It might be objected to the explanation of the physically beautiful as a simple aid to the reproduction of the internally beautiful, or expressions, that the artist creates his expressions by painting or by sculpturing, by writing or by composing, and that therefore the physically beautiful, instead of following, sometimes precedes the æsthetically beautiful. This would be a somewhat superficial mode of understanding the procedure of the artist, who never in reality makes a stroke with his brush without having previously seen it with his imagination; and if he has not yet seen it, he will make the stroke, not in order to externalize his expression (which does not yet exist), but as a kind of experiment and in order to have a point of departure for further meditation and internal concentration. The physical point of departure is not the physically beautiful instrument of reproduction, but a means that may be called _pedagogic,_ like retiring into solitude, or the many other expedients frequently very strange, adopted by artists and scientists, who vary in these according to their various idiosyncrasies. The old æsthetician Baumgarten advised poets seeking inspiration to ride on horseback, to drink wine in moderation, and (provided they were chaste) to look at beautiful women. XIV ERRORS ARISING FROM THE CONFUSION BETWEEN PHYSICS AND ÆSTHETIC We must mention a series of fallacious scientific doctrines which have arisen from the failure to understand the purely external relation between the æsthetic fact or artistic vision and the physical fact or instrument which aids in its reproduction, together with brief criticisms of them deduced from what has already been said. [Sidenote: _Criticism of æsthetic associationism._] That form of associationism which identifies the æsthetic fact with the _association_ of two images finds support in such lack of apprehension. By what path has it been possible to arrive at such an error, so repugnant to our æsthetic consciousness, which is a consciousness of perfect unity, never of duality? Precisely because the physical and æsthetic facts have been considered separately, as two distinct images, which enter the spirit, the one drawn in by the other, first one and then the other. A picture has been divided into the image of the _picture_ and the image of the _meaning_ of the picture; a poem, into the image of the _words_ and the image of the _meaning_ of the words. But this dualism of images is non-existent: the physical fact does not enter the spirit as an image, but causes the reproduction of the image (the only image, which is the æsthetic fact), in so far as it blindly stimulates the psychic organism and produces the impression which answers to the æsthetic expression already produced.