Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 Benedetto Croce 
 
 An Introduction to his Philosophy by 
 Raffaello Piccoli 
 
 JVith a Foreword by 
 
 H. Wildon Carr 
 
 Jonathan Cape 
 Eleven Gower Street, London
 
 First published 1922 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Primed in the U.S.J.
 
 v„ 
 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 This book is the account of the life and activity of 
 one who is living and acting. Herodotus tells us 
 the Greeks had a proverb which forbade them to 
 pronounce any man happy before he is dead. We 
 may certainly take his warning to this extent, — that we 
 should refrain from attempting to fix a philosopher's 
 thought so long as he continues to think. Benedetto 
 Croce has, it is true, presented his Philosophy of 
 Mind in such "questionable shape," that it gives the 
 student the impression of finality, the feeling that a 
 doctrine which throughout the history of philosophy 
 has been struggling for expression has now at last 
 come to light. But this appearance of finality is due 
 to a certain artistic power which Croce possesses in 
 an eminent degree, the power of reliving the past 
 and making history interpret life. Beneath all his 
 systematization there is the germ of a new life, a new 
 life, which, will take form in new problems. While 
 then we may say that no living philosopher has given 
 so complete an appearance of finality to his doctrine 
 as Croce has done in his Philosophy of Mind it is 
 really the reflection of a work of art which serves 
 only to conceal the living thought.
 
 Foreword 
 
 The publishers of this Introduction to the 
 philosophy of Benedetto Croce by Dr. Raffaello 
 Piccoli have courteously invited me to write this 
 foreword inasmuch as I was the first to introduce 
 this philosophy, otherwise than by translations, to 
 the attention of English students. I do so very 
 gladly. My own work was confined to the purely 
 philosophical writings, my interest in them having 
 been first aroused by the striking address on 
 Aesthetic delivered by Croce to the International 
 Congress of Philosophy at Heidelberg in 1908. 
 When I wrote my book, the Philosophy of Mind 
 consisted of three volumes, the Estetica^ the Logica^ 
 and the Pratica^ but before I had completed my 
 account I read in Croce's Journal Critica the announce- 
 ment of the forthcoming publication of the fourth 
 volume on the Theory and History of the Meriting 
 of History. Croce had, it seemed to me, closed his 
 book on Practice with the plain indication, not that 
 he had solved every philosophical problem, nor that 
 philosophy was not an external problem, but that he 
 had given an exhaustive account of the stages or 
 degrees in their order as moments of the developing 
 life of the mind, and that outside these degrees there 
 were no others. The new work did not, indeed, 
 either negative or qualify this conclusion, but it bore 
 evidence of the ceaseless activity of his mind. Are 
 we then, because the philosophy of Croce is still
 
 ERRATUM 
 
 Foreword^ p. 2, line 21. For external read eternal.
 
 Foreword 
 
 developing, to refrain from the attempt to interpret 
 it on the ground that any meaning we may find in it 
 is indefinite and insecure? Certainly not, for a 
 philosopher's thinking unfolds and develops like a 
 living thing, it is not constructed like a building, nor 
 does it rest on foundations which may be unsound. 
 
 Dr. RafFaello Piccoli, a professor in the University 
 of Pisa, and the author of this book, was born in 
 Naples, Croce's city, in 1886. He himself as a young 
 student came under the personal spell of the philo- 
 sopher he writes about, and grew up in the intel- 
 lectual atmosphere which his philosophy was creating. 
 To this great advantage he has added another, for first 
 in Australia, and later in the Universities of England 
 and America he has acquired a perfect command of 
 our language and a thorough knowledge of our 
 philosophy. He is specially qualified, therefore, to 
 give a first-hand account of Croce's literary and 
 philosophical activity, and the kind of influence it 
 has had in forming the mind of Modern Italy. 
 
 The author has not confined himself to an exposi- 
 tion of the philosophy of Croce in its narrow and 
 technical meaning, he has given us an account of the 
 whole of his literary and historical activity. He has 
 traced the origin of his philosophy in the circum- 
 stances of his parentage, early life and education, and 
 has followed biographically the formation of his philo- 
 sophical theories and the direction of his philosophical
 
 Foreword 
 
 interest. He has shown how his general trend of 
 thought, his literary tastes and historical studies 
 without any professional spur, by the very nature 
 and force of the problems with which they con- 
 fronted him, led to philosophy as the dominant and 
 culminating interest of life. 
 
 Philosophers and philosophies have had in our 
 generation to undergo the trial of a fiery furnace. 
 The Great War and the passions aroused by it and 
 the estrangement between nations nurtured in the 
 same Western culture have been a fierce test of prin- 
 ciples. In regard to every great leader we ask first 
 how he reacted to the conflicting emotions of the 
 international struggle. Dr. Piccoli has dealt with 
 this latest and crucial period of Croce's activity in a 
 very sympathetic spirit. Croce's attitude at one time 
 exposed him to an extreme unpopularity. This was 
 largely the result of misunderstanding. He has com.e 
 through the ordeal with enhanced reputation. This, 
 at least, is the author's judgment — the judgment of 
 one who himself fought and suffered severely in the 
 War. 
 
 The two great achievements of Croce are in the 
 domain of aesthetical and ethical theory. Dr. Piccoli 
 shows us each doctrine in its historical origin and 
 in its relation to contemporary philosophy. The first 
 is a reaction against the intellectualism of Hegel. In 
 its affirmation of intuition it is in rather strikino- 
 
 o
 
 Foreword 
 
 agreement with the philosophy of Bergson, although 
 as Croce's approach is from the side of art and 
 literature, and not like Bergson's from the study of 
 biological science, it rather supplements than eluci- 
 dates Bergson's theory. The second is a reaction 
 against the school of Karl Marx and its materialistic 
 interpretation of history. 
 
 At the present time Croce is directing his criticism 
 on the new line of development which his own friends 
 and colleagues are taking in regard to his own prin- 
 ciples, in particular to the " actual idealism " of his 
 colleague Professor Giovanni Gentile. To Croce 
 this new doctrine spells mysticism, and of mysticism 
 in all its forms he is the open enemy. On this point 
 we may, I think, detect an inclination on the part of 
 Dr. Piccoli to disagree with Croce. It will be seen, 
 therefore, that we have in this book a very full and 
 a very welcome account, brought right up to date, of 
 one who is, as far as contemporaries can judge, forming 
 the mind of the present age. 
 
 H. WiLDON CaRR
 
 PREFACE 
 
 When, about a year ago, I undertook to write this 
 little book for its present publishers, all that I had 
 in my mind was a brief exposition of the solutions 
 given by Croce to a number of philosophical problems 
 of vital interest to the students of what were once 
 called the Moral Sciences. I thought at the time 
 that it would be possible to abstract such solutions 
 and problems from the body of his Philosophy of 
 Mind, which Is a coherent and austere theory of 
 knowledge of a kind that in the modern decadence 
 of philosophical studies and of general culture is 
 rapidly becoming unintelligible even to the most 
 highly cultivated. I hoped that the specialized 
 reader, for whom the larger aspects of Croce's thought 
 have no appeal, and therefore no meaning, would be 
 able to apply those particular solutions to the 
 problems that confronted him in his particular branch 
 of studies, by translating them Into terms of his own 
 naive philosophy. 
 
 This plan had also a personal advantage, inasmuch 
 as it did not compel me to a conscious revision of 
 my own position in regard to those larger aspects of 
 Croce's philosophy. But as soon as I began to think 
 consistently of this book, the history of my own
 
 iv Preface 
 
 reactions to Croce's work came back to me so vividly 
 that I found it impossible to set it aside; and I dis- 
 covered that this supposed advantage was a delusion, 
 towards which I had probably been drawn by a very 
 human, very natural desire of avoiding the most ob- 
 vious difficulties of my task. 
 
 As a young man, in my student days in Italy, I 
 was a fervid and enthusiastic follower of Croce's 
 ideas: one of the many who used to swear, as we 
 were wont to say, in verba Crucis. To the generation 
 who opened the eyes of their intellect in the dawn 
 of the century, he had revealed what seemed to be 
 the only safe path between the two precipices of a 
 pseudo-scientific materialism on one hand, and of a 
 mysticism on the other, which in all its many forms 
 (traditionalism, modernism, pragmatism, intuition- 
 ism, aestheticism, super-humanism, futurism) could 
 not be anything less than an abdication of thought 
 for the sake of the emotions. And it should not be 
 wondered at, if Croce's books, appearing at short 
 intervals between 1900 and 1910, and building up 
 what presented itself to us as a complete system of 
 answers to all, or practically all, our most pressing 
 spiritual questions, were received by us with deep 
 gratitude but with very little constructive criticism. 
 They covered such an enormous space on the map 
 of European culture, that even for the most ambitious 
 among us, they were very often the first introduction 
 to entirely new fields of studies, and all we could do 
 was to follow our guide in his voyages of rediscovery:
 
 Preface V 
 
 to repeat within ourselves the strenuous experience 
 of which each of those books was a report and a 
 testimony. 
 
 Impatience with a master who was not of the 
 kind we had been accustomed to, who could not be 
 easily digested, surpassed and disposed of, but had 
 as much energy and courage, as light a step and as 
 curious a mind, as the most gifted among his pupils, 
 prompted a good deal of immature and capricious 
 criticism, which was but a means for an arbitrary 
 liberation. It was an amusing sight to see Croce 
 assailed and, to the satisfaction of his critics, de- 
 stroyed, with weapons that nobody could have pro- 
 vided but Croce himself, and a dwarf victoriously 
 brandishing against the giant a toothpick for a sword. 
 But there is no epic of thought without such comic 
 interludes. 
 
 My own faith in Croce was not shaken until inter- 
 course with one of the greatest critical minds of our 
 day, and the representative of a totally different 
 philosophical tradition, a mathematician and a phi- 
 losopher, showed me the weakness of the foundations 
 not of Croce's, but of my own idealism. And a long 
 residence in England, where I became intimately ac- 
 quainted with certain logical habits utterly unlike 
 our Latin ways of thought, made me profoundly 
 sceptical of the intellectual advantages of whatever 
 dogmatism might have been in me. Yet I continued 
 for a long time to keep as it were in separate com- 
 partments those that had seemed to me to be es-
 
 VI Preface 
 
 tablished truths in Croce's system, and speculations 
 of a quite different order on problems which were 
 forced upon me by my own experience of life and 
 by contact with a new moral and cultural environ- 
 ment. 
 
 All this was in the happy days of peace. The war 
 from its very beginning appeared to me, then living 
 in one of the most purely intellectual centres of 
 Europe, at one of the oldest Universities of England, 
 as the catastrophe of our whole intellectual life. 
 From the trials of the war I emerged with infinitely 
 less faith in the value of our intellectual possessions 
 than I ever had had before, and at the same time 
 with the firm conviction that intelligence, more in- 
 telligence, a deeper, purer, more active, charitable, 
 courageous and pervasive intelligence, is our only 
 hope for the future. 
 
 It was with such a disposition that I took up this 
 work, and read what Croce had been writing during 
 the war. Three things, in the course of this new 
 acquaintance with him, and while I was meditating 
 and lecturing on him during my American peregrina- 
 tions, became very clear to me. The first, that his 
 thought is not a system in the ordinary sense of the 
 word, but a method; that therefore it is impossible 
 to sever parts of his philosophy from the main body, 
 the truth of particular propositions being dependent 
 upon an understanding of the whole. 
 
 The second, that in the last few years the progress 
 of his thought has been so considerable that an at-
 
 Preface vii 
 
 tempt at giving a general exposition of his philosophy 
 without any regard to the successive stages of growth, 
 at describing as a static structure what is a dynamic 
 process, would inevitably lead to the construction of 
 a fanciful system, of an image totally different from 
 the original. 
 
 The third, that whatever our individual position 
 may be in relation to his ideas, his work before, dur- 
 ing and after the war will remain as the most solemn 
 contemporary monument of that intellectual civiliza- 
 tion of Europe, of which we have seen so many false 
 idols, so many white sepulchres, go under during 
 these seven years of passion. 
 
 The conclusion to be drawn from these considera- 
 tions was obvious: first, that I had to give up my 
 former plan, and this with no regret, as I ought to 
 have remembered what Croce has taught again and 
 again, that to the naive philosophy of the specialist 
 his own solutions of his particular problems, however 
 childish they may appear from a higher standpoint, 
 are perfectly adequate, that ready-made, formal solu- 
 tions are no solutions at all, and the only truth is the 
 one that we conquer by our own effort, under the 
 impulse of our own need. And second, that, how- 
 ever conscious I was and am of my own limitations, 
 I had to take a first step in the direction of construc- 
 tive criticism by trying to retrace the history, the 
 ideal biography, of the philosophy of Croce. 
 
 With the exception of a little book written by 
 Croce himself, there is very little help to be found
 
 viii Preface 
 
 for a work of this kind in the vast Hterature that 
 has grown in the last twenty years, in Europe and 
 in America, around his work. And I firmly believe 
 that there is not one man in Europe or in America 
 who is qualified to do that work of creative inter- 
 pretation which ought to be at the same time a his- 
 tory and a criticism of Croce's philosophical activity: 
 least of all, the professional philosopher, who has 
 dealt all his life with the conceptual residuum of the 
 problems of life, and has no direct experience of any 
 of them. Croce, as this little book will try to show, 
 has always come to the concept from the concrete, 
 particular problem, and has occupied himself with 
 such a variety of problems, going into them so deeply 
 and so thoroughly, that a complete valuation of his 
 work will never be possible to a single man, but will 
 take place^ will happen^ in the history of the various 
 disciplines, and in the general history of thought, 
 for years and years to come. For the present, and 
 as long as he will be alive and thinking, the only 
 creative interpreter of Croce is Croce himself. 
 
 This book does not therefore intend to substitute 
 itself, not even as a summary and a short cut for 
 lazy minds, to the works of Croce. It is rather an 
 introduction to those works, and at the same time 
 the confession of one individual experience of that 
 philosophy. It is an historical sketch, and implicitly 
 a criticism, since our way of understanding a thought 
 is our judgment of that thought (when not a judg- 
 ment that that thought passes on us); a sketch which
 
 Preface ix 
 
 I think I can honestly write because so much of that 
 philosophy has been the daily food of my intellectual 
 life, my own history, for years. Before the war I 
 should probably have been able to write it with less 
 difficulty, with more complete adhesion; but the per- 
 spective of these few years will make it perhaps less 
 passionate and more reflective. An explicit criticism 
 of the whole philosophy of Croce it is not, and it 
 does not attempt to be: the reader may find traces 
 of my doubts and of my preoccupations in it, but 
 I have humbly tried to give not more, and I hope 
 not less, than what he has a right to expect from the 
 title. 
 
 I do not write this book for the professors of phi- 
 losophy. Those among them who know Croce will 
 not need it; and those who either have not as yet 
 taken any notice of him, or from a casual acquaint- 
 ance with one of his books have proceeded to damn 
 most vigorously what they have hardly understood, 
 are certainly beyond my power. I write it for the 
 young, from the heart of my own now fast receding 
 youth, trying to raise before their eyes, in the words 
 of Dante to Brunette Latini, 
 
 la cara e buona immagine paterna 
 
 di voi, quando ad ora ad ora 
 
 m'insegnavate come I'uom s'eterna. 
 
 I trust that they will find in it what they need not 
 less than we of an older generation needed it, and 
 what I know they are thirsting for: an example of
 
 X Preface 
 
 intellectual energy and of moral strength converging 
 into a life of unremitting devotion to the service of 
 that truth which is light and love and joy, — our 
 only light against the menace of darkness. 
 
 Raffaello Piccoli. 
 
 Northampton, Mass., June-October, 1921,
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction 3 
 
 I. The Beginnings 3 
 
 II. Early Environment 16 
 
 III. The Origins of his Thought 28 
 
 PART FIRST 
 
 From Philology to Philosophy (1893-1899) 43 
 
 I. History as Art 45 
 
 II. On Literary Criticism 57 
 
 III. History and Economics 71 
 
 PART SECOND 
 
 The Philosophy of Mind (1900-1910) 85 
 
 I. The Growth of the System 87 
 
 II. Intuition and Expression 99 
 
 III. The Concept of Art 116 
 
 IV. Criticism and Technique 130 
 
 V. The Pure Concept 141 
 
 VI. The Forms of Knowledge 159 
 
 VII. The Theory of Error 173 
 
 VIII. The Practical Activity 188 
 
 IX. Economics and Ethics 207 
 
 X. The Laws 225 
 
 PART THIRD 
 
 Philosophy as History (1911-1921) 241 
 
 I. Works and Days 243 
 
 II. The Theory of History 253 
 
 III. Criticism and History 274 
 
 IV. Veritas filia temporis 289 
 
 Bibliographical Note „ 305 
 
 Index , 311 
 
 xi
 
 BENEDETTO CROCE
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Croce's family, and early education — His religion — Life in Rome in the 
 eighties — Labriola's influence — Meditations on ethics — Return to 
 Naples; life as a scholar — Travels; and the problem of history — 
 Philosophus fit — The intellectual conditions of Italy after the Risor- 
 gimento — Contemporary European culture — American analogies — 
 Two leaders of Italian thought — Francesco de Sanctis — Giosue 
 Carducci — Croce's approach to philosophy, and his method of 
 work — His relations to the philosophical practition — Vico and the 
 philosophy of the Renaissance — Bruno and Campanella — The 
 humanism of Vico — Naturalism and spiritualism — A philosophy of 
 the human spirit. 
 
 I. The Beginnings 
 
 Benedetto Croce was born in 1866, in a small 
 town in the Italian province of Aquila, the only son 
 of an old-fashioned, Catholic, and conservative Nea- 
 politan family. His grandfather had been a high 
 magistrate, untouched by the new liberal currents 
 in his devotion to the old regime and to the Bour- 
 bon dynasty then reigning in Naples. His father 
 followed the traditional maxim of the "good people" 
 of Naples: that an honest man must take care of his 
 family and of his business, and keep away frorrr the 
 intrigues of political life. His mother was a woman 
 of culture and taste, such as the old type of education 
 for women, which is now as completely forgotten as 
 if it had never existed, used to produce. Bertrando 
 
 3
 
 4 Benedetto Croce 
 
 Spaventa, the philosopher, and Silvio Spaventa, a 
 statesman who had brought to his enthusiasm for the 
 national cause all the traditions of his Neapolitan 
 conservatism, were her brothers: both of them, how- 
 ever, estranged from Croce's family because of their 
 political ideas. 
 
