  This is the reply to a comment by Andreas Aste [hep-th/0302103] on a previous
article of mine in Can.J.Phys. The counter-arguments used by Aste utilize a
mathematical limit without physical meaning. We still contend that in QCD, the
particles ``gluons'' and ``quarks'' are merely artifacts of an approximation
method (the perturbative expansion) and are simply absent in the exact theory.
