What is peculiar to spiritual production can, through the manner of its expression, turn directly into such an externality of a thing that it can now equally be produced by others; so that, with its acquisition, the new owner — apart from thereby being able to make his own the communicated thoughts or the technical invention (a possibility which, in the case of literary works, in part constitutes the sole determination and value of the acquisition) — comes at the same time into possession of the universal manner of expressing himself in this way and of producing such things in multiple copies.

In works of art, the form that gives figurative shape to the thought in an external material, as a thing, is so much the peculiar property of the producing individual that any imitation of it is essentially the product of the imitator’s own spiritual and technical skill. In a literary work, on the other hand, the form by which it becomes an external thing is, as with the invention of a technical device, of a mechanical kind — in the former case because the thought is presented only in a series of isolated abstract signs, not in concrete figuration; in the latter, because it has a mechanical content in general — and the manner of producing such things as things belongs among the ordinary skills. Between the extremes of the work of art and handicraft production, there are, moreover, transitional cases, containing now more, now less, of the one or the other.