 The child grew in this greyish, subdued atmos- 
 phere, in which the only touches of colour were added 
 by his own passion for books of history and romance, 
 and by the visits to the beautiful old churches to 
 which he accompanied his mother. To the circum- 
 stances of his childhood, Croce attributes the relative 
 delay in the development of his political feelings 
 and ideals, for a long time submerged by his interests 
 in literature and erudition. But because every fault 
 brings with itself some compensation, he also owed 
 to them his critical attitude towards partisan political 
 legends, his impatience towards the rhetoric of liber- 
 alism, his vehement dislike of great emphatic words, 
 and of any kind of pomp and ceremony, together 
 with a power to appreciate what is useful and effectual 
 in the actions of men, wherever it may come from. 
 
 As a boy, he went to a Catholic "collegio" or 
 boarding school, and in this too his experience dif- 
 fered from that of the majority of his contemporaries. 
 The insistence on lay education imparted by the 
 State, and the preference for the day school, which 
 allows the family to supplement the work of the 
 school, in fact, to take care of the moral and social 
 side of education, as distinct from the purely intel-
 
 Introduction 5 
 
 lectual one, are characteristics of the new Italian 
 methods, obviously in keeping with the general ten- 
 dencies of the age. I remember that to myself as a 
 boy it was inexplicable why anybody should be sent 
 to a "collegio," unless he were an orphan or an un- 
 manageable scamp. But Croce seems to have en- 
 joyed his experience, to which he was submitted 
 merely in accordance with the habits of his family; 
 and even now he praises the system for breeding in 
 him those feelings of loyalty and honour, which are 
 the result of life in common with boys of one's own 
 age, and of the necessity of adapting oneself to a 
 variety of dispositions and temperaments. 
 
 Classical secondary educatioii in Italy roughly 
 corresponds in its scope, even to-day, to that which is 
 imparted in Anglo-Saxon countries by secondary 
 schools and liberal colleges. It is supposed to end 
 the "formative" phase of education, and to lead to 
 the higher phase in the Universities, which is, whether 
 cultural or professional, of a highly specialized and 
 "informative" kind. It is the direct outcome of the 
 humanistic tradition, and rather more so in the cler- 
 ical schools, like the one which Croce attended, than 
 in the public ones. By the time he was ready for the 
 University, he must have had a good knowledge of 
 the classics, as a general background to a mainly 
 literary and historical culture, in which the elements 
 of scientific knowledge, and a good deal of mathe- 
 matics, had also their place. 
 
 The religion which played such an Important part
 
 6 Benedetto Croce 
 
 in his family and school life was probably little more 
 than a habit with him: a set of answers to certain 
 fundamental problems which, accepted on the au- 
 thority of parents and teachers, released his mind 
 for the pursuit of his favourite studies. And yet, 
 there is no doubt that we can find traces of this re- 
 ligious education in all his work: a personal expe- 
 rience of the catholic catechism and of catholic moral- 
 ity brings a spirit in contact with some of the great 
 ideas and of the great realities of life in a much more 
 intimate and profound way than the purely intel- 
 lectual apprehensions of the same ideas and realities 
 ever will. It creates habits of mind and moral tastes 
 which will still be recognizable even after the individ- 
 ual mind to which they belong has undergone the 
 most radical changes. In a philosopher, in particular, 
 it forms a kind of personal background to thought, 
 similar to that which modern philosophy actually 
 has in its own history: it reproduces in the youth 
 of one man that religious phase which corresponds 
 to the youth of a civilization, and is the source of the 
 intellectual development of a more conscious age. 
 
 At intervals during his adolescence, Croce's faith 
 intensified itself into passing aspirations towards a 
 life of devotion, until it quietly vanished, so to speak, 
 from his consciousness, through no great dramatic 
 crisis, but merely in consequence of a course of les- 
 sons on the philosophy of religion, which were in- 
 tended to strengthen it and make it more resistent 
 to criticism, during the last years of his secondary
 
 Introduction 7 
 
 education. At about the same time, having come 
 under the influence of both Carducci and De Sanctis, 
 he began to write, and contributed his first articles 
 to a literary weekly, the Fanjulla della Domenica^ 
 which represented the most vigorous and advanced 
 tendencies of the day. 
 
 In 1883, in the earthquake of Casamicciola, in the 
 island of Ischia near Naples, Croce lost both his 
 parents and his only sister, he himself remaining 
 buried for several hours under the ruins, and broken 
 in several parts of his body. The years immediately 
 following were the "saddest and darkest" of his 
 life, and he spent them in Rome in the house of his 
 uncle Silvio Spaventa, which was one of the most 
 conspicuous political and intellectual centres of the 
 capital of the new kingdom. Spaventa was one of 
 the leaders of the Right, or Conservative party, 
 which had been thrown out of oflice by the Left, or 
 Liberal party, a few years before; by him and by 
 his friends the young Croce was strengthened in his 
 mistrust of the prevailing ideas and methods, which 
 he heard bitterly and sarcastically criticised by men 
 of great culture and of profound political honesty. 
 While his temperament and the shadow of his grief 
 kept him away from the brilliant social life of the 
 Roman jeunesse doree, his relations with the men of 
 a party which had little hope of ever coming back to 
 power prevented him from taking any part in active 
 political life, in sharp contrast with the habits of the 
 majority of Italian university students, to whom
 
 8 Benedetto Croce 
 
 politics are what the major sports are to Anglo- 
 Saxon students. He divided his time between the 
 University and the great Roman libraries, among 
 which the one he loved best was the Casanatense, 
 in those years still served by Dominican monks, a 
 typical old monastic library, its benches provided 
 with old-fashioned inkhorns, sandboxes with golden 
 sand, and goose-quills. Anyone seeing him there, 
 buried among his ancient and curious books, and not 
 suspecting the deep perpetual dissatisfaction and un- 
 happiness which accompanied him in a work which 
 seemed to be but a work of love, would have proph- 
 esied for him the life of one of those ascetics of erudi- 
 tion, intoxicated by the romantic dust of the past, 
 who still haunt the solemn halls and the dark corri- 
 dors of the libraries of the old world. 
 
 But the great event of his University life, the one 
 which awakened him from the torpor of mere erudi- 
 tion, and set before him a new goal and a higher 
 hope, was the lessons on moral philosophy which he 
 heard from Antonio Labriola. Croce himself has de- 
 scribed this new, decisive experience: "Those lessons 
 came unexpectedly to meet my harrowing need of 
 rebuilding for myself in a rational form a faith in 
 life, and in the aims and duties of life; I had lost the 
 guidance of a religious doctrine, and at the same time 
 I was feeling the obscure danger of materialistic 
 theories, whether sensistic or associationistic, about 
 which I had no illusions at all, as T clearly perceived 
 in them the substantial negation of morality itself,
 
 Introduction 9 
 
 resolved into a more or less disguised egotism. Her- 
 bart's ethics taught by Labriola restored in my mind 
 the majesty of the ideal, of that which has to be as 
 opposed to that which is, and mysterious in its op- 
 position, but because of this same mysteriousness, 
 absolute and uncompromising." ^ Labriola's in- 
 fluence on Croce was not limited to the classroom; 
 the professor and the student became friends, and 
 Croce enjoyed the benefit of his wonderful gifts as a 
 conversationalist, on which even more than on his 
 academic activity, or on his published work, his fame 
 rests. He seems to have been an awakener of souls, 
 an intellectual stimulant in the fashion of the Greek 
 philosophers, a breaker of new paths and a spiritual 
 guide such as a younger generation had in the mathe- 
 matician Vailati. 
 
 The mind of the young scholar is henceforth con- 
 stantly occupied by meditations on the concepts of 
 pleasure and duty, of purity and impurity, of actions 
 prompted by the attraction of the pure, moral idea, 
 and of actions which result in apparent moral effects 
 through psychic associations, through habits, through 
 the impulse of the passions. It is easy to discover 
 the dependence of such meditations on the early re- 
 ligious education of Croce; they are the link, in fact, 
 between his religion and his philosophy, since we 
 find them, at a more mature and elaborate stage, re- 
 flected in the third volume of his Philosophy of 
 
 * Contributo, pp. 21, 22; and passim, pp. 1-30, for practically the whole 
 substance of this section.
 
 10 Benedetto Croce 
 
 Mind J which, to the eyes of its author, has still an 
 almost autobiographical aspect, entirely concealed 
 from the reader by its didascalic form. 
 
 The plan of life that he sketched for himself about 
 this time, was a distinctly disillusioned and pessimis- 
 tic one: on one hand, he would pursue his erudite 
 and literary work, partly because of his natural in- 
 clination towards it, and partly because one has any- 
 how to do something in this world; and he would, 
 on the other hand, fulfil his moral duties to the best 
 of his capacity, conceiving them to be above all 
 duties of compassion. In later years he criticised this 
 view as a purely selfish one, since "the true and high 
 compassion is that which one practices by setting 
 the whole of one's self in harmony with the ends of 
 reality, and by compelling others too to move to- 
 wards those ends, and a kind heart makes itself truly 
 and seriously kind only through an ever broader and 
 deeper understanding." ^ 
 
 After three years of residence in Rome, Croce re- 
 turned to Naples, where he lived in the society of 
 curious and learned old men, librarians and archiv- 
 ists, all absorbed in minute and painstaking historical 
 researches. The moderate fortune which he had in- 
 herited from his parents gave him the independence 
 he needed for his quiet, laborious tastes, and allowed 
 him gradually to collect in his own house a very large 
 and precious library. To it he owed also the possi- 
 bility of learning without teaching, and therefore of 
 
 2 Contributo, p. 23.
 
 Introduction 1 1 
 
 keeping his own work entirely free from any academic 
 taint: of subordinating his studies rather to the ne- 
 cessities of the development of his own personality 
 than to those of professional specialization. 
 
 Practically all the production of the years between 
 1886 and 1 892 is concerned with one aspect or another 
 of the history of Naples. Through his researches on 
 the Neapolitan theatres, on Neapolitan hfe in the 
 eighteenth century, and on the Hterature of the 
 seventeenth century, he acquired an intimate and 
 exhaustive knowledge of the minutest literary, po- 
 litical, social and archaeological details of that life 
 of his own city, which was the immediate historical 
 background of his own life. Towards the end of this 
 period, this complex activity crystallized itself into 
 two rather ambitious enterprises: the editing of a 
 Biblioteca letteraria napoletana, for the publication 
 of texts and documents of Neapolitan literature; 
 and of a periodical, Napoli Nobilissima^ which in the 
 fifteen years of its existence collected an enormous 
 amount of material for the history and archaeology 
 of Naples, and to which Croce himself contributed 
 the essays of his Storie e leggende napoletane. 
 
 We have here a Croce, who, though not a professor, 
 was yet truly a specialist: one of that great host of 
 local and municipal historians which are to be met 
 with in even the least important Italian towns. 
 And undoubtedly this kind of activity offered him, 
 as he willingly acknowledges, not only an outlet 
 for his youthful imagination, in the reconstruction
 
 12 Beyiedetto Croce 
 
 of an adventurous and picturesque past, but a formal 
 discipline of precision and thoroughness in scientific 
 work. But it must be remembered that municipal 
 or regional history in Italy has in many cases the 
 breadth and depth of national history in other coun- 
 tries, because of the number and variety of divergent 
 political, literary and artistic traditions which are 
 present in the life of each Italian city or state. And 
 Naples, though she never had as preponderant a 
 part in the formation of the national consciousness as 
 either Rome or Florence, was a world in herself, 
 with her own art and poetry, with her own philoso- 
 phical and political tendencies, with her peculiar 
 relations to non-Italian states and cultures, such as 
 France and Spain. Croce's Neapolitan researches, 
 however specialized and barren they may appear at 
 first sight, were therefore well fitted to give him, in 
 one particular instance, that direct and concrete 
 experience of historical reality, of a complex and 
 variegated historical reality, which is among the 
 necessary premises of his philosophical thought. 
 They gave him also a clearer consciousness of the 
 processes of thought which were naturally connected 
 with that particular experience, and they thus helped 
 him to penetrate the minds of his two great Neapoli- 
 tan predecessors, Vico and De Sanctis. And finally, 
 especially through his interest m the cultural rela- 
 tions between Naples and Spain, they enlarged his 
 horizon from the problems of local to those of gen- 
 eral European history.
 
 Introduction 13 
 
 He visited, always as a scholar, not only Spain, 
 but France and England and Germany, constantly 
 widening the range of his excursions in libraries and 
 archives. But the more he acquired of the knowledge 
 of individual facts, the deeper he felt the futility 
 and vacuity of their purely material accumulation. 
 There was no end, apparently, to the labor of research 
 and erudition, unless a guiding and limiting principle 
 should be found: by the mere piling up of historical 
 information, however minute and exact, it would 
 be forever impossible to decipher the secret of the 
 past. No amount of erudition would ever make 
 history. It is no wonder that to a mind which already 
 had been preoccupied with religious and moral prob- 
 lems, the problem of its own work should present 
 itself with the same intensity and in the same sjiape 
 as a moral experience. He began to feel a satiety 
 and distaste for that which he had once thought 
 would be the labour of his whole life, and a yearning 
 for a more satisfying, more intimate form of activity. 
 He felt a vague attraction towards a new type of 
 history, moral history, in relation to which all his 
 previous researches appeared as a kind of amorphous 
 and unconscious preparation. He planned a book 
 on the psychological and spiritual history of Italy 
 from the Renaissance to our own times, and he under- 
 took a series of studies on the relations between 
 Spain and Italy, to be followed by similar work in 
 regard to the other nations of Europe, as necessary 
 to a full understanding of his main theme.
 
 14 Benedetto Croce 
 
 But his old methods and habits followed him in 
 the new field: again it seemed to him that there 
 would be no end to his merely preparatory work, 
 once he had undertaken it in what was practically 
 still his old spirit. In fact he had sensed a spiritual 
 need which had announced itself by that peculiar 
 feeliiig so closely resembling one of moral dissatis- 
 faction, but he had not been able as yet to formulate 
 the terms of his problem. It is probable that what 
 kept him for quite a long time from doing so was 
 partly the character of his literary education, and 
 partly a kind of intellectual humility, which made 
 him distrust his own powers, on entering Into a com- 
 pletely new form of mental activity. 
 
 The problem which he had to solve for himself was, 
 indeed, not an historical, or philological, or archaeolog- 
 ical one, but a purely philosophical one: the problem 
 of the nature of history and of science. We know 
 with what religious awe Croce regarded the profes- 
 sional philosophers at the time; and certainly nothing 
 could have been more painful to the young and 
 modest scholar than the thought of stepping beyond 
 the limits of his own specialty, and invading a 
 ground so powerfully occupied and defended. But 
 Croce discovered through his own experience that 
 you cannot reject a problem, once it Is forced upon 
 you by the facts of your own life, and t\\d.tphilosophus 
 fit with the same kind of necessity with which poeta 
 nascitur. It Is from this point that we can observe 
 the transformation of the young scholar into a
 
 Introduction 15 
 
 philosopher; his philosophical career will appear 
 to us as a continued effort towards the solution of 
 that first problem, and of all the problems which 
 followed in its train. The last answer to it is in 
 Croce's theory of the identity of history and philos- 
 ophy; and the dependence of this theory on the 
 first impulse from which the whole of his philosophy 
 arose is clearly visible in the desire which he has 
 again and again expressed and partly fulfilled in his 
 latest writings, of going back from abstract and 
 formal philosophy to the philosophy of particular 
 facts or history: storia pensata; "since this is the 
 meaning of the identity of philosophy and history, 
 that we philosophize whenever we think, whatever 
 may be the subject or form of our thought." ^ The 
 philosophy of Croce, which begins with the raw 
 material of history, presenting itself as a dense, 
 impenetrable mass, ends in a new conception of 
 history, which is permeated in all its parts by the 
 vivifying breath of thought. 
 
 I may add here, since it will be very hard to inter- 
 rupt the history of his intellectual development 
 with biographical details, that the new direction of 
 his thought did not alter Croce's external mode of 
 life; that the discipline acquired in his early work 
 remained the norm of all his later activity; that he 
 accepted public ofhces in his own town, and later as a 
 senator (which in Italy is a life-office) and as a 
 Minister of Public Education in the last Giolitti 
 
 ^ Contributo, p. 8i.
 
 1 6 Benedetto Croce 
 
 Cabinet, certainly more out of the consciousness of a 
 moral obligation than through his inclination or his 
 ambition. His life on the whole has been and is 
 essentially that of the scholar and of the thinker: 
 his work, a political work only in the wide meaning 
 which Plato gives to the word. 
 
 II. Early Environment 
 
 Benedetto Croce was thirty-four years old in nine- 
 teen hundred: his education (if it is possible to 
 set a term to the education of a philosopher) is 
 therefore the work of the last quarter of the nine- 
 teenth century. A rapid examination of the intel- 
 lectual conditions of Italy during those years will 
 help us to see that education in its true light, that is, 
 as a reaction to, rather than a fruit of, the environ- 
 ment. 
 
 The Risorgimento, with its fifty years of wars and 
 revolutions coming close on the heels of the great 
 Napoleonic upheaval, left Italy materially and 
 morally exhausted. After centuries of foreign domi- 
 nation, of political and spiritual servitude, all the 
 elements of Italian culture had been gathered by the 
 two generations of the Risorgimento into a new cul- 
 ture, which was much more an instrument of combat, 
 for the conquest of unity and independence, con- 
 sidered as the necessary premises of national life, 
 than the best soil for the spiritual growth of that life 
 after the conquest. This new culture, in the poets 
 who had announced and formed it, Parini, Alfieri,
 
 Introduction 17 
 
 Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni, in its philosophers, 
 Rosmini and Gioberti, and in its prophet and apostle, 
 Mazzini, had forms and spirits, the value and mean- 
 ing of which by far transcended the importance of its 
 immediate historical purpose; but through the dif- 
 ficulties and labors of the practical effort, it reached 
 the end of the period shorn of a good deal of what was 
 deepest, most beautiful, nearest to the universal, 
 in it. Italy in 1870 was very much like the sprinter 
 who wins the race, but collapses at the crossing of 
 the line. 
 
 The culture of Italy had been for centuries oscillat- 
 ing between the pursuit and discovery of certain 
 universal values, which had gradually become part 
 of the common European culture (the Roman idea, 
 the Christian idea, the main principles, aesthetic and 
 moral, of the Renaissance), and the development of 
 purely local, regional characteristics, ht the end of 
 the Risorgimento, the Hnks that had kept Italian 
 culture in constant contact with the rest of Europe 
 were broken, and on the other hand the local cul- 
 tures found themselves, as it were, lost and sub- 
 merged in the new political readjustment, threatened 
 in their very existence by the new claim of loyalty 
 advanced by a literary and abstract national ideal. 
 The duties of Italian culture, clearer to us now than 
 to the men who lived in the midst of those events, 
 were then, on one side, to re-establish the connection 
 between Italian and European culture, and this time 
 more by learning than by teaching — and on the other
 
 1 8 Benedetto Croce 
 
 side to utilize the less particular elements of the 
 regional cultures as a foundation for a real and con- 
 crete and diffused cultural life in the nation. 
 
