 For our purposes, it is simplest to regard Croce as an idealist, for whom there is nothing besides the mind. So in that sense, the work of art is an ideal or mental object along with everything else; no surprise there, but no interest either. But he still maintains the ordinary commonplace distinction between mental things—thoughts, hopes and dreams—and physical things—tables and trees. And on this divide, the work of art, for Croce, is still a mental thing. In other words, the work of art in doubly ideal; to put it another way, even if Croce were a dualist—or a physicalist with some means of reconstructing the physical-mental distinction—the work of art would remain mental. In what follows, then, except where otherwise noted, we shall treat Croce is being agnostic as between idealism, physicalism, or dualism (see PPH 227).