The popular distinction between what is termed "mental", "spiritual" or "psych(olog)ical" on the one hand and "physical" or "material" on the other is a metaphysical concoction of a number of clearly, or at least more clearly, definable distinctions, such as:

• mental or personal vs bodily (or physical)
• abstract (non-spatiotemporal) vs concrete (spatiotemporal)
• propositional vs nonpropositional
• cultural vs natural
• visual (and auditory) vs tactual (gustatory and olfactory)
• symbolic (representative) vs nonsymbolic (presentative)

It is remarkable that human symbolism in ideology and in art is mainly, and often only, visual and auditory so far as the five senses are concerned. Traditionally human beings seem to more closely connect the visual, or visual and auditory, with what is or can be of symbolic significance than they do with respect to the other senses. There is no need for this, however, since symbols can in principle also use the sense of touch, of taste or of smell.

The above list of antitheses illustrates how the symbolic and the visual together are drawn into the sphere of the mental and of culture, whereas the presentative and the tactual stay in the sphere of the physical and of nature. At the same time the presentative is associated with the concrete ground-world; and the representative with abstract, propositional reality. Yet, in actual fact, a visual symbol is as 'concrete' as a tactual symbol. Concrete symbols are, perhaps, not propositional, but abstract symbols can be either propositional or nonpropositional.

Preferably symbols should not only adequately represent a certain idea or discipline, but have beauty as well. Beauty itself is a concept which is often put on the side of the visual(-auditory), culture (or art), the abstract and the propositional (or literature) with the symbolic. It is traditionally restricted to what is pleasing to the eye or the ear or to what pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit. Esthetics, which is etymologically supposed to deal with all sense perception, tends to deal exclusively or predominantly with the visual. It could be said that the beautiful and esthetic refer to the visual or visual-auditory by definition, but then similar kinds of concept and theory can be developed with regard to the senses of touch, taste and smell. Of course, there are words like nice, fine and delicious which can denote that something is pleasing to one or more of the three other senses. But they are either employed for all senses or associated with what pleasurably exalts the body in particular. For sure, this is not wrong. What is wrong is to suggest that beauty in the visual field would be less physical or spatiotemporal than the experience of a nice feeling in the tactual, or one of the other nonvisual, fields. Such an attitude is not warrantable: if a visual symbol or other thing should look good or be nice to look at, a tactual symbol or other thing should feel good or be nice to touch. Neither symbol or thing is more spiritual or more physical than the other. (Let alone more sexual in that intentionally touching a nice human body would be plain eroticism, whereas intentionally looking at such a body would be pure esthetics.)

Maybe something is 'beautiful' when it pleases the sense of sight or hearing. To be attractive, however, it does not only have to please the eyes or the ears, but also to represent something valuable. Beauty covers the presentative aspect of something, but there is also an (often not less) important representational aspect. (If beauty is said to cover both aspects, then being beautiful is not solely a question of pleasing the senses.) The representational aspect becomes most noticeable when the beautiful is expressed by artistic means, for the use of symbols (in the widest sense of the word) is essential to art in particular. Evidently, what applies to beauty and to the senses of sight and hearing, applies to the senses in general, even tho ordinary language may have no analogs of beauty and attractiveness for all five senses. If one does make the distinction between beauty and its analogs on the one hand, and attractiveness and its analogs on the other, and if one wants to associate this with the distinction mental/physical, it is attractiveness and its analogs which have both a physical and a mental or spiritual dimension, regardless of the kind of sense concerned.