 Thus Italy becomes, at the beginning of her new, 
 unified existence, little more than a province of 
 European thought. She looks around herself and she 
 is compelled to take notice of what had happened 
 beyond her frontiers during the last two or three 
 centuries. It is Interesting to compare the charac- 
 teristics of the other great nations of Europe as they 
 appear to Italy during and after the Risorgimento. 
 England, who had been a symbol of political liberty, 
 a source of political and economic wisdom, reappears 
 as a model of industrial development and at the same 
 time as the proclaimer of a new creed to the world, 
 the creed of evolution, which after having infused a 
 fresh spirit in the natural sciences with Darwin, 
 seems to promise a new interpretation of human life, 
 a new organization of science and of social thought, 
 with Spencer. France, the mother of revolutions, 
 the deliverer of the spirit of man from the shackles 
 of divine and earthly tyranny, remains, In a vague 
 and hazy fashion, through the many disappointments 
 that her policies give to her Italian lovers during all 
 this period, the same kind of Inspiration that she 
 has been ever since the Encyclopedic and the Revolu- 
 tion; but contributes to the new effort little more 
 than her veristic fiction, In which art itself is reduced 
 to a handmaid of the goddess of the hour, biological 
 and social science.
 
 Introduction 19 
 
 Germany had saturated with the romantic at- 
 mosphere of her poetry the passionate struggle 
 of the times, and she had captured a httle band of 
 thoughtful patriots, among whom we find Croce's 
 uncle, Bertrando Spaventa, with the fascination 
 of her new metaphysics, in which they found the 
 fulfilment of all the promises of Italian thought 
 in the foregoing centuries; but after her victory over 
 France, the same cause that makes French influence 
 less vigorous, makes also German influence less deep 
 and less inspiring. A Germany who has like Faust 
 sold her romantic and metaphysical soul, yields only 
 a shadow of her great historical and philosophical 
 culture of the eighteenth and of the first half of the 
 nineteenth century, though a tremendously powerful 
 one, and such that for a long time it overawes the 
 academic mind not of Italy only, but of the whole 
 continent. A narrow and materialistic philology, 
 under the name of historical method, becomes the 
 heir to the humanistic tradition, and substitutes it- 
 self for every native impulse, even in fields in which 
 ItaHan thought had been master for centuries, as in 
 that of law: where it mercilessly destroys, of the 
 ideologies of the Risorgimento, not only that which 
 was arbitrary and fanciful, and therefore destined to 
 perish, but even that which through the subsequent 
 course of history was to prove vital and sound. The 
 Italian school of international law, the new concep- 
 tion of the Law of Nations, for instance, which was 
 the fruit of the Italian juridical tradition during the
 
 20 Benedetto Croce 
 
 experiences of the Risorgimento, and which is the 
 more or less consciously accepted foundation of all 
 the doctrines of international relations striving for 
 realization in our times, in no country and in no 
 schools was so resolutely repudiated as in the Italian 
 universities. And it could not have been otherwise, 
 since the new philology was as static and deter- 
 ministic a doctrine, only more logically and rigor- 
 ously so, as the evolutionary positivism which we had 
 learnt from England. 
 
 The faults of Italian culture during this period are 
 therefore the faults of the other European cultures 
 which Italy had to assimilate: at a time when Italy 
 was most in need of cultural help from without, she 
 found that, for reasons infinitely complex and totally 
 different from those which had caused her own ex- 
 haustion, the other nations of Europe were also spirit- 
 ually exhausted. x'\nd yet it cannot be said that 
 from these very faults Italy did not draw some useful 
 lessons. The so-called historical method, which com- 
 pletely disregarded the great forces of history, and 
 made of the least significant historical datum a Ding 
 an sich in which the mind of the scholar seemed to 
 find its ultimate object, proved in the end to be a 
 salutary discipline as against the facile and enthusi- 
 astic generalizations of the historians of the Risorgi- 
 mento. Positivism, however barbarous and uncouth 
 in itself, was a powerful weapon for the destruction 
 of the last remnants of a more or less mythological 
 metaphysics, and in that sense it afforded an example
 
 Introduction 21 
 
 of intellectual honesty; and at the same time it awak- 
 ened the consciousness of the continuity of natural 
 and spiritual life, announcing, though in a hasty and 
 imperfect synthesis, what every philosophy of the 
 future will have to be. And about the middle of the 
 period which we are now considering, the only real 
 contribution of Germany to European thought in the 
 second half of the century became known in Italy 
 with the advent of Marxism, in which we found a 
 new conception of history, in so far adequate to the 
 true spirit and conditions of the times, as it afforded 
 to blind social forces, striving for political expression, 
 an interpretation of their needs and a rationalized 
 programme of action. 
 
 The analogies between this general cultural at- 
 mosphere, and the present conditions of the intel- 
 lectual world in America, are, provided we do not 
 stress them too hard, so striking that I cannot refrain 
 from calling the attention of the reader to them. I 
 believe this will help him to apply a good many of 
 Croce's criticisms and ideas to tendencies and prob- 
 lems with which he is thoroughly familiar. The most 
 recent forms of American philosophy, pragmatism, 
 instrumentalism, realism, are indigenous elaborations 
 of that same English positivism and empiricism 
 which was dominant in Italy a generation ago: the 
 relations between science and philosophy are seen 
 in the same light in America to-day as in Italy before 
 the beginning of this century, x^nd the two most 
 significant and far-reaching directions of research,
 
 22 Benedetto Croce 
 
 social psychology and psychoanalysis, branching out 
 into every ramification of social and moral and 
 aesthetic thought, are based on assumptions, and 
 lead to results, very similar to those of the Spencerian 
 sociology and of the Lombrosian theory of insanity 
 and genius. Even in fiction America is to-day trying 
 her hand at verism, and in poetry, apart from a few 
 marked exceptions, she is experimenting in the same 
 spirit in which we began to follow, about the end of 
 the period, the most recent fashions of Paris in vers- 
 librism and decadentism. In academic circles Ger- 
 man philology has maintained its sway for a much 
 longer time than in Europe, and the war has brought 
 about more an emotional than an intellectual con- 
 sciousness of the need of a vaster and deeper under- 
 standing of history. Finally, certain aspirations to- 
 wards ancient and totally different systems of moral 
 and aesthetic standards, embraced with an enthusiasm 
 that is akin to an act of faith — the hope to discover 
 a refuge and a consolation from the chaos of modern- 
 ity in a restoration of classical or mediaeval ideals — 
 are American varieties of an attitude of mind which 
 found its satisfaction in Italy in patterns which we 
 drew after the models of Ruskinism and of French 
 traditionalism. 
 
 On the whole, Italian culture was suffering from 
 the effects of the same delusion which accounts for 
 the straits in which American culture is to-day: that 
 European culture could be assimilated through its 
 representatives at one particular moment only, and
 
 Introduction 23 
 
 as if it were at the surface of time, rather than by 
 the only legitimate and fruitful method, which is that 
 of delving beneath that surface for the truly funda- 
 mental contributions that each nation has made to 
 the common mind. Not one of the nations of Europe 
 was then, or is now, at one of those turning points 
 in the history of culture in which principles of uni- 
 versal value are elaborated within the limits of a 
 single national group. The only possible exception 
 was that of Russia, sending out to an age-worn 
 Europe a fresh message of human pity and Christian 
 love in a succession of epic masterpieces; but the 
 quality of the message was such as to affect the heart 
 much more than the intellect, to produce a new and 
 deeper feeling rather than a sounder knowledge. 
 
 Two great individual figures, however, dominate 
 the whole period, and among so many contrasting 
 currents of thought and feeling, among the fluctuat- 
 ing fashions of the times, connect the new genera- 
 tions with the traditional elements of Italian culture. 
 That breadth of vision, that sense of the perspective 
 of history, which was totally lacking in the prevail- 
 ing cosmopolitan thought, was a conspicuous char- 
 acteristic of the work of a great critic, Francesco de 
 Sanctis, and of a great poet, Giosue Carducci. x'\nd 
 what made the secret of the strength of the one as 
 well as of the other, was their fidelity to the regional 
 traditions from which they were issued, coupled with 
 a power to invest them with a much broader signifi- 
 cance than they had ever possessed. With De Sanctis,
 
 24 Benedetto Croce 
 
 the speculative trend of the Southern Italian mind, 
 with Carducci the humanism of Florence and Tus- 
 cany, for the first time in history become real ele- 
 ments of a greater national consciousness. Neither 
 the one nor the other was, moreover, without a knowl- 
 edge of, and a taste for, foreign cultures; but what 
 they gained from these were elements of more per- 
 manent value than the ones which attracted the at- 
 tention of the crowds, and they both succeeded in 
 grafting those foreign elements on their native dis- 
 positions in such a way and with so little violence 
 that they seemed to belong rightfully to them. This 
 is true of what De Sanctis learnt from the idealistic 
 philosophers of Germany, and particularly from 
 Hegel, as well as of what Carducci acquired from the 
 great poets and historians of the two previous genera- 
 tions in France, in England, and in Germany. Nor 
 should we marvel at this, since by going deep enough 
 or high enough into any of the European cultures, 
 it is always possible to find a level that is common to 
 all of them. 
 
 Francesco de Sanctis was not a philosopher in the 
 strict meaning of the word; yet, among all the Euro- 
 pean critics of the nineteenth century, he is the only 
 one from whose works it is possible to derive a con- 
 sistent line of ^sthetical thought. His education had 
 been partly philosophical, of old Italian and modern 
 German philosophy; and partly grammatical and 
 rhetorical, in those literary doctrines of the old school 
 which embodied a secular experience, and in compari-
 
 Introduction 25 
 
 son with which the modern science of literature is 
 ineffably shallow and puerile. It was through a 
 philosophical elaboration of those doctrines, and 
 through a criticism of the intellectualistic aesthetics 
 of Hegel and his followers, for whom art was the 
 sensuous clothing of the concept, that De Sanctis, 
 guided by an unerring taste and by a unique power 
 for discerning the essential and vital element in 
 poetry, came to his conception of form as not an a 
 priori^ a thing by itself and different from the con- 
 tent, but something that is generated by the con- 
 tent itself when active in the mind of the artist. 
 This is the principle which he had constantly in mind 
 in approaching the concrete works of poetry, and 
 which enabled him to analyze and reproduce the 
 terms of the spiritual experiences of which they are 
 an expression. Thus his Essays and his History of 
 Italian Literature, though in a sense the purest and 
 most genuine kind of literary criticism, are at the 
 same time a complete spiritual history of a people, 
 as it reveals itself in its literary manifestations, such 
 as no other country possesses. The immediate in- 
 fluence of his work was not as great as it ought to 
 have been: the generation of philologists who im- 
 mediately followed him was unable to see in him 
 more than a brilliant exponent of what was then 
 contemptuously called aesthetic criticism, and could 
 never forgive him for his apparent lack of method, 
 due to the circumstances of his life as an exile and a 
 politician. It was only unwittingly, and through the
 
 26 Benedetto Croce 
 
 intermediary of a German disciple of De Sanctis, 
 Gaspary, who wrote a standard handbook of ItaHan 
 hterature, that they came to accept the greatest part 
 of his interpretations, and followed the main direc- 
 tions of his thought in their own researches. 
 
 Giosue Carducci was a disciple of Parini and Al- 
 fieri, of Foscolo and Leopardi, and in a sense of all 
 that lineage of Italian poets, beginning with Dante 
 and Petrarch, for whom poetry was not less an ar- 
 duous discipline for the attainment of a certain 
 standard of formal beauty, set down once and for- 
 ever by the poets of the classical tradition, than a 
 moral and political function in the life of the nation. 
 As his predecessors had been, he was not only a poet, 
 but also a student and historian of literature, of lit- 
 erature as the only field in which that life had truly 
 realized itself. But though his contributions to the 
 study of Italian literature were many and important, 
 and the knowledge and taste which were the instru- 
 ments of his art made of him an exquisite critic of 
 poetry, yet what even in his historical and critical 
 prose attracts us most is his lyrical imagination, his 
 poetry. And his poetry, on the other hand, is mainly 
 the poetry of the history and of the historical and 
 poetical landscape of Italy, — of an Italy which was 
 to him not merely one among the nations of Europe, 
 but the heir of Greece and of Rome, the cradle of 
 western civilization; not a land and a community 
 limited in space and in time, or not that only, but 
 an ideal of beauty, of freedom, of right, of a full and
 
 Introduction 27 
 
 harmonious life, which was Italian, as it had been 
 Greek and Roman, because it was universally human. 
 In his early works, the contrast between this ideal 
 and the actual conditions of Italy in his times found 
 expression in a strain of invective and satire, from 
 which the poet lifted but rarely his soul to the con- 
 templation of the great deeds and thoughts of the 
 past; of a past which in some cases was very recent, 
 as some of the men of the French Revolution and of 
 the Risorgimento were among his favourite heroes. 
 But later, and especially in his Odi Barbare, for which 
 he adapted a new technique from the metres of an- 
 cient Greece, while he added many personal notes 
 to his lyre, his historical inspiration became higher 
 and deeper and purer, and Italy had in his poetry 
 that which she had lacked in all the course of her 
 literature, a true epos, though in a lyrical form, of 
 her secular life, from the fabulous kings and priests 
 of Etruria to that most legendary of all her heroes. 
 Garibaldi. 
 
 The influence of Carducci, not a purely literary, 
 but a moral and political one, on the generation to 
 which Croce belongs, can hardly be overestimated; 
 and Croce himself calls his own generation carduc- 
 ciana. And the two other great poets that Italy has 
 produced after him, D'Annunzio and Pascoli, were 
 both disciples of Carducci at the beginning of their 
 careers. But the formation of their personalities, so 
 widely divergent in their later developments, is con- 
 temporaneous with what we have called the educa-
 
 28 Benedetto Croce 
 
 tion of Croce, and therefore outside the scope of this 
 rapid review of the circumstances under which that 
 education took place. The growth of the erotic- 
 heroic poetry of D'Annunzio and that of the idylHc- 
 humanitarian poetry of PascoH are no longer among 
 those circumstances but rather products of the same 
 environment. 
 
 III. The Origins of His Thought 
 
 There are philosophers for whom it is possible, 
 and relatively easy, to trace the roots of their specu- 
 lations and of their systems in the thought of one or 
 a few predecessors. The research of what we might 
 call their sources, or more precisely of the terms in 
 which certain problems were handed down to them 
 through the particular philosophical tradition to 
 which they belong, would probably not lead us very 
 far in space or very deep in time: it might be useful 
 in such cases to preface the history of their thought 
 by a brief summary of these immediate antecedents. 
 But in the case of Benedetto Croce, such a summary 
 ought to extend, in relation to the problems in which 
 he is or has been interested, to the whole range of the 
 history of human thought. This is due partly to his 
 peculiar approach to the problems of philosophy, and 
 partly to his method of work. 
 
 Philosophy is to him neither a special science nor 
 a specialized technique: not a discipline which re- 
 quires a scholastic training, and which you can def- 
 initely acquire after a given number of years of study,
 
 Introduction 29 
 
 but just what it was in the beginning: that love of 
 wisdom which prompts every man to the exercise of 
 his thinking powers. The problems of philosophy 
 cannot be enumerated and defined, but that which 
 happens to you, or your own doings, in your life, in 
 your conduct, in your work, in your study, is the 
 perpetually renewed material for your meditation. 
 Problems are not given to you from outside, as puz- 
 zles at which you might try your skill or duties im- 
 posed by a pedagogue: they are your experience, and 
 your philosophy is your conscious logical reaction to 
 them. 
 
 This unprofessional and broadly human view of 
 philosophy was not, however, an obvious and spon- 
 taneous attitude of Croce's spirit, but a laborious 
 conquest. In the years of his erudite and unphilo- 
 sophical youth, at his first coming in contact with 
 philosophy in the strict and technical meaning of the 
 word, with philosophical treatises and dissertations, 
 his attitude was one of profound respect for the pro- 
 fessors of philosophy, "as I was persuaded," (he tells 
 us in his autobiographical notes), "that they, as 
 specialists, should possess that abstruse science, of 
 whose sacred curtain I had hardly lifted a few folds, 
 and I did not know that in a few years I should with 
 wonder and irritation discover that most of them did 
 not possess anything, not even that very little which 
 I, merely by my good will to understand, had suc- 
 ceeded in acquiring." ^ The fact is that these pro- 
 
 ^ Contributo, p. 26.
 
 30 Benedetto Croce 
 
 fessors and specialists could hardly be termed philos- 
 ophers at all, while Croce had already in himself that 
 obscure and tormenting desire for intellectual claritv, 
 which is the beginning of philosophy. 
 
 But in this initial ignorance, in his coming as if 
 unaware to the gates of the temple, we shall find the 
 reasons of Croce's method of work. When a given 
 problem presents itself to him, not as a subject of 
 learned controversy, but as a spiritual necessity, he 
 becomes suddenly conscious of the duty of following 
 the history of that particular problem through cen- 
 turies of thought. The first impulse may come from 
 a mere attempt at understanding the terms under 
 which the problem presents itself to him: a clarifica- 
 tion of words. His mental habits are, in fact, those 
 of the conscientious and painstaking philologist, and 
 he brings the method and discipline of the severest 
 erudition into the field of logic. There is no problem 
 for him that is purely logical, in an abstract and 
 formal sense; still less, purely psychological. The 
 mere occasion for his speculation is sometimes of- 
 fered, as we shall see, by contemporary discussions, 
 but he feels from the very beginning that these dis- 
 cussions are merely concerned with the surface of 
 things, are taking place on a plane of thought, me- 
 chanical and dilettantesque, on which all conclusions 
 are equally legitimate and equally irrelevant. Very 
 soon, and long before any trace can be found in his 
 writings of his final identification of philosophy with 
 history, he practically identifies each problem with
 
 Introduction 3 1 
 
 its own history, by retracing, generally in an inversely 
 chronological order, the original meanings of terms 
 and theories of which contemporary culture gave him 
 only a pale and distorted reflection. 
 
 But this intimate and vital contact with the past 
 never leads him to that attitude of reaction, which 
 our forefathers typified in the laudator temporis acti^ 
 and which even to-day is so abundantly exemplified 
 by the scholar who, having laboriously climbed the 
 heights of the thought of one man or of one epoch, 
 feels himself in the possession of final truth, and smiles 
 contemptuously on the childishness of the moderns. 
 He is as much on his guard against the idols of the 
 school as against the idols of the market place. His 
 relation to the great thinkers of the past is not one 
 of blind discipleship, but of critical collaboration. 
 The favourite process of his own thought might be 
 defined as one of historical integration. 
 
