The consequences of the common conception of technique in criticism are more dangerous, because more subtle and affecting a more intimate knowledge of art, than those of any other æsthetic error. The talk of the connoisseur and of the average musical or dramatic critic is full of such fallacies as the technical errors of great painters, the harmonic or orchestral wonders of poor music, the faulty construction of a great play; fallacies which may sometimes have originated from some real character of the æsthetic fact, but which are mere contradictions in terms. And the literary critic will speak of the _fine frenzy_ and the _quiet eye_, meaning by the one, the abstract inspiration, and by the other the abstract production, and so miss the true æsthetic moment which is neither the one nor the other, but the synthesis of the two. Or he will oppose romanticism to classicism, in a similar sense, without realizing that all art is at the same time romantic and classic, truly inspired, and because truly inspired, able to express itself. Mere variations of the naturalistic or psychological conception of technique, as an actual moment of the æsthetic creation, are a series of theories which Croce has extensively criticised, and of which we can give but a cursory account. The theories of the particular arts and of their limits originate from the manuals of practical precepts useful to architects, sculptors, painters or musicians, and are founded on the assumed possibility of finding a field of the æsthetic activity corresponding to the physical means employed by each category of artists. But we have already seen that in the æsthetic fact there is no distinction between means and end: we can speak of the various arts in a purely empirical sense, as an external classification of the objects of art, but not as classes of æsthetic activity.