ABSTRACT
Aesthetic activity, distinct from the practical activity, is always accompanied by it in its manifestations. Hence its utilitarian or hedonistic side, and the pleasure and pain which are, as it were, the practical echo of aesthetic value and disvalue, of the beautiful and of the ugly. But this practical side of the aesthetic activity has in its turn a physical or psychophysical accompaniment, which consists of sounds, tones, movements, combinations of lines and colours, and so on. Monuments of art, the stimulants of aesthetic reproduction, are called beautiful things or physical beauty. This combination of words constitutes a verbal paradox, for the beautiful is not a physical fact; it does not belong to things, but to the activity of man, to spiritual energy. But it is now clear through what transferences and associations, physical things and facts which are simply aids to the reproduction of the beautiful are finally called elliptically beautiful things and physical beauty.