 By emphasizing one aspect or another of Croce's 
 philosophy, it is possible, however, to connect him 
 more particularly with one or another philosopher. 
 The name that is most frequently pronounced in 
 this connection is that of Hegel, probably because 
 Hegel stands, in the mind of the positivist and of the 
 pragmatist, for a certain type of thought, much more 
 ancient than Hegel himself and practically coexten- 
 sive with the history of philosophy, rather than for 
 what Hegelianism actually is. The facile critic of 
 Croce, who condemns and rejects him as a Hegelian, 
 would probably find it very hard to define the actual
 
 32 Benedetto Croce 
 
 points of contact between the two thinkers; but we 
 know that the word "Hegelian" is more a term of 
 abuse, in such cases, than the expression of a critical 
 judgment. Croce himself has defined his attitude 
 towards Hegel, and generally towards the philos- 
 ophers of the past, in the conclusion of his examina- 
 tion of Hegel's thought: "I am, and I believe one 
 has to be, Hegelian; but in the same sense in which 
 any man who to-day has a philosophical mind and 
 culture, is and feels himself, at the same time, Eleatic, 
 Heraclitean, Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, 
 Sceptic, Neoplatonic, Christian, Buddhist, Cartesian, 
 Spinozian, Leibnitzian, Vichian, Kantian, and so on. 
 That is, in the sense that no thinker, and no historical 
 movement of thought, can have passed without fruit, 
 without leaving behind an element of truth, which 
 is an either conscious or unconscious part of living 
 and modern thought. A Hegelian, in the meaning 
 of a servile and bigoted follower, professing to accept 
 every word of the master, or of a religious sectarian, 
 who considers dissension as a sin, no sane person 
 wants to be, and no more I. Hegel has discovered, 
 as others have done, one phase of truth; and this 
 phase one has to recognize and defend: this is all. If 
 this shall not take place now, it matters little. 'The 
 Idea is not in haste,' as Hegel was wont to say. To 
 the same content of truth we shall come, some day, 
 through a different road, and, if we shall not have 
 availed ourselves of his direct help, looking back on 
 the history of thought we shall have to proclaim
 
 Introduction 33 
 
 him, with many an expression of wonder, a fore- 
 runner." ^ 
 
 This last hypothesis describes what actually hap- 
 pened in the case of another among the ancestors of 
 Croce's Philosophy of Mind. For two centuries 
 either unknown or misunderstood, Vico came into his 
 own only a few years ago, and mainly through the 
 efforts of Croce himself. In Vico, that is in Italy at 
 the beginning of the eighteenth century, practically 
 all the germs of the idealistic philosophy, and of the 
 historical and critical culture of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, were already present, as a natural development 
 of the philosophical and humanistic Renaissance. 
 And it is through what, in Vichian style, we may call 
 the discovery of the true Vico, that Croce inserts 
 himself in the central tradition of Italian, and Euro- 
 pean, culture, and is saved from the dangers inherent 
 in his catholic attitude towards the philosophers of 
 the past, that of a material, mosaic-like eclecticism on 
 one side, and that of a metaphysical syncretism, such 
 as led Hegel to the dialectic constructions of his 
 Philosophy of History, on the other. 
 
 The philosophy of the Renaissance, in which the 
 fundamental impulses that are the soul of that move- 
 ment find their clear and distinct expression, had 
 produced a new naturalism and a new spiritualism 
 with Giordano Bruno and Tomaso Campanella: that 
 is, two widely divergent views of reality, which how- 
 ever had sprung from a common source, the opposi- 
 
 1 Hegel, pp. 147-8.
 
 34 Benedetto Croce 
 
 tion to that scholastic synthesis in which all the 
 transcendental elements of Greek and Roman philos- 
 ophy had been gathered to the support of mediaeval 
 theology, in direct relation with the mediaeval de- 
 scription of the cosmos. There has probably never 
 been made in the world, either before or after the 
 Middle Ages, such a resolute and comprehensive at- 
 tempt at an intellectual understanding of the moral 
 and material universe, as the one that is the work 
 of mediaeval philosophy: but that attempt had been 
 made possible, and had brought definite results, only 
 through the acceptation of the limits of revealed truth, 
 which, however freely accepted, proved in the end to 
 be much more compelling than to the modern scientist 
 are the freely accepted limits of external reality. Re- 
 vealed truth could not be a mere object of thought, as 
 it carried within itself, under the mythological dis- 
 guise, its own metaphysics and its own ethics: a iiew 
 principle, in fact, a more absolute and intimate spirit- 
 uality than had been known to either the Greeks or 
 the Romans, which attracted to itself all the kindred 
 elements in ancient thought, and determined the es- 
 sential characteristics of mediaeval speculation. 
 
 The discovery and establishment of this spiritual 
 principle, as a universal reality which transcends na- 
 ture and the spirit of man, and which to this natural 
 and human world is as a law dictated from outside 
 and from above, is the message of the Middle Ages, 
 not in pure philosophy only, but in religion and ethics, 
 in science and in the life of society. The Renaissance
 
 Introduction 35 
 
 is the beginning of our modern world, inasmuch as 
 it isj through the infinite variety of its artistic, social, 
 religious, scientific manifestations, an effort to see 
 that same spiritual principle no longer as a tran- 
 scending reality, but as the active, immanent, all- 
 pervading soul of immediate reality, both natural 
 and human. The Ptolemaic cosmography, which is 
 the visible form of mediaeval thought, a system of 
 the finite universe, of which the Earth is the centre, 
 and which leaves an infinite space for the seat of the 
 only real, transcending existences, beyond the com- 
 pass of the heavenly spheres, and as if it were outside 
 itself, loses its hold on the imagination, and there- 
 fore on the conscience of men, long before Copernicus 
 and Galileo read in the skies a new system of an in- 
 finite universe, within which, or nowhere, the divine 
 principle must live and work. 
 
 The impulse towards the identification of the spirit 
 with nature, on one side, and with man on the other, 
 had been at work in Italian life and thought all 
 through the Renaissance; but it is only at the end of 
 that miraculous spring of Western civilization, be- 
 tween the close of the sixteenth and the beginning of 
 the seventeenth century, that it expresses itself in the 
 philosophies of Bruno and Campanella. Bruno pre- 
 sents himself as an expounder and defender of Coper- 
 nican astronomy, and Campanella writes the apology 
 of Galileo. And to each of them the scientific discov- 
 eries are much more than mere helps and suggestions 
 for metaphysical speculation; they are the revelation.
 
 36 Benedetto Croce 
 
 in one field of human thought, of a new logic which 
 has to be recognized, in one form or another, as the 
 fundamental principle of modern civilization. 
 
 Both in Bruno and Campanella, inert remnants of 
 the ancient and mediaeval logic are still part of the 
 structure in which their new intuitions try to express 
 themselves; but such remnants are to be met with 
 even in much later philosophers, and constantly re- 
 appear, as blind spots in the active process of thought, 
 in the whole history of European philosophy down 
 to our days. What is significant of each thinker, 
 what marks him as the legitimate interpreter of the 
 deepest spiritual life of his times, is not his system 
 as a whole, but the particular new intuition on which 
 in each case the system is founded: in Bruno, the 
 conception of an infinite universe, and of the infinite 
 life of God in the universe; in Campanella, the af- 
 firmation of the value of human experience and hu- 
 man consciousness, to which God is present per 
 tactum intrinsecum^ intrinsically, and in which know- 
 ing and being coincide. 
 
 The two main directions of modern thought, or 
 rather of all human thought, are thus represented in 
 the naturalism of Bruno and in the spiritualism of 
 Campanella, at the conclusion of the Renaissance, 
 respectively prefiguring the pantheism of Spinoza 
 and the rationalism of Descartes, that is, the two 
 systems through which similar conceptions became 
 active and effective in all subsequent developments 
 of European philosophy. And it is useful to recall
 
 Introduction 37 
 
 their names as an introduction to the exposition of 
 the ideas of a modern Italian philosopher, because we 
 are to-day only too prone to identify certain forms of 
 common European thought, originating from Greece 
 and from Italy, with what was only their last expres- 
 sion in the great idealistic movement in Germany in 
 the nineteenth century; where Bruno and Spinoza 
 reappear in Schelling, and Campanella and Descartes, 
 through the intermediary of the English thinkers of 
 the eighteenth century, in Kant and Hegel. 
 
 I am not trying to establish an Italian pedigree 
 for the kind of philosophy to which Croce belongs: 
 nowhere are national distinctions so futile as in the 
 history of thought. But the Italy of the Renaissance 
 shares with India and with Greece the purely mate- 
 rial privilege of having given birth to a vision of the 
 world and its problems, which is national only in the 
 sense that it was elaborated for a certain time at 
 least by minds belonging to a single nation. The 
 value of that vision, however, does not reside in any 
 tribal or national characteristic, but in those ele- 
 ments of universality, which made of the Italian cul- 
 ture of the Renaissance, and of its inherent logic, the 
 basis of all modern European culture. What can still 
 be recognized as peculiarly Italian, or French, or Eng- 
 lish, or German in the thought of modern philosophers, 
 is not that phase of truth, which may be present in it, 
 but the element of prejudice, of crowd-mindedness, of 
 spiritual inertia, which even the greatest among them 
 have in common with their weaker brothers.
 
 38 Benedetto Croce 
 
 In Bruno and Campanella we find an interest in 
 certain problems of thought, which we may call either 
 religious or, more technically, ontological: the prob- 
 lems of the relations of being and knowing. In Vico, 
 who is infinitely nearer to Croce in intellectual tem- 
 per, the centre of interest is shifted. Vico is appar- 
 ently satisfied with Catholicism as a religion; and he 
 spends all his efforts in creating a philosophy out of 
 the purely humanistic and historical side of Renais- 
 sance culture. And yet, long before Kant's Pro- 
 legomena, he foresees the necessity of the new meta- 
 physics being the metaphysics, as he says, of human 
 ideas, and his theory of knowledge is founded on a 
 principle which bears an external resemblance to cer- 
 tain aspects of pragmatism, but is in reality of a 
 quite different, and much deeper, character: that of 
 the interchangeability of t\it factum with the verum, 
 of that which we make with that which we know. 
 It was a commonplace of the schools that perfect 
 science is to be found in God only who is the author of 
 all things: Vico transfers this logical formula from 
 God to man, and applies it, in the first stage of 
 his thought, to mathematics, which appears to him 
 as of man's own making, in a narrow and abstract 
 sense, and later to the whole world of history and 
 human thought and action, which, in a much truer 
 and broader sense, is made by man. 
 
 Vico was brought to this second and final form of 
 his theory of knowledge by his studies on the history 
 of law, of religion, of language and poetry: his philos-
 
 Introduction 39 
 
 ophy is essentially a philosophy of the moral sciences, 
 of philology in its widest meaning. And the whole 
 of his speculation, in his Scienza Nuova, takes the 
 shape of an enquiry into the origins and development 
 of human society: not essentially of a sociology, an 
 empirical and inductive science of man (though this 
 aspect is undoubtedly also present in his mind), but 
 rather, through "the unity of the human spirit that 
 informs and gives life to this world of nations," of 
 an ideal and eternal history of mankind, a philosophy 
 of the human mind. 
 
 A contemporary and an antagonist of Descartes, 
 Vico is one of the last among European philosophers 
 to embrace practically the whole range of contem- 
 porary culture. But while Descartes lays the founda- 
 tions of his theory of knowledge on the certainty of 
 mathematical method, mistrusting the imperfection 
 and vagueness of any other form of science, Vico is 
 enabled by his intimate contact with rhetoric and 
 history, with that philology which had been the soul 
 of the intellectual life of the Renaissance, and which 
 through the erudition of his century was preparing 
 the historical consciousness of the following one, to 
 anticipate the general principles of idealistic philos- 
 ophy and, on the theories of art, of language, of law, 
 of religion, as well as on a large number of particu- 
 lar historical problems, the general development of 
 subsequent European thought. 
 
 At a later stage in our exposition, we shall examine 
 in greater detail the indebtedness of Croce to Vico,
 
 40 Benedetto Croce 
 
 especially as regards the theory of art and language; 
 but the similarities of circumstance and of tempera- 
 ment between the two philosophers are already ap- 
 parent. Both Vico and Croce came to philosophy 
 through erudition and philology; and in Croce as 
 well as in Vico, the fundamental philosophic attitude, 
 their theory of knowledge, their idealism (what in 
 the case of Croce has been called his Hegelism), is 
 the intrinsic and necessary logic of the same human- 
 istic tradition, the natural outcome of the centering 
 of their intellectual interests on the history of the 
 human spirit rather than on the mathematical or 
 natural sciences. It is only after Descartes and Vico, 
 and through the independent progress of scientific 
 thought in the last two centuries (during the Renais- 
 sance, science is constantly in contact with philology, 
 and there is no scientist who is not also a humanist) — 
 that the two divergent attitudes of mind which we 
 have seen exemplified in Bruno and Campanella, 
 naturalism and spiritualism, are finally divorced from 
 each other, and respectively linked with the scientific 
 or with the historical aspect of modern European 
 culture. Rationalism, intellectualism, positivism, 
 pragmatism, on one side, are the more and more 
 rarefied logics of science, in its progressive estrange- 
 ment from the humanities; and because of the in- 
 creasing prestige of scientific thought, we see them 
 making constant inroads even in the fields of the 
 historical and philological disciplines. Idealism, on 
 the other side, represents in its many forms the
 
 Introduction 41 
 
 central tradition of European culture, and is heir to 
 the religious thought of the Middle Ages as well as 
 to the humanism of the Renaissance; but in many of 
 its exponents, and to my mind, even in some aspects 
 of Croce's philosophy, it suffers from that same con- 
 dition of things which is the cause of the poverty 
 and narrowness of the so-called scientific philosophies: 
 from that inability to grasp both nature and the 
 spirit of man, the world of science and the world of 
 history, which is a characteristic of our times. The 
 recurrence of the realistic position, after every great 
 affirmation of Idealistic philosophy. Is certainly not 
 the mere recurrence of error, the obstinate perma- 
 nence of human folly after the pronouncements of 
 wisdom, but rather the restatement of a logical exi- 
 gency which cannot be entirely satisfied and disposed 
 of by any of the idealistic solutions of the problem 
 of reality. Idealism and realism in modern philos- 
 ophy are two distinct and divergent elaborations of 
 different fields of modern culture: that unity of the 
 Intellectual vision, which Is perfect, within its ac- 
 cepted limitations, in mediaeval philosophy, and 
 which is never entirely lost sight of In the thought of 
 the Renaissance, Is the goal towards which both 
 realism and Idealism continually tend, but which will 
 not be reached by either, until the disiecta membra 
 of our Intellectual consciousness will be brought to- 
 gether through a higher synthesis than the one from 
 which they fell apart at the end of the Renais- 
 sance.
 
 42 Benedetto Croce 
 
 We are now in a position to understand why it 
 would be vain to look in the work of Croce for either 
 an organized synthesis of scientific thought, under- 
 stood as a means through which the mind of man 
 grasps the reality of nature, or a system of meta- 
 physics attempting to explain the facts of our human 
 life by reference to an order of superhuman and super- 
 natural realities. These are two types of philosophy, 
 a criticism of which is implicit in every step of Croce's 
 philosophical career, as well as in the quality of his 
 philosophical ancestry. But in their place we shall 
 find a series of ^meditations on the problems of the 
 human spirit in its actual historical development; on 
 the distinctions and inter-relations of the various 
 forms of spiritual activity, not as they appear, in a 
 purely abstract and external consideration, to the 
 eye of the psychologist, but as they reveal them- 
 selves in the intimacy of those spiritual and historical 
 processes, in which man creates at the same time his 
 own being and his own truth. As we have stated 
 already, the philosophy of Croce is essentially a 
 philosophy of the humanistic tradition, of that 
 Italian and European tradition the consciousness of 
 which seems to be fast disappearing even among 
 those who consider themselves as its exponents and 
 defenders; and which in his thought not only justifies 
 and understands itself, but brings that justification 
 and that understanding to a greater depth, to a more 
 comprehensive clarity, than it ever reached during 
 the many centuries of its existence.
 
 PART FIRST 
 FROM PHILOLOGY TO PHILOSOPHY 
 
 (i 893-1 899)
 
 I. HISTORY AS ART 
 
 Croce's first philosophical essay — Is history an art or a science? — The 
 essence of art — History as the representation of reality, and there- 
 fore, art — The distinction between art and science — A tentative 
 definition of history. 
 
 Croce's first philosophical essay is a short memoir, 
 La Storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale deW Arte^ 
 which he read to the Accademia Pontaniana of 
 Naples in March, 1893. In his autobiographical 
 notes, Croce tells us that this memoir was sketched 
 by him one evening in February or March of the 
 same year, "after a whole day of intense medita- 
 tion," ^ But the reader cannot help feeling that 
 those few pages are very far from being an impro- 
 visation; and this, not only because of the ease 
 with which the author finds his way among the 
 literature of his subject, but especially because 
 one realizes that only a discipline so constant and 
 so severe as to become a kind of second nature 
 could give him that sure grasp of the essentials of 
 his problem, which he shows from the very begin- 
 ning of his speculation. The majority of histor- 
 ians and philologists, when they turn their atten- 
 tion to what Croce calls the logic of their discipline, 
 are apt to trust themselves exclusively to their 
 
 ^ Coniributo, p. 32. 
 45
 
 46 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 immediate experience of their work, and to disre- 
 gard the very obvious fact that an inquiry into the 
 general principles of a certain branch of knowl- 
 edge is, and cannot be anything but, philosophy: 
 they are therefore either unwilling or unable to 
 follow the implications of that logic on to their 
 ultimate consequences, as this operation would 
 inevitably lead them away from their own safe 
 and solid ground into a discussion of unfamiliar 
 concepts and ideas. They seem to perceive but 
 dimly that the problems of that logic have been 
 intimately connected with the whole development 
 of philosophical thought from the Sophists to our 
 day; and therefore even when they go back to 
 philosophical authorities in their treatment of these 
 problems, when they quote Plato or Aristotle, or 
 Leibnitz or Hegel, they are content with mere 
 fragments, arbitrarily understood, unconnected with 
 the general body of thought from which they de- 
 rive their meaning. The result is, at best, a futile 
 rediscovery of truths and truisms which have their 
 place in the history of thought, but are meaning- 
 less in their modern context. An examination of 
 the greatest part of the methodological literature 
 of the last fifty years, both in Europe and in America, 
 would easily bear out this contention: that it is 
 hard to find a more shallow and imcompetent phil- 
 osophy than that of the average historian and 
 critic. 
 
