood, however, that these successive stages are not real, but abstract or symbolical distinctions. We cannot re-create an æsthetic vision except through the sounds or colours in which it originally expressed itself; and those sounds or colours coincide with the original expression. The words and rhythm of a poem are to it what the body is to the soul, and once you have dissolved that form, there is nothing left. Hence the theoretical impossibility of a translation, which can only exist as a new creation. But when we consider those words or that rhythm not within the expressive synthesis, in which their reality is spiritual and not physical, but outside it, as words, as rhythm, we build up by abstraction a category of physical facts, to which we attribute a reality not inferior to that of the spiritual activity. _B_ and _d_, in the preceding analysis, are not different realities, but different elaborations, the first, ideal, the second, naturalistic, of the same fact.