 What saved Croce from the academic weakness
 
 History as Art 47 
 
 which seems to be congenital to this kind of lucu- 
 brations was, besides the native temper of his mind, 
 an instinctive realization of the true philosophical 
 import of the problems involved. The question, 
 whether History is an art or a science, had been a 
 favourite one with the generation to which Croce's 
 masters belonged; and it was really threatening 
 to become an endless, insoluble one, since no at- 
 tempt was ever made to solve it by the only method 
 which could give positive results, that is, by an 
 accurate definition of the concepts of both art and 
 science. The most common answer to it, and the 
 one that most clearly proved the confused state of 
 mind of those who formulated it, was that history 
 was at the same time a science and an art. The 
 traditional humanistic view, which considered his- 
 tory as one of the arts, and to which the inclusion 
 of Clio in the college of the Muses bears witness, 
 found but little favour in a time which was entirely 
 under the domination of the pseudo-scientific 
 philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and could there- 
 fore hardly admit of any form of knowledge which 
 was not scientific knowledge. The third solution, 
 history as a science, was in fact the most usually 
 accepted one, being but one aspect of that general 
 tendency of the age, superficial and uncritical, 
 through which all forms of knowledge were striving 
 hard to assimilate themselves to the mathematical 
 and natural sciences. This tendency which was 
 present in all fields of philology, manifested itself
 
 48 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 in history either in the attempt to transform his- 
 tory into sociology, and to substitute a system of 
 institutional schemes or of so-called general laws 
 for the actual historical processes, or in the raising 
 of the usual canons and criteria of historical method, 
 that is, of a collection of maxims and precepts for 
 the proper handling of sources, docum>ents, and 
 monuments, to the dignity of a supposititious science. 
 It is characteristic of Croce, that he did not directly 
 attack the English and French and Italian sociol- 
 ogism which was so popular in his day: to a mind 
 which had received its first logical training at the 
 hands of a Thomistic schoolmaster, and had been 
 introduced to modern philosophy through Labriola's 
 Herbartism, the logic of the average sociologist was 
 so abhorrent in its barbarity, that it did not even 
 afford him a starting point for his own criticism. 
 The fallacy of sociologism is made evident in the 
 course of the discussion, but rather by implication 
 than through a direct animadversion. He chose his 
 own adversary among the exponents of the other 
 form of the same error, among the German critics, 
 whose ideas were more clearly defined and logically 
 more consistent. 
 
 Their main position can be stated in a few words: 
 history is a science and not an art, because its aim 
 is not to give aesthetic pleasure, but knowledge. The 
 premises of this formula are a hedonistic conception 
 of art, and the identification of all forms of knowl- 
 edge with science: that is, a too narrow definition
 
 History as Art 49 
 
 of art, and a too broad definition of science. Croce's 
 demonstration takes the form of a rigorous syllogism: 
 he defines the concept of art and the concept of 
 science, the two definitions forming so to speak the 
 two horns of a dilemma; history is shown by its own 
 definition to be included in the definition of art, and 
 the only remaining question is that of the distinction, 
 within the same concept, between art in the strict 
 sense and history. 
 
 The most important part of this demonstration is 
 that which concerns art. Croce's object was to dis- 
 cover the nature of history, but his real achievement 
 in his first essay was that of stating the aesthetic 
 problem in its true terms. His opinions about history 
 and about science were destined to undergo many 
 changes in the further development of his thought; 
 but his whole theory of aesthetics is already virtually 
 present in these few pages about art and the Beau- 
 tiful. 
 
 "Art is an activity aiming at the production of the 
 Beautiful.'* ^ A purely psychological doctrine of 
 aesthetics, which considers not art as an activity, but 
 the objects of art as a collection of stimuli, a doctrine 
 of aesthetic appreciation rather than of aesthetic crea- 
 tion, of the kind that has flourished in Germany and 
 in England during the last twenty years, especially 
 in the field of the graphic and plastic arts, will there- 
 fore be incapable of even grasping that which is the 
 specific subject of aesthetics. But Croce does not 
 
 1 Primi Saggi, p. 8.
 
 50 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 lose his time in attacking the psychologists. The error 
 of their ways has its philosophical expression in Sen- 
 sualism and in Formalism, which he summarily dis- 
 misses together with RationaHsm or Abstract Ideal- 
 ism: the Beautiful as pleasure, the Beautiful as a 
 system of formal relations, the Beautiful as abstractly 
 one with the Good and the True. The fourth solu- 
 tion of the problem of the Beautiful, which he ac- 
 cepts, is that of the Concrete Idealism of Hegel and 
 Hartmann: the Beautiful as expressiony as the sen- 
 suous manifestation of the ideal. But Croce was 
 guided by his Latin moderation (and probably also 
 helped by his, at the time, insufficient understanding 
 of German Idealism) to give to this formula not the 
 intellectualistic interpretation which rightly belongs 
 to it, but the very simple meaning of an adequate 
 and efficacious representation of reality. The dif- 
 ference between this conception of Art— as an ac- 
 tivity aiming at the representation of reality — and 
 the one that we shall find in Croce's later elaborations 
 of his aesthetic theory, does not lie in the conception 
 itself, but in its context of general thought. Here he 
 is still working under the common-sense assumption 
 of a double reality, of being and of thought, and this 
 explains why he still speaks of form and content, and 
 why he still admits of a category of Beauty of nature 
 side by side with artistic Beauty. Later, the relation 
 between form and content will transform itself into 
 that of the aesthetic activity with the other forms of 
 spiritual activity; but even such a momentous change
 
 History as Art 51 
 
 in the foundations of his theory does but slightly 
 impair the substantial truth of the words in which 
 he first expressed it: "An object is either beautiful or 
 ugly according to the category through which we 
 perceive it. Art is a category of apperception, and 
 in art, the whole of natural and human reality — 
 which is either beautiful or ugly according to its va- 
 rious aspects — becomes beautiful because it is per- 
 ceived as reality in general, which we want to see 
 fully expressed. Every character, or action, or ob- 
 ject, entering into the world of art, loses, artistically 
 speaking, the qualifications it has in real life, and is 
 judged only inasmuch as art represents it with more 
 or less perfection. Caliban is a monster in reality, 
 but no longer a monster as an artistic creation." ^ 
 As to natural Beauty, Croce observes that it is not 
 inanimate, as Hegel and his followers would have it, 
 but animated by the spirit of the beholder, and its 
 contemplation is therefore a kind of artistic crea- 
 tion: 2 but this observation, in which the later doc- 
 trine is present in germ, is set forth timidly in a note, 
 and remains for the moment sterile and as if incap- 
 able of yielding its obvious logical results. 
 
 If it were admitted that history is a representation 
 of reality, its inclusion in the concept of art would 
 be obvious. But the adverse contention is that his- 
 tory is a scientific study of reality, or to use Bern- 
 heim's definition, the science of the development of 
 men in their activity as social beings. Croce's answer 
 
 ' Primi Saggi, p. 14. ^ Primi Saggi, p. 1411.
 
 52 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 is that history is not a science, because history is 
 constantly concerned with the exposition of particu- 
 lar facts, and not with the formation of concepts, 
 which is the proper sphere of science. There may be 
 a science or philosophy of history, investigating the 
 philosophical problems connected with the facts of 
 history, but such a science or philosophy, which can- 
 not be distinguished as a separate organism from the 
 philosophy of reality as a whole, is not history. 
 History does not elaborate concepts, but reproduces 
 reality in its concreteness: it is therefore not science 
 but art. 
 
 Sociology, on the other hand, which renounces the 
 concreteness of history in the quest for the general 
 laws of human development, is neither art nor science. 
 When compared with the concepts or laws of science, 
 the laws of sociology appear as vague and empty 
 generalizations, and sometimes as mere pseudo- 
 scientific enunciations of contemporary social and 
 political ideologies. The sociology which Croce had 
 in mind in his criticism was, in substance, because of 
 the fallacy of its logical premises, either inferior 
 science or poor philosophy; but because of the un- 
 certainty of his own idea of the relations between 
 science and philosophy, it was easier for him to re- 
 ject it than to define it. His reaction was the instinc- 
 tive one of a sound logical organism against a mental 
 hybrid. He was certain that sociology, whatever else 
 it might have been, was not history. 
 
 This part of Croce's argument is undoubtedly the
 
 History as Art 53 
 
 weakest. His conception of science was inadequate, 
 and his discussion of the relations of history with 
 science suffered from this inadequacy: the problem 
 which he had attacked could not be solved at this 
 stage of his speculation. While his aesthetics was 
 contained in germ in his conception of art, his logic 
 was not even adumbrated in his conception of science. 
 In fact, the only real function of the latter was to 
 mark the limits of the former: "In the presence of 
 an object, human mind can perform but two opera- 
 tions of knowledge. It can ask itself: what is it?, and 
 it can represent to itself that object in its concrete- 
 ness. It can wish to understand it, or merely to 
 contemplate it. It can submit it to a scientific elab- 
 oration, or to what we are wont to call an artistic 
 elaboration." "Either we make science, or we make 
 art. Whenever we assume the particular under the 
 general, we make science; whenever we represent the 
 particular as such, we make art." ^ 
 
 This distinction is the old Platonic one between 
 logos and mythos; a distinction that appears in one 
 form or another in practically every system of philos- 
 ophy, but the true import of which has never been 
 completely grasped before Vico. From Vico Croce 
 quotes in this connection the following passage: 
 "Metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, 
 the poetical faculty must submerge the whole mind 
 in the senses; metaphysics lifts itself above the uni- 
 versals, the poetical faculty must plunge itself in the 
 
 ^ Primi Saggi, p. 23.
 
 54 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 particulars." ^ This quotation shows how decisive 
 was Vico's influence in the determination of the main 
 theses of Croce's aesthetics: of which we already find 
 here the three fundamental ones, that is, the recog- 
 nition of art, or the aesthetic activity, as one of the 
 fundamental forms of knowledge; the distinction of 
 the aesthetic activity from, and its opposition to, the 
 logical activity; and, finally, the exclusion of any 
 other form of knowledge besides the aesthetic and the 
 logical, which exhausts the whole of man's theoretical 
 activity. 
 
 The rest of this particular discussion is not as 
 fruitful or as interesting. Having included history 
 in the concept of art, Croce proceeds to draw a dis- 
 tinction between art in the strict sense, which is a 
 representationof imaginary or merely possible reality, 
 and history, which represents that portion of reality 
 which has actually happened. His final definition of 
 history is: "That kind of artistic production the 
 object of which is to represent that which has really 
 happened." - The value of this definition is what 
 we might call a value of reaction against the pseudo- 
 scientific sociology of his day: it consists in the em- 
 phasis laid on the concreteness and individuality of 
 historical processes, against the void schematism of 
 general laws. But by introducing the distinction 
 between the possible and the real, Croce had in fact 
 recognized the presence of a conceptual element in 
 history — a conceptual element totally different from 
 
 ' Primi Saggi, p. 2311. ^ Primi Saggi, p. 36.
 
 History as Art 55 
 
 the concepts of the sciences, which were all that he 
 could then see outside the aesthetic activity in human 
 knowledge. In a preface to a reprint of his early- 
 philosophical essays, written twenty-five years later, 
 Croce explained the conditions which prevented him 
 from perceiving the new problem at once, in a page 
 of admirable self-criticism: "Why did I not perceive 
 it? Because I was full of the first truth which I had 
 found, and for the moment I did not feel any other 
 need: I had violently rejected the weight of sensism 
 and sociologism, and I could breathe. And in my 
 culture at that time the impulses towards that other 
 need were lacking; because neither my scholastic 
 logic nor Labriola's Herbartism opened my mind to 
 a distinction between the concepts of the sciences 
 and the speculative concept; and De Sanctis, entirely 
 given to the criticism of poetry, gave little attention 
 to logical problems. The authority of my first mas- 
 ters of philosophy induced me, in regard to the 
 problems which I had not experienced in myself, to 
 content myself with temporary formulas and solu- 
 tions, which attracted me through some aspects of 
 truth, and to be satisfied with an imagination of the 
 Ideal above the real, and of the world of Concepts 
 above the world of representations. By this separa- 
 tion, by this collocation in the Empyrean, it seemed 
 to me that 1 could better attest my reverence for 
 concepts and ideals, which positivists and evolution- 
 ists were dragging in the mud, or lowering to the 
 status of superstitions and hallucinations. Now,
 
 56 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 running again through my pages, it is not possible for 
 me to think those transcendental doctrines again, 
 not because I thought them in the past, and what is 
 past is past, but, on the contrary, because I did not 
 truly think them even then, but only received them 
 or imagined them, so that what I can think now is 
 only the way in which, then, I was brought to imagine 
 them, and to believ^e that I thought them." ^ 
 
 ^ Primi Saggi, pp. XI-XII.
 
 11. ON LITERARY CRITICISM 
 
 The problem of literary criticism — The three phases: exposition, valua- 
 tion, history — ^Esthetic judgment and history of art: the exigency 
 of a new ^Esthetics — The place of /Esthetics in Croce's thought — 
 Moral and logical preoccupations — Croce and Spaventa. 
 
 At the end of the following year (1894), Croce in- 
 terrupted again the steady flow of his erudite pro- 
 duction with the publication of a little book, La 
 Critica Letteraria: questioni teoriche, which was the 
 outcome of a discussion he had had during the sum- 
 mer with a friend, a professor of philosophy. As the 
 net result of his first philosophical effort had been 
 the conquest of a clearer conception of art, it was 
 natural that he should proceed to investigate the 
 relations between history and the subject-matter of 
 history in that field in which he felt he had already 
 been able to find some light. The general problem 
 of the nature of history, of which he had seen but 
 one aspect, was set aside for the moment, giving way 
 to a close examination of the methods of historical 
 thought in the study of literature. 
 
 Only a few of the conclusions of this particular re- 
 search were destined to have any kind of permanency 
 in Croce's theories; but it is useful to recall them, not 
 only as a step in the development of his thought, but 
 as representing a marked progress in that conception 
 
 57
 
 58 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 of literary criticism which is still predominant wher- 
 ever the influence of that thought has not yet been 
 felt. Croce submitted that conception to a process 
 similar to what a French critic calls a disassociation 
 of ideas, trying to establish which can be said to be 
 the essential operations of literary criticism, and the 
 relations between these and the various kinds of pos- 
 sible works on literary material. Given this method, 
 which is that of abstract classification, and having 
 approached his problem through criticism itself in- 
 stead of starting from the other end and deducing 
 the concept of criticism from the concept of art and 
 literature, he was bound to reach a number of ab- 
 stract concepts, apparently irreducible to each other, 
 and the fundamental unity of which he could only 
 later affirm through the general progress of his theory 
 of aesthetics. 
 
 Literary criticism, which until fifty or sixty years 
 ago, stood only for the judgment and valuation of 
 literary works, to-day usually includes, beside the 
 aesthetic valuation, the study of the historical de- 
 velopment, the edition and comment of the text, the 
 biography of the author, the exposition of the work 
 itself, the aesthetic theory of literature, and so on; 
 in fact, every kind of conceivable work on literature. 
 The danger of this extension of meaning lies in the 
 facility with which we are led to believe that many 
 things, when called with one name, are really one 
 thing: we think of literary criticism as of the syn- 
 thesis of all the above-mentioned operations — a syn-
 
 On Literary Criticism 59 
 
 thesis which, as Croce observes, when it exists cannot 
 be due to anybody but the printer. Or, again, we 
 may consider that one or another of those operations 
 is the true aim of literary criticism — and to that one 
 we subordinate all the others, as merely subservient 
 to the particular aim we have in sight. This is the 
 origin of the various schools of criticism — aesthetic, 
 historical, psychological — each of which believes it- 
 self to be in possession of the only legitimate method. 
 But if we subordinate the history of a work to its 
 aesthetic valuation, we deny the independence and 
 intrinsic importance of history; if we subordinate the 
 aesthetic valuation to the historical consideration, we 
 make of the former a useless accessory of the latter; 
 if we subordinate the biography of the author to the 
 historical explanation of the work, we destroy the 
 importance of biography, which, though useful in a 
 certain sense to the explanation of the work, is in 
 itself "nothing but the history of the development of 
 a moral personality." ^ In fact, the unity of literary 
 criticism lies not in its aim, but in its subject-matter: 
 what we mean by literary criticism is "a series of 
 particular operations having independent aims, with- 
 out any other connection than that of the material 
 employed in each of them." ^ Croce does not deny 
 the possibility of using the results of one of these 
 operations for the purposes of another, but this does 
 not change the nature of either: "the spirit of man 
 is not divided into small compartments: all our ex- 
 
 ^ Primi Saggi, pp. 79-80. ^ Primi Saggi, p. 80.
 
 6o From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 perience helps us in whatever work we are doing. To 
 understand Petrarch's poetry, it is useful either to 
 be or to have been in love; but it doesn't follow that 
 to make love and to understand that poetry are one 
 and the same thing." ^ 
 
 The study of the principles of literature does not 
 belong to literary criticism, but to ^Esthetics; or, to 
 use Vico's distinction, not to Philology but to Philos- 
 ophy. Textual criticism, and interpretative com- 
 ment, are preliminaries of literary criticism, which 
 begins only with the contemplation or aesthetic en- 
 joyment of literature: that is, with that operation of 
 reading which is made possible through the estab- 
 lishment of a correct text, and by the help, when 
 needed, of a convenient commentary. In literary 
 criticism proper Croce distinguishes three successive 
 phases, or moments, answering respectively to the 
 questions: What have I read? What is the value of 
 that which I have read? Which is the genesis and 
 fortune of this particular work? The first is the ex- 
 position or description — which in itself is a work of 
 art of which another work of art is the subject; the 
 second, the valuation or aesthetic judgment; the third, 
 the history of the work under consideration. Out- 
 side these three moments or phases, Croce does not 
 admit of any other independent critical operation: 
 the research of the sources of a work is only part of 
 the history of that work; comparative criticism is an 
 instrument of historical criticism; philology in the 
 
 ' Primi Saggi, p. 82.
 
 On Literary Criticism 6 1 
 
 strict sense of the word can in turn be used as a help 
 to each of the three main operations, but when it is 
 exclusively concerned with the general history of a 
 language, it is no longer a literary discipline; bib- 
 liography is a mere external element of the history 
 of the work; the study of the content is a literary 
 study only if it is pursued In relation with either the 
 exposition, valuation or history of the work, that is, 
 when the work itself is viewed as literature, and not 
 as a document for the purposes of another science or 
 discipline; the biography of the author is an element 
 of the genesis of the work, and therefore of its his- 
 tory, but its main interest is moral and not literary. 
 It is easy to see that, however fruitful as a reaction 
 to the prevailing confusion, this abstract partition 
 was still very artificial; but it was impossible for 
 Croce to go beyond It, with the help of the mechanical 
 and unhistoric logic which was his only instrument 
 at that time. He still divided a fact from its genesis, 
 and the fact and genesis from the judgment, and 
 therefore it was impossible for him to see that the 
 internal history of a work is its true exposition or 
 characterization, and that such characterization Is 
 one with the valuation. In regard to the valuation 
 itself, he considered it to be purely subjective and 
 relative, as he was unable to accept either Kant's 
 theory of the objectivity of taste, because of its In- 
 tellectuallsm, or the psychologists' childish delusion 
 of the possibility of drawing a normal or standard 
 taste from the average of the aesthetic likings and
 
 62 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 judgments of different communities and different 
 ages; and on the other hand he was still very far from 
 discovering that identity of the aesthetic judgment 
 with the aesthetic activity, which was to be the 
 foundation of his later doctrine. 
 
 The discussion that follows, on the relations be- 
 tween the aesthetic judgment and the history of a 
 work of art, obviously suffers from the impossibility 
 of drawing useful consequences from a distinction of 
 purely abstract concepts; from the fact that that 
 which was Croce's only real discovery at the time, 
 his conception of art, had not yet been thought out 
 by him in the fulness of its relations with the other 
 activities of the human spirit. As regards history, 
 this little book is a step forward because it is a valid 
 criticism of a confused and naive state of mind, in 
 which these abstract concepts could help to introduce 
 some sort of order and method; but, on the whole, 
 though it clarifies the terms of the general problem, 
 it does not bring it appreciably nearer to a solution. 
 
 Croce was, however, more or less consciously 
 aware of this deficiency. In a long excursus on De 
 Sanctis, whose work he upheld as a model of perfect 
 literary criticism, he insisted on the importance of a 
 sound theory of art, such as De Sanctis undoubtedly 
 possessed, as an essential part of the mental equip- 
 ment of a literary critic; and the chief reproach that 
 he addressed to his contemporaries in the field of 
 literary studies in Italy, was that of neglecting those 
 theoretical problems to which very little attention
 
 On Literary Criticism 63 
 
 had been paid in our country after the work of Vico. 
 He pointed to the great development of aesthetic 
 studies in Germany during the nineteenth century, 
 and affirmed the necessity of "dismissing every 
 spirit of impatience and false pride, and of submitting 
 oneself to the hard labour of extracting the essence 
 of the abundant literature created by the philosophic 
 activity of the Germans around those problems." ^ 
 His final words contained at the same time an appeal 
 and a programme of work: "There is a good deal to 
 be expected from a work especially directed towards 
 these two points: to banish a series of concepts which 
 have introduced themselves in aesthetics, and which 
 are entirely foreign to it, and with their presence 
 maintain an invincible confusion; and to free the 
 concept of art and of the Beautiful from the limits 
 within which it has been circumscribed by linguistic 
 habits, acknowledging the intimate connection be- 
 tween the so-called aesthetic and artistic facts and 
 other facts of the life of the spirit." ^ That his atti- 
 tude towards the later German aesthetics was, from 
 the very beginning, a critical one, is clearly shown 
 by what immediately follows: "Working in this direc- 
 tion, I believe that we shall find ourselves, with a 
 new consciousness and with a wealth of observations 
 gathered in the course of a century, to the point from 
 which modern /Esthetics started, to the school of 
 Leibnitz and Wolff, and to Baumgarten's concep- 
 tion," 3 — that is, to Baumgarten's Meditations of 
 
 ^ Primi Saggi, p. 163. ^ Primi Saggi, p. 164. ^ Primi Saggi, ib.
 
 64 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 1735, ^^ which the word Msthetica appears for the 
 first time as the name of an independent philosophi- 
 cal discipline, contrasted to Logic in the same sense 
 in which the Greeks used to contrast aistheta to 
 noeta, the facts of sensuous knowledge to the facts 
 of mental knowledge. Which means that Croce 
 believed the science of Esthetics to be still in its 
 infancy, and to require a great creative effort which 
 was well worth making, both for the sake of the gen- 
 eral philosophical problems involved, and for the 
 effects that a deeper view of those problems could 
 not but have on the practical work of the literary- 
 critic and of the historian. 
 
 Through these first discussions, which at the time 
 appeared to him more as acts of personal liberation 
 than as the beginning of a philosophical career, 
 Croce had really discovered his vocation. From De 
 Sanctis he had learnt that "art is neither the work 
 of reflection and logic, nor the product of craft, but 
 a pure and s^ontdin^ous forma fantastica'\- ^ through 
 his own experience of dry erudition, and through his 
 meditations on the relations between history and 
 criticism, he had verified the validity and usefulness 
 of De Sanctis' conception, and had been made aware 
 of the necessity of doing what De Sanctis had not 
 been either willing or capable of doing: "of creating 
 a philosophy where he had given nothing but critical 
 essays and delineations of literary history, and a new 
 criticism, a new historiography, as a consequence 
 
 1 Contributo, p. 54.
 
 On Literary Criticism 65 
 
 of the philosophic deepening and systematization 
 of his thought." ^ 
 
 But from Croce's published work at this time it 
 would be easy to gather the fallacious impression 
 that his interest was an exclusively literary one: 
 that he proceeded to create a philosophy of literature 
 and art, and that only through the necessities of the 
 system he was led to the consideration of logical, 
 economic and ethical facts. If that were true, with 
 the exception of his theory of aesthetics, practically 
 the whole of his philosophy would be opened to the 
 reproach that he levelled against the greatest part of 
 the German aesthetic theories of the nineteenth 
 century: "of not being derived from spontaneous 
 and direct researches, but rather from the need of 
 filling a compartment in a philosophical system." ^ 
 A good many among Croce's critics have been the 
 victims of such a misconception of the actual genesis 
 of his thought; and have discounted the importance 
 of any but his aesthetic theories, considering all the 
 rest as a kind of philosophical by-product, with 
 the result that they have not been able properly to 
 understand even that part of his work in which they 
 were interested. The typical exampL is given by 
 those moralistic critics of his aesthetics, who would 
 have been spared many mistakes and inanities, if 
 they had thought Croce's ethics and logic worth a 
 little consideration. They would then have realized 
 that their criticisms had been anticipated and criti- 
 
 ' Contributo, pp. 55-56. ^ Primi Saggi, p. 163.
 
 66 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 cized long before they had been uttered. But per- 
 haps it is asking too much of the average student 
 of literature, once he has made the effort to think 
 about the problems of art, that he should also try 
 to turn the light of his reason on the obscure prompt- 
 ings of his moral consciousness; a suggestion which 
 in many cases would be violently rejected as the 
 height of immorality. 
 
 We shall soon see from which source Croce derived 
 his interest in economic problems and in the history 
 of the practical activities of man. Of the perma- 
 nence of those moral preoccupations which had been 
 his constant companions since his adolescence, we 
 find the traces in his autobiographical notes. In De 
 Sanctis, whose History of Italian Literature is as 
 much a moral as an aesthetic history of the Italian 
 people, he had the model of "a sound and simple 
 morality, austere without exaggerations, and high 
 without fanaticisms." ^ But the same difficulties 
 which prevented him from fully understanding De 
 Sanctis' aesthetic principles, and from using them 
 as a vivifying element in his literary work, made 
 him also for a long time accept an inferior moral con- 
 ception, that of Herbart's realism, "in which the 
 moral ideal was energetically asserted, but as a thing 
 of another world, as having man under itself as 
 brute matter, on which its stamp, more or less 
 marked, might or might not be impressed." That is, 
 he saw the moral ideal in relation to the actual life 
 
 ' Contributo, p. 58.
 
 On Literary Criticism 6j 
 
 of man, in a position similar to that which concepts 
 and ideals had for him in relation to reality as a 
 whole: his moral abstractism and rigorism was the 
 counterpart of his logic. "But that rigorism and 
 abstractism was the way that I had necessarily to 
 follow in order to understand the moral concreteness, 
 and to lift it to the plane of a philosophical theory." 
 "And that rigorism, which was at the same time a 
 love for sharp distinctions, while it saved me from 
 associationism and positivism and evolutionism, 
 put me on my guard against, and hindered me from 
 falling into the errors of that now naturalistic, now 
 mystic, Hegelianism, which through a hasty and 
 often mythological dialectic, obliterated or weakened 
 the distinctions which are the life of the dialectic 
 process." ^ What Croce lacked, in ethics as well as 
 in aesthetics, was a new logic or theory of knowledge, 
 which would allow him to grasp the concept or the 
 ideal, that is the universal, in the concrete spiritual 
 activity, that is in the particular and individual. 
 Meanwhile, his own dealing with abstract concepts, 
 with purely formal universals, was to be, in relation 
 to the further developments of his logic, what his 
 early literary work, of a purely erudite character, 
 had been in relation to his meditations on art and 
 history: that personal experience, of difficulties and 
 errors, without which no truth can ever be reached. 
 
 On the whole, Croce's position at that time was, 
 as he himself defined it many years later, a Platonic- 
 
 ^ Contributo, pp. 59-60.
 
 68 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 Scholastic-Herbartian one; one that, in the moral 
 field, had at least the advantage of being "invulner- 
 able to the subtle menace of sensualism and deca- 
 dentism," ^ in the European life and thought of the 
 nineties, the acme of spiritual distinction — an illusory 
 reaction to and escape from the prevailing positivism 
 and determinism, of which in reality they were but 
 thinly disguised variations. Croce "never lost, 
 even for an instant, the power of discerning sensual 
 refinement from spiritual finesse, erotic flights from 
 moral elevation, false heroism from sheer duty." - 
 Here lies the fundamental difference, "of spiritual 
 race," between him and his most illustrious contem- 
 porary, Gabriele d'Annunzio, with whom he has 
 more than once been coupled by superficial critics. 
 The character of their respective influence on the 
 younger Italian generations, of D'Annunzio between 
 1890 and 1900, and of Croce between 1900 and 1910, 
 is more than sufficient evidence on this point. 
 
 It is something of a surprise to find that he had 
 learnt practically nothing from his uncle Bertrando 
 Spaventa, who had been the most powerful represen- 
 tative of the Hegelian tradition in Italy. The cen- 
 tral problem of Spaventa's speculation had been 
 that of the relations between knowing and being, 
 of transcendence and immanence; and although it 
 was only through a solution of this problem that 
 Croce could hope for progress in any of his particular 
 philosophical researches, yet he could take no interest 
 
 ' Contributo, p. 60. - Contributo, p. 61.
 
 On Literary Criticism 69 
 
 in it when its discussion was carried on independently 
 of those problems of art, of moral life, of law and 
 history, towards which his attention was naturally 
 drawn. Croce himself explains this lack of interest 
 as due to his "unconscious immanentism": "as I 
 met with no difficulty in conceiving the relation 
 between thinking and being; if I had any difficulty, 
 it was rather in conceiving a being severed from 
 thought, or a thought severed from being." ^ But 
 in this case he is probably seeing himself in the light 
 of his later experience: that difficulty did exist, and 
 is the fundamental difficulty of his early speculation. 
 Only, he could not solve it by Spaventa's methods, 
 which were those of a rigorous and formal logician, 
 of a philosopher with a theological background, but 
 only through the elaboration of the materials of his 
 own particular moral and intellectual experience. At 
 a later stage, and when he had already independently 
 arrived at a position much more similar to that of 
 Spaventa, than he would ever have thought possible 
 for him, the influence, if not of Spaventa himself, 
 at least of that attitude towards philosophy which 
 had been his, came back to him through his friend 
 Giovanni Gentile, whose mental temperament was 
 much more akin to that of the old Neapolitan thinker, 
 than Croce's ever was. Croce's idealism (or Hegel- 
 ianism) was at this time limited to what he had un- 
 consciously absorbed through De Sanctis' concep- 
 tion of art; but his theory of knowledge, not yet 
 
 ' Contributo, p. 63.
 
 70 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 logically unfolded, was still oscillating between in- 
 tellectualism and naturalism. He was decidedly 
 anti-Hegelian, on the other hand, in his theory 
 of history and in his general conception of the 
 world.
 
 III. HISTORY AND ECONOMICS 
 
 A new interest: Marxism — Historical materialism — Criticism and inter- 
 pretation: a new historical canon — Marxian economics as an appli- 
 cation of the hypothetic method — The concepts of science and the 
 economic principle — Science and practice — Marxism and morality. 
 
 In Aprilj 1895, ^^^ ^^^ professor at the University 
 of Rome, Antonio Labriola, sent to Croce an essay- 
 on the Communist Manifesto^ in which he submitted 
 to a critical examination the materialistic conception 
 of history elaborated during the fifty preceding years 
 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Labriola had 
 been probably the first professor in a European 
 University to take Historical Materialism as a sub- 
 ject for his academic lectures, his first course on 
 Marxism having been delivered in 1889. But Croce, 
 who had given all his thoughts first to his literary- 
 work, and then to his meditations on art and criti- 
 cism, had not been as yet able to perceive the bearing 
 of the new problems discussed by his master on that 
 problem of the nature of history which had been 
 the subject of his first philosophical essay, and was 
 to be the centre of his later speculations. Labriola's 
 little book came to him at a moment when he had 
 reached an impasse in the course of his research, 
 and it opened to him an entirely new field of in- 
 vestigations, it afforded him an escape towards 
 
 71
 
 72 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 studies and meditations, at first apparently un- 
 related to his former ones, but the results of which 
 were destined to react vigorously on them. He 
 plunged with youthful enthusiasm into the literature 
 not of Marxism and historical materialism only, but 
 of Economics in general. In the five following years, 
 while he continued with unremitting energy his 
 literary labours, now more clearly directed towards 
 an understanding of the historical problems of 
 /Esthetics, and a clarification of the concepts of a 
 philosophical science of /Esthetics, he published a 
 series of critical essays on Materialismo storico ed 
 economia marxistica^ intended at the same time as a 
 defence and a rectification of Marx's doctrines. 
 
 We shall consider this phase of Croce's work from 
 two distinct poiiits of view — as a new individual 
 experience, and as a stage in the development of his 
 philosophy. For the first of them, we shall again 
 leave the word to Croce himself: "That inter- 
 course with the literature of Marxism, and the 
 eagerness w4th which for some time I followed the 
 socialistic press of Germany and Italy, stirred my 
 whole being, and for the first time awakened in me a 
 feeling of political enthusiasm, yielding a strange 
 taste of newness to me: I was like a man who having 
 fallen in love for the first time when no longer young, 
 should observe in himself the mysterious process of 
 the new passion. At that fire I burnt also my ab- 
 stract moralism, and I learnt that the course of 
 history has a right to drag and to crush the individual.
 
 History and Economics 73 
 
 As I had not been disposed in my family circle to 
 any fanaticism, and not even to a liking for the 
 current and conventional liberalism of Italian 
 politics ... it seemed to me to breathe faith and 
 hope in the vision of the rebirth of mankind re- 
 deemed by labour and in labour." ^ This political 
 enthusiasm did not last very long: it disappeared 
 when that which was Croce's true nature, not prac- 
 tical but essentially theoretical, reasserted itself, by 
 reducing this new experience into new conceptual 
 forms; but without it, the whole of his philosophy 
 of the practical activity would forever have been 
 like a theory of vision in the mind of a blind man, 
 or a theory of love in that of a keeper of the harem. 
 Art, thought, mortality, had already appeared to 
 him as aspects of his own life; to these, a new element 
 was added now, not as a mere object of thought, 
 but as a passionate and concrete experience. 
 
 The interpretation of the doctrine of historical 
 materialism presented a number of difficulties deriv- 
 ing partly from the form in which the doctrine itself 
 had originally appeared — not as a coherent theory, 
 but as a series of pronouncements and observations 
 scattered in a variety of writings, composed at a 
 distance of years, and the aim of which was rather 
 political and polemical than scientific; and partly 
 from its association with remnants of old meta- 
 physics, both in its originators and in their followers. 
 In Marx and Engels, as well as practically in the 
 
 ^ Contributo, pp. 36-37.
 
 74 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 whole literature of Marxism, the emphasis being 
 laid on the substantive rather than on the adjective, 
 historical materialism implied the adhesion to that 
 metaphysical materialism which was one of the 
 children of Hegelian metaphysics. What had been 
 the Idea for Hegel, was the Economy of the new 
 metaphysicians: the only reality, working beneath 
 the surface of human consciousness, as an under- 
 structure beneath a merely apparent and illusory 
 superstructure. Given this conception, it is easy to 
 understand why historical materialism appealed 
 so strongly to positivists and evolutionists, who con- 
 cealed a similar kind of metaphysics under their 
 proclaimed contempt for philosophy. The old 
 philosophies of history had attempted to reduce the 
 sequence of history to a scheme of concepts, start- 
 ing with God, or Providence, or the Hegelian 
 Idea: the new unconscious metaphysicians substi- 
 tuted for the old concepts that of Economy, or of 
 Matter, or of Development and Evolution, from 
 which all the particular historical determinations 
 could be deduced with not less certainty than from 
 the old metaphysical entities. /\nd from their 
 predecessors they also borrowed those teleological 
 tendencies which are implicit in all metaphysics, 
 attributing a will and an end to their new God, be 
 it called Progress or Matter, and trying to deduce 
 the future course of history from the dialectic of 
 the past. Hence the growth of a vast literature 
 inquiring into the development of abstract sociological
 
 History and Economics 75 
 
 schemes or of economic forms reduced to character- 
 istics of economic epochs, forcing the concrete mate- 
 rials of history into rigid conceptual frames; hence 
 the naive faith In the deduction of social predeter- 
 minations, of which the most striking was the as- 
 serted necessity of the advent of socialism as the 
 only logical outcome of capitalist society. 
 
 Croce, pursuing the analysis initiated by Labriola, 
 began by dissociating what seem.ed to him to be the 
 vital element in historical materialism, from any 
 intrusion of either Hegelian or positivistic meta- 
 physics. His criticism of historical materialism as 
 a philosophy of history and, generally, of the pos- 
 sibility of constructing any philosophy of history, 
 is the first resolute step towards an antimetaphysical 
 conception of philosophy. Whether by metaphysics 
 is meant the knowledge of another world of real 
 essences, of things in themselves, beyond the objects 
 of our immediate experience, or the creation of ab- 
 stract concepts duplicating and falsifying the com- 
 plex world of life, the whole trend of Croce's thought 
 will henceforward oppose any claim on the part of 
 these spurious philosophies, mythological or pseudo- 
 scientific, to furnish an adequate interpretation of 
 reality. Vico's metaphysics of hum.an ideas, which 
 is no metaphysics at all, because it does not postulate 
 the existence of any reality beyond that of the spirit 
 of man, will more and more become the model of 
 Croce's own philosophy. That immanentism which 
 he considers as one of the spontaneous attitudes
 
 76 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 of his mind slowly extricates itself from the ruins 
 of his own transcendental logic, and shows itself 
 impervious to the allurements of both Platonism 
 and Positivism, of the ancient and the new myth. 
 Purged of its unessential philosophical associations, 
 historical materialism (or, more precisely, the 
 economic interpretation of history) appeared to 
 Croce as nothing more than a new canon or criterion 
 of historical interpretation, fixing the attention of 
 the historian on a mass of new data, the importance 
 of which had not been recognized before. It was 
 neither a new philosophy nor a new method: it 
 could not be legitimately employed to draw con- 
 clusions on the relations between economic facts 
 and the other facts of history, nor to reduce history 
 itself to the operation of a few abstract laws. It 
 was a tendency of historical thought, coinciding 
 with the manifestation of certain objective con- 
 ditions of society (the industrial revolution) and 
 their reflexes in political thought, by which the 
 economic element in social facts acquired a stronger 
 relief than it had ever had in the consciousness of 
 man. And it seemed to point, both for the historian 
 and for the philosopher, towards the existence of a 
 fundamental principle or form of human activity — 
 economic activity, about the nature of which, and 
 its relation with aesthetic, logic, and moral activity, 
 very little had been thought and written, besides 
 what is contained in the introductions to all classical 
 manuals of political economy. While still insisting
 
 History and Economics JJ 
 
 that history is art, that is, the representation of 
 individual happenings, Croce was thus implicitly- 
 brought to admit of the importance of philosophy, 
 that is, of the study of the fundamental forms or 
 categories of human activity, for the historian. His 
 conception of history was undergoing a transfor- 
 mation in a direction similar to that towards which 
 his conception of philosophy was moving. 
 
 When he passed from the consideration of the 
 general theory to the examination of more technical 
 aspects of Marx's doctrines, the first difficulty which 
 presented itself to him was that of the relations 
 between Marxian economics and pure economics, 
 or general economic science. The society whose 
 economic life Marx had studied in Das Kapital, was 
 neither human society in general, nor any particular 
 historical society, but a purely ideal and formal 
 society deduced from a proposition assumed out- 
 side the fields of pure economics: that of the equiv- 
 alence of value and labour. Starting from this 
 postulate, Marx had proceeded to inquire into those 
 processes of differentiation between the assumed 
 standard and the actual prices of commodities in a 
 capitalist society, by which labour itself acquires a 
 price and becomes a commodity. It was a method 
 of scientific analysis consisting in regarding a phe- 
 nomenon not as it actually exists, but as it would be 
 if one of its factors were altered, and in comparing 
 the hypothetical with the real phenomenon, con- 
 ceiving of the first as diverging from the second
 
 78 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 which is postulated as fundamental, or the second 
 as diverging from the first, which is postulated in 
 the same manner. It is only when the whole of 
 Marxian economics is considered as the application 
 of such a method, that the concepts of labour-value 
 and of surplus-value acquire a definite and precise 
 meaning: the description of economic society as a 
 pure working society (producing no goods which 
 cannot be increased by labour) must then be inter- 
 preted as a concept of difference, or an instrument 
 of elliptical comparison, as against the descriptions 
 of actual economic society given by pure economics. 
 Its positive value, not as an abstract hypothesis, 
 but as a means of knowledge, depends on the fact 
 that such a society does actually coincide with 
 certain aspects of historical capitalist society; that 
 the equivalence of labour and value is not a purely 
 imaginary fact, but a fact among other facts, 
 empirically opposed, limited, and distorted by other 
 facts. Having assumed this equivalence as a test 
 for the study of the social problem of labour, Marx's 
 object was to show the special way in which this 
 problem is solved in a capitalist society. And this 
 was the real justification for his employment of 
 the hypothetical method. 
 
 It is clear that Croce was infinitely more interested 
 in what Marx had actually accomplished, than in 
 what he had intended to do. In Marx's own mind, 
 the analysis of the conditions of capitalist society led 
 inevitably to the conclusion that a passage from
 
 History and Economics 79 
 
 capitalism to socialism was predetermined by the 
 structure of capitalist society itself. It is well known 
 that the prevision assumed what claimed to be a 
 strictly scientific character in the formulation of the 
 law of the fall in the rate of profits: the gradual de- 
 crease of surplus-values accompanying the increase 
 in technical improvements, and automatically re- 
 establishing the equivalence of labour and value. 
 Croce offered a very convincing criticism of this law 
 on Marx's own grounds, by showing that it rested 
 on a confusion between technical and economic facts, 
 thus affording a remarkable example of Marx's un- 
 certainty of his own method. It was clear that in 
 this particular case Marx had been carried away by 
 his desire to reduce the metaphysical implications of 
 his economic sociology to the status of an historical 
 law. And Croce's criticism was evidently intended 
 both to deprive Marx's historical determinism of one 
 of its most powerful instruments, and to confirm his 
 own view of the method which gave validity and im- 
 portance to such economic speculations as Marx's 
 were. 
 
 Marxian economics stood thus interpreted as com- 
 parative sociological economics, and by the definition 
 Croce also defined the scope of sociological science, 
 and the nature of the logical processes which it could 
 legitimately employ. It was a considerable advance 
 in the study of scientific concepts, as distinct from 
 purely speculative concepts. But he still believed at 
 the time, misled by the economists' discussions on
 
 8o From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 the nature of the economic principle, that pure eco- 
 nomics and the philosophy of economics practically- 
 coincided; and as he had maintained the legitimacy 
 of Marx's method against the criticisms of the pure, 
 or scientific, economists, he defended pure economics 
 against Marx and his school, as the general science 
 of the economic datum. But he was soon to under- 
 stand that his own point of view and that of the pure 
 economists were widely divergent, and that the 
 methods of pure economics are in fact scientific and 
 not philosophical. In later years, when he came to 
 regard the science of economics as an empirical and 
 mathematical science, Marxian economics appeared to 
 him merely as a special branch of economic casuistry, 
 employing methods fundamentally identical with 
 those of pure economics: a relationship which could 
 be illustrated by a comparison with the parallel of 
 non-Euclidean and classical geometry. Although he 
 did not reach this final position at the time, there is 
 no doubt that his experience of the actual scientific 
 processes of economics freed him from his allegiance 
 to Herbartian logic, in which science and philosophy 
 were still formally undifferentiated, and led him grad- 
 ually to the distinction between the scientific and the 
 speculative concept, of which the relation established 
 between Marxian and pure economics is a tentative 
 prefiguration. 
 
 But the most essential gain of his economic studies 
 was in the direction of the affirmation of the merely 
 practical, or economic, principle, as one of the irre-
 
 History and Economics 8 1 
 
 ducible forms of human activity, raising the concept 
 of the Useful to the same level (logically speaking) at 
 which those of the Beautiful, the True, and the Good 
 had been kept by the whole European philosophical 
 tradition since Plato. He was here actually elaborat- 
 ing not a scientific, but a speculative concept, though 
 his approach to it was always by means of the dis- 
 cussion of particular problems, the solution of which 
 implied a definite view of the relations between the 
 economic principle on one side, and respectively on 
 the other side, the intellectual and the moral principle. 
 As regards the possibility of inferring practical pro- 
 grammes from scientific principles, he objected that 
 neither the desirable nor the practicable are science. 
 Science may be a legitimate means of simplifying 
 problems, making it possible to distinguish in them 
 what can be scientifically ascertained from what can 
 only be partially known; in the case of the Marxian 
 law of the fall in the rate of profits, for instance, if 
 such a law were proved to be scientifically correct, 
 it could be said, under certain conditions that the 
 end of capitalist society was a scientific certainty, 
 though it would remain doubtful what would follow it. 
 But logic is not life, and the appraisement of social 
 programmes is a matter of empirical observations 
 and of practical convictions. The unconquerable in- 
 determination of social facts brings forth that ele- 
 ment of daring in the actions of practical men, 
 which is to will what inspiration is to expression, in- 
 sight to intellect, in the poet and in the scientist.
 
 82 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 Socialism could not be called a scientific programme, 
 except in a limited and metaphorical sense, which 
 was not a criticism of socialism itself, but of the bad 
 logic of certain Socialists: the Marxian programme as 
 such, Croce recognized as one of the noblest and 
 boldest, and also one of those which obtain the great- 
 est support from the objective conditions of existing 
 society. Having already denied the dependence of 
 intellectual truth on economic fact, by criticising 
 the metaphysics of historical materialism, he thus 
 asserted now the autonomy of the economic from the 
 logical principle. 
 
 On the other hand, he destroyed the legend of the 
 intrinsic immorality of Marxism, which was due to 
 Marx's repeated assertions that the social question 
 is not a moral question, and to his sharp criticisms 
 of class ideals and hypocrisies. He pointed to the 
 moral interest which had guided Marx's political ac- 
 tivity, and which could even be said to have prompted 
 the choice of the fundamental hypotheses of his 
 economics. What Marx had called the impotence of 
 morality was the futile attempt at apportioning 
 praise or blame for the natural conditions of the 
 social order. It is only when such conditions are no 
 longer conceived as necessary for the social order in 
 general, but only for a stage in its history, and when 
 new conditions appear that make it possible to 
 destroy them, that moral condemnation is justified 
 and effective: to use another of Marx's phrases, 
 morality condemns what history has already con-
 
 History and Economics 83 
 
 demned. This is as much as saying that the only 
 real moral problems, as all other problems of human 
 life, are those that present themselves under given 
 historical circumstances, at a given time; concrete, 
 not abstract; and that moral judgments apply not 
 to facts or conditions, but to actions. The passage 
 from such a concrete, or historical, view of morality, 
 to a doctrine of moral relativity is a very easy one, 
 but Marx's own views on this point, which he never 
 deliberately expounded, are irrelevant to the sub- 
 stance of his doctrine. For his own part, Croce re- 
 asserted the value of Kantian ethics, and the ab- 
 soluteness of the moral ideal, as an ideal which is 
 not above and outside the spirit of man, but rather 
 one of its intrinsic forms or categories. And Marx's 
 conclusions in regard to the function of morality in 
 the social movement, and to the method for the 
 education of the proletariat, though clashing with 
 current prejudices, contain no contradiction of gen- 
 eral ethical principles. But Marx's interest was not 
 essentially an ethical one: the moralistic criticisms of 
 Marx were similar to the puritanic criticisms of 
 Machiavelli, and resolved themselves into a charge 
 that neither the one nor the other had treated prob- 
 lems totally different from those which they had ac- 
 tually attempted to clarify. While vindicating the 
 importance of Machiavelli in the history of the study 
 of the economic activity of man, Croce called Marx 
 himself the Machiavelli of the labour movement, 
 implicitly suggesting a similarity of both object and
 
 84 From Philology to Philosophy 
 
 method between // Principe and Das Kapital^ which 
 is singularly illuminating. 
 
 The last essays of the book on Materialismo 
 Storico are two letters to Professor Pareto "On the 
 Economic Principle," written in 1900; but with these 
 we reach a time when Croce's thought was already 
 organizing itself in the system of the philosophy of 
 mind. In them we find a sketch of the system in 
 the form in which it appeared in the first edition of 
 the Estetica: that is, we already decidedly enter into 
 the maturer phase of Croce's thought. We must 
 here pause on the threshold, and looking back on the 
 years of Croce's special interest in economic prob- 
 lems, sum up the new elements that the study of 
 these problems adds to his intellectual physiognomy: 
 a more deliberately antimetaphysical attitude, a 
 growing consciousness of the complexity of history 
 and of the concreteness of moral life, a realization of 
 the function of the economic activity, a progress in 
 the analysis of scientific concepts, and therefore in 
 the foundations of his logic — but, most important 
 of all, a continued practice of philosophical thought 
 under the shape of historical methodology. Apart 
 from their interest as documents of the growth of 
 his philosophy, Croce's studies have also a place in 
 the history of social and economic thought, side by 
 side with those of Labriola and of Georges Sorel, as 
 a significant episode in that Latin crisis of Marxism, 
 the ultimate outcome of which are the theories of 
 French and Italian Syndicalism.
 
 PART SECOND 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND 
 
 (1900-1910)
 
 I. THE GROWTH OF THE SYSTEM 
 
 The unity of thought — The writing of the Estetica — The method of 
 philosophy — A philosophy of mind — The Filosofia della Sphito 
 and the Critica — Other activities. 
 
 The salient feature of Croce's mind, fully displaying 
 itself in the maturity of his work, is a power to follow 
 different lines of thought and research, without either 
 confusing the Issues or losing sight of the deep under- 
 lying connections. For the average scholar, an in- 
 cursion into alien ground will generally mark the 
 abandonment of his former interests; or, in the best 
 hypothesis, the creation of a new mental person- 
 ality coexisting with the original one, but neither 
 reacting on it nor being influenced by It. The reason 
 is obvious: the substance of each personality is a 
 cross-section of the body of one discipline, which In 
 its actual history, in its methods, associations and 
 sphere of interest, touches the other one at very 
 few points only, if at any at all. The establishment 
 of new relations between the two requires a new per- 
 sonal elaboration, a complete individual mastery 
 of the materials and methods of each discipline. 
 We are hardly aware of the independence gained by 
 even very closely related fields of research through 
 the specialistic treatment of the last century: how 
 each of them has developed, so to speak, a language 
 
 87
 
 88 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 of its own, which has its foundation in the pecuHar, 
 and inevitable, terminology, but extends far beyond 
 it into the logical structure of the specialist mind. 
 We have more or less consciously built up a world 
 (that is, an implicit conception of the world, a naive 
 philosophy) for the economist, one for the biologist, 
 one for the mathematician, one for the student of 
 literature, and so on. The scholar with the dual 
 personality lives alternatively in separate and self- 
 contained worlds; but to melt the two images into a 
 single one, is far beyond his power. In other cases, 
 he will relate all the experiences legitimately belong- 
 ing to one special world, to another one, probably 
 to the one with which he was first acquainted; but 
 then we have those awkward hybrids, the economics 
 of the literary man, or the literature of the biologist, 
 or the biology of the economist; and the confusion 
 is so apparent that it generally reflects itself in the 
 very quality of the terminology employed. 
 
 It was against this kind of confusion, against the 
 transference of the concepts of one science into 
 another, which was the favourite device of positiv- 
 ism, that Croce continually reacted in his criticism 
 of contemporary thought. He instinctively knew 
 the value of distinctions, and also the value of unity; 
 but he would never pay for unity at the expense of 
 the fine, precise, necessary distinctions. This ex- 
 plains why for a certain number of years he may have 
 appeared as a man occupied in the pursuit of two 
 quite different and unconnected lines of research:
 
 The Growth of the System 89 
 
 his literary friends used to look on his economic 
 studies with wonder and distrust, as on a strange 
 whim and a total waste of time, while the economists 
 more or less resented the intrusion of the outsider. 
 But it explains also why, when he finally attempted 
 to give shape to the conclusions he had reached in 
 regard to one particular group of problems, his grasp 
 of the essential unity and his power to build an inclu- 
 sive and unspecialized conception of reality, were 
 made visible at once. There was no special problem 
 of thought which could be treated apart from an 
 either implicit or explicit view of the whole of reality: 
 there was no solution of any particular problem 
 which would not affect, and in turn be affected by, 
 the solution of every other problem. Or, to say 
 the same thing in different words, philosophy was a 
 system, not in the sense that a rigid logical scheme 
 could once and forever fit the ever moving stream 
 of reality, but because it is impossible to think the 
 distinctions without the unity, or the unity without 
 the distinctions. That which appears to us, psycho- 
 logically, as the main characteristic of Croce's mind, 
 transforms itself into the intrinsic logic of his system, 
 in which the principles of unity and of distinction 
 are, as we shall see, fundamental. 
 
 In the year 1899 Croce had been compelled to 
 spend a good part of his time in a more or less prac- 
 tical activity in connection with the Centenary of 
 the Neapolitan Republic of 1799, and it was only 
 towards the end of that year that he could dedicate
 
 90 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 himself entirely to the work he had constantly had 
 in mind since the publication of his essays on liter- 
 ary criticism: the exposition of his concept of art 
 in the fulness of its relations and determinations. 
 It will be well to let Croce himself give us an account 
 of that decisive moment, of the ripening and gather- 
 ing of his various speculations into their first co- 
 herent and systematic expression. "When I started 
 my work, and began to collect my scattered thoughts, 
 I found myself extremely ignorant: the gaps multi- 
 plied themselves in my sight; those same things that 
 I thought I held well in my grasp wavered and 
 became confused; unsuspected questions came for- 
 ward asking for an answer; and during five months 
 I read almost nothing, walked for hours and hours, 
 spent half days and whole days lying on a couch, 
 searching assiduously within myself, and putting 
 down on paper notes and thoughts, each of which 
 was a criticism of the other. This torment grew 
 much worse, when in November I tried to set forth 
 in a concise memoir the fundamental theses of /Es- 
 thetics, because, ten times at least, having carried 
 my work up to a certain point, I became aware of 
 the necessity of taking a step which was not justified 
 logically, and I started all over again in order to 
 discover in the beginnings the obscurity or error 
 which had brought me to that quandary; and, having 
 rectified the error, again went my way, and a little 
 further I again stumbled into a similar difficulty. 
 Only after six or seven more months was I able to
 
 The Growth of the System 91 
 
 send to the press that memoir in the form in which it 
 has been printed under the title Tesi Jondamentali 
 di un' Estetica come scienza delV espressione e lin- 
 guistica generale; arid and abstruse, but from which, 
 once I had finished it, I came out not only quite 
 oriented in regard to the problems of the mind, but 
 also with an awakened and sure understanding of 
 almost all the principal problems about which clas- 
 sical philosophers have toiled: an understanding 
 which cannot be acquired by merely reading their 
 books, but only by repeating within oneself, under 
 the stimulus of life, their mental drama." ^ 
 
 We are so used to see the intellectual worker sur- 
 rounded and propped up by libraries, laboratories, 
 files, and statistics, that the sight of a man abandon- 
 ing his books, giving himself up to what by all ma- 
 terial standards must be classed as a state of idle- 
 ness, in order to withdraw into the intimacy of his 
 own consciousness, there to find an answer to the 
 problems of reality, cannot but strike us as incon- 
 gruous and anachronistic. If we were frank about 
 ourselves, we should confess that our unbounded 
 confidence in the purely material helps is merely 
 a mask for our deep-rooted scepticism, for our abso- 
 lute lack of confidence in the power of reason. What 
 we cannot hope to attain through our individual 
 effort, we expect as the product of a great machine 
 of thought, in which man enters as a little wheel, 
 accomplishing a given function, as mechanical and 
 
 ' Contribuio, pp. 40-41,
 
 92 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 impersonal as the rest of the machine. We strive 
 for objectivity, and believe in the automatic fabri- 
 cation of truth. Through a false analogy with the 
 methods of the natural sciences, imperfectly under- 
 stood, and assimilated to those of industrial produc- 
 tion, we call this process scientific, and we pretend 
 to despise what we fear, the testimony of our con- 
 sciousness and the hardships of personal thought. 
 Reason, the human reason, the ultimate source of 
 all knowledge, we pay lip homage to, but really 
 put in the same category as the obscure intuition 
 of the mystic. Outside our mechanical objectivity, 
 we seem unable to see anything but an arbitrary 
 subjectivism, a capricious and empirical individuality. 
 But however incongruous and anachronistic it 
 may appear to us, there is little doubt that this 
 method is the only philosophical method, the 
 method of philosophy in all times. Croce's orig- 
 inality consists merely in having reasserted its 
 validity in such sharp contrast to all the tendencies 
 of the age, and to have shown that true objectivity 
 belongs only to the truth we discover within our- 
 selves, when the eye of our mind is not turned on 
 the transient spectacle of our superficial life, but is 
 reaching under it for that universal consciousness 
 which is the foundation of the individual one. There 
 is no scholar who is as exacting and punctilious as 
 Croce in the choice and elaboration of his material — 
 as conscious of the need of thoroughness and pre- 
 cision — as impatient of any form of improvisation;
 
 The Growth of the System 93 
 
 but he never forgets that the end of all his labours 
 is merely that of knowing himself^ in the spirit of the 
 ancient oracle, by acquiring a direct, intimate ex- 
 perience of the processes through which a mind of 
 to-day has come to be what is truly is; of making his 
 own individual consciousness partake more and more 
 of that universality which alone is true consciousness, 
 by liberating itself from all casual determinations, 
 and becoming historically acquainted with itself. It 
 is easy to see how in such a general attitude the road 
 to philosophy is also the road to history; and how 
 both in philosophy and in history the final test must 
 be not that of the dead material, but of the living 
 spirit. 
 
 The employment of such a method leads to two 
 consequences: the first, that a philosophy thus con- 
 ceived will be a philosophy of the human spirit — 
 Filosofia dello Spirito — or, as we, following the habits 
 of English-speaking philosophers, shall tentatively 
 call it, a philosophy of mind; the second, that the 
 universality which the individual spirit discovers 
 within itself, not being a static, immovable universal- 
 ity, but merely the form of its ever-changing, his- 
 torical actuality, philosophy itself will be a contin- 
 uous progress, and at no particular moment will it 
 be possible to define the thought of the philosopher 
 as a completed system. As we cannot, however, 
 in the small compass of this book, minutely follow 
 all the successive modifications and accretions of 
 Croce's thought, we shall speak of the ten years
 
 94 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 between 1900 and 1910 as of the period in which the 
 system of the philosophy of mind was developed and 
 determined, and we shall attempt in the following 
 chapters to give a general view of the system itself 
 as it might have appeared in 1910 to a conscientious 
 student of all the works of Croce published during 
 that interval of time. 
 
 The Tesi contained already the substance of the 
 Estetica come scienza delV espressione e linguistica 
 generale which was completed in 1901 and published 
 in 1902, and with which Croce definitely took his 
 place in modern philosophy. The book is divided in 
 two parts, the exposition of the theory and the 
 history of the doctrine. But the two parts are very 
 closely related to each other, as the exposition already 
 criticises all the possible aspects of aesthetic theory, 
 and the history merely disposes the same criticisms 
 in a chronological order, and labels each of them with 
 a name. This plan, with slight alterations, is that 
 of the successive volumes of the Filosojia dello Spirito: 
 to the reader who is already acquainted with the 
 history of philosophy, the historical character of the 
 purely theoretical exposition is readily apparent. 
 
 Soon after the publication of the Estetica, Croce 
 began to consider his book merely as a programme and 
 a sketch which needed filling in with further develop- 
 ments, — with the investigation of the other forms of 
 human activity, which had been merely postulated 
 in the study of the aesthetic activity; and with a 
 wide cultural work, to be carried on especially by
 
 The Growth of the System 95 
 
 means of a review, through which his ideas should 
 be tested in immediate and constant relation with 
 the problems of contemporary Italian and European 
 thought. The enormous activity of the following 
 years falls easily into this rough division. On one 
 hand we have the completion of the Filosofia dello 
 SpiritOy with the Logica come scienza del concetto 
 pure, the first edition of which appeared in 1905 
 {Lineamenti di una Logica^ etc.), and the second, 
 deeply modified by his meditations on the practical 
 activity, in 1909, with the Filosofia della Pratica: 
 Economica ed Etica, written in 1908, but of which 
 some parts had already been given in 1907 in the 
 memoir Riduzione della filosofia del diritto alia filo- 
 sofia deir economia; and with the new and fuller 
 formulation of his /Esthetics in a paper read to the 
 International Congress of Philosophy in Heidelberg 
 in 1908, on U intuizione pura e il carattere lirico delV 
 arte. To these must be added the two monographs 
 on Hegel (1906) and Vico (1910), which are at the 
 same time an exposition of their philosophies and a 
 restatement of Croce's own main positions, in so 
 far as they coincided with those elements of truth 
 which he still recognized as living in their thought. 
 On the other hand we have the publication of a bi- 
 monthly review, La Critica^ the first number of which 
 appeared in January, 1903, and which is still being 
 published. La Critica announced itself as a review 
 of literature, history and philosophy, but it differed 
 from all other publications in the same fields in two
 
 96 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 main features: the first, that the number of its con- 
 tributors was practically limited to two, Croce him- 
 self, and his friend Giovanni Gentile, with whom he 
 had first been brought in contact through their com- 
 mon interest in Marxian studies, and who followed 
 for some years at least a line of thought which 
 touched his own at many points; the second, that it 
 imposed upon itself a very definite programme of 
 work, each number containing an essay, or part of an 
 essay, by Croce on some Italian writter of the pre- 
 ceding half-century, and one by Gentile on the 
 Italian philosophers of the same period, besides a 
 number of reviews of new Italian and foreign books, 
 and notes and comments on contemporary questions 
 of culture and moral life. In his own main work for 
 the CriticUy Croce was at the same time aiming at 
 giving concrete examples of the application of 
 aesthetic theory in the domain of literary criticism, 
 and at clearing the ground for the work of the new 
 generation, through an appraisement of the literary 
 values of the preceding one. The general temper of 
 the review is clearly expressed in the following words 
 from the already so often quoted autobiographical 
 notes: "The ideal which I cherished was drawn not 
 from my own personality, but from my varied ex- 
 perience, because, having lived sufficiently in the 
 academic world to know both its virtues and its 
 faults, and having at the same time preserved a 
 feeling of real life, and of literature and science as 
 being born from it and renovating themselves in it.
 
 The Growth of the System 97 
 
 I addressed my censures and my polemics on one 
 hand against dilettanti and unmethodical workers, 
 on the other against the academicians resting in 
 theii prejudices and idling with the externals of art 
 and science." ^ 
 
 The greatest part of the writings contributed by 
 Croce to the Critica during these years were later 
 collected in volumes, of which however only the 
 Problemi d'Estetica (1910), containing, besides the 
 Heidelberg lecture, a large number of essays both 
 on the theory and history of i^sthetics, appeared 
 before the end of the period we are now considering. 
 To intensify the action of both his books and his 
 review, he initiated in 1906, in connection with the 
 publisher Laterza of Bari, the publication of a series 
 of Classici della filosofia moderna, in which he pub- 
 lished his own translation of Hegel's Encyclopedia; 
 and in 1909, of the collection Scrittori d' Italia, which 
 is in the way to becoming the standard corpus of 
 Italian Literature. He took also a leading part in 
 the editing of the same publisher's Biblioteca di 
 cultura moderna, which was enriched through his 
 care and advice with reprints of rare works of south- 
 ern Italian writers of the Risorgimento and of the 
 early years of the Unity, and with translations of 
 books representative of foreign contemporary thought. 
 
 If we add to all this, a number of scattered essays 
 and monographs, editions of texts and documents, 
 and bibliographies, and the generous cooperation, 
 
 ^ Contributor p. 48.
 
 98 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 extending from the friendly discussion of plans 
 and ideas to the humble -reading of proofs, with a 
 host of friends and disciples, we have a fairly com- 
 plete idea of the significance of Croce in the cultural 
 life of young Italy. He very rapidly became some- 
 thing like an institution; he was hailed as the master 
 and spiritual guide of the new generation. His work 
 and his example, the clarity of his thought and the 
 rhythm of his steady, harmonious, powerful activity, 
 were an element not of the limited life of the intel- 
 lectual laboratory only, but of the spiritual life of 
 the nation.
 
 II. INTUITION AND EXPRESSION i 
 
 The four grades of spiritual activity — Intuition and conceptual knowl- 
 edge — The intuitive consciousness — The limits of intuitive knowl- 
 edge — Identifications of intuition and expression — Art as expression: 
 content and form — Language as expression; the reality of words — 
 Croce's use of the word intuition — The lyrical character of the pure 
 intuition. 
 
 The whole cycle of the philosophy of mind ex- 
 hausts itself in the study of the four fundamental 
 forms of human activity, the concepts of which we 
 have seen slowly developing through the mazes 
 of Croce's early speculations: the aesthetic, the 
 logic, the economic and the ethic; of the distinction 
 and the unity of aesthetic and logic in the theoretical 
 activity, or knowledge, and of economic and ethic 
 in the practical activity, or action; and finally of the 
 relations between the theoretical and the practical, 
 or knowledge and action. This may be said to be 
 the positive aspect of Croce's philosophy: the nega- 
 tive aspect consists in the criticism and exclusion 
 of any other form of activity from the system of 
 the human spirit, and of that which is not the spirit, 
 or nature, from the system of reality. 
 
 * This chapter and the following two are founded especially on the 
 Estetica, pp. 1-171; the essay on L'inluizione pura e il carattere lirico dell' 
 arte, in Problemi, pp. 1-30; and the Breviario, in Nuovi Saggi, pp. 1-91. 
 
 99
 
 lOO The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 To the four forms or grades of spiritual activity, 
 correspond four philosophical sciences: ^Esthetics, 
 Logic, Economics, and Ethics. Each of them can be 
 said to be the organum of the particular form of 
 activity which it studies; the affirmation of that 
 sphere of consciousness which is proper to it, and 
 of its relations to the other forms. Each of them 
 is therefore related to the others in the same way as 
 the various forms of activity are related to each 
 other. They might be defined as the projection on 
 the plane of logic of the whole system of human 
 activity, that is, of the whole of reality. They de- 
 rive their intrinsic validity from this perfect coin- 
 cidence of their several objects with the only con- 
 ceivable aspects of reality. 
 
 We shall in this and in the following chapters 
 attempt to fill in with the strictly necessary detail 
 this very ample frame. But we can already point 
 to the idealistic character of such a philosophy 
 resulting from its method, which is that of the 
 testimony of consciousness, as opposed to the nat- 
 uralistic or psychologic method of indirect obser- 
 vation; from its object, which is the human spirit 
 or mind in the fulness of its determinations; and 
 from the exclusion of any aspect of reality which 
 is not immanent in consciousness, that is, both 
 of the naturally and the supernaturally trans- 
 cendent. As against another kind of idealism, of 
 which the typical example is Platonic transcen- 
 dentalism, Croce's idealism is realistic and immanen-
 
 Intuition and Expression loi 
 
 tistic: the task of the philosophy of mind is to 
 discover the immanent logic of reality. But against 
 current realism, which considers mind as the mere 
 spectator and observer of external or natural reality, 
 it asserts the identity of reality and consciousness, 
 which is the basic position of all idealism. 
 
 There are two forms of knowledge: intuitive (or 
 aesthetic) and conceptual (or logical). Intuition is 
 the knowledge of the individual or particular; the 
 concept is the knowledge of the universal. This 
 distinction, as we have already seen, corresponds 
 roughly to the old classical distinction of mythos 
 and logos y to Vico's definitions of poetry and met- 
 aphysics, and to the new meaning given by Baum- 
 garten to the old antithesis of aistheta and noeta. 
 Let us quote Vico again: "Men first feel without 
 perceiving, then they perceive and are perturbed 
 and moved; finally they reflect with pure mind." 
 Here we have three successive grades, of which the 
 first is mere sensation, the lower limit of mental ac- 
 tivity; the second is intuition; the third, concept. 
 For Vico, the second grade is identical with Poetry, 
 and the science of this form of knowledge, which 
 we call i^sthetics, he called Poetic Logic, the sci- 
 ence of poetry as "the first operation of the human 
 mind." Vico's discovery consists in this definition 
 of Poetry (and Art), not as a casual, capricious, 
 lateral form of spiritual activity, but as the first 
 and necessary grade of knowledge, as an essential 
 function of the mind. But Vico's thought was
 
 I02 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 clothed in what we might well call a mythological 
 form: the various grades of spiritual activity were 
 presented by him as successive stages or epochs 
 in the history of mankind; and the inter-relation 
 of the various grades, as the actual law of the de- 
 velopment of human society. Croce unravelled 
 Vico's philosophy, or ideal history, history of the 
 mind, from Vico's concrete, sociological history, 
 and the result was this new ^Esthetics which is 
 at the same time a science of the first grade of 
 knowledge, and of art and language. 
 
 Of the reality of intuitive, as distinct from re- 
 flected knowledge, we have constant evidence in 
 our immediate experience. If I examine my own 
 consciousness, at any particular moment, I find 
 it crowded with things I know^ as, now, this room 
 in which I am writing, the piano that is open be- 
 fore me, the flowers in a little basket, blue frag- 
 ments of sky and green branches washed by the 
 recent rain swaying in the clear sunlight, the 
 shrill voice of a child from the road, the light steps 
 of a girl moving about the house. I am not con- 
 scious of all these intuitions at once: I write, and I 
 distinctly know this white paper only, and the 
 black signs I am tracing, the pen guided by my 
 hand, and the edges of a few books on my table: 
 all the rest has faded away into a blurred, con- 
 fused intuition, the intuition of an atmosphere, 
 composed of mere shreds and shadows of the colours 
 and sounds of which I was so distinctly conscious
 
 Intuition and Expression 103 
 
 but one minute ago. But now I put down my pen 
 again, and I look at the piano; and I let my mind 
 wander away, from what I see to what I remember or 
 imagine: the fair-headed figure playing this morning 
 Franck's Prelude, Choral and Fugue, the rapid and 
 sure movements of the fingers on the white and 
 black keys, a vague image of the solemn and pas- 
 sionate music, memories of distant days, a sudden 
 rush of obscure fantasies, evoked by the actual 
 playing, and still lingering in the recesses of my 
 mind, returning now with a fragment of a melody, 
 with a succession of triumphant chords. And 
 again, I look beyond the window, and the little 
 square of green and blue expands itself into the 
 vast valley beyond, screened from my view by these 
 few trees clustering around the house, and yet 
 mysteriously present to my inner eye: I see a little 
 company of riders cantering along a shaded lane, 
 coming out in an open meadow surrounded by 
 low, thick- wooded hills; the sun sets in a pale pur- 
 ple sky, and I hear the tramping of the slow, heavy 
 hoofs, as the horses find their way back through 
 the woods, through a darkness much more opaque 
 and solid than that of the remote twilight, still 
 visible above the highest branches, animated by 
 the first faint glittering of a star. And the woods 
 are full of a myriad small breathing and stirring 
 noises, of the sense of the deep surging inhuman life 
 of trees and shrubs, of the penetrating scent of the 
 rich damp earth, of decaying wood, of fallen leaves.
 
 104 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 And now, I suddenly shut myself out of this 
 world of perceptions and imaginations, or rather 
 I keep them all before m.e, but not because of the 
 immediate, individual interest I have in each of 
 them. I try to extract the common, the universal 
 element of which I suspect the existence not be- 
 yond but within them. I renounce all particular 
 intuitions for the concept of intuition. I am no 
 longer an image-making mind, no longer engaged 
 in this elementary or "first" operation of the human 
 mind, but I have passed on to a different, and 
 manifestly a "secondary" plane of mental activity, 
 since it would be impossible for me to root my 
 thinking anywhere but on the soil of my intuitions. 
 
 What, then, is intuition? Clearly it is not the 
 mere sensation, the formless matter which the 
 mind cannot grasp in itself, as mere matter, but 
 possesses only by imposing its form on it. With- 
 out matter no human knowledge or activity is pos- 
 sible, but matter is, within ourselves, the animal 
 element, that which is brutal and impulsive, 
 not the spiritual domain, which is humanity. Matter 
 conquered by form gives place to the concrete form. 
 Matter, or content, is what differentiates one in- 
 tuition from another; the form is constant, and 
 the form is the spiritual activity. In this way 
 we set the lower limit of intuitive knowledge, and 
 we recognize its characters of awareness and activ- 
 ity: an intuition is not that which presents itself 
 to me, but that which I make my own, by giving
 
 Intuition and Expression 105 
 
 form to it. It may be an actual perception, but 
 the distinction between that which is real and that 
 which is imaginary is not an intuitive, but a logical 
 or intellectual one; the knowledge of things which 
 I do not perceive, but only remember, or even 
 only create with my imagination belongs to the 
 same class, partakes of the same formal character. 
 Space and time, which have more than once been 
 considered as intuitions, are in reality categories 
 of an intellectual order: they may be found in in- 
 tuitions, as other intellectual elements are found, 
 but as ingredients and not as necessary elements, 
 materialiter and not Jormaliter. In relation to the 
 usual psychological concepts of association and rep- 
 resentation, it can be said that an intuition is an 
 association, when by that word we mean an active 
 mental synthesis, and not a mechanical juxtaposi- 
 tion of abstract sensations; and that it is a repre- 
 sentation, not as a complex sensation, but as a 
 spiritual elaboration of the sensation. 
 
 The upper hmit of intuitive knowledge is given 
 by reflected, or intellectual, or logical knowledge, or 
 whatever we may call that which is no longer knowl- 
 edge of the individual, of things, but of the uni- 
 versal, of relations among things, of concepts. 
 Intuitive knowledge is independent of intellectual 
 knowledge, as it is possible to form intuitions 
 without forming concepts; in the examples which 
 I have given in the preceding paragraph, practi- 
 cally all the intuitions are pure intuitions, in the
 
 io6 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 sense that they do not contain any logical ingre- 
 dients. But even when such are found, they appear 
 as mere intuitions, and not as concepts: as, for in- 
 stance, Hamlet's philosophy, which I do not read 
 as a help towards the understanding of metaphysi- 
 cal problems, but as a characterization of an im- 
 aginery individual. On the other hand, logical 
 knowledge is founded on intuitions, presupposes 
 the world of intuitions as its matter or content. 
 The relation between aesthetic and logical knowl- 
 edge is one of grade or development: the former 
 stands by itself, rests directly on that which is not 
 yet spirit or form, is the first grade of spiritual or 
 human activity; the latter gives a further spiritual 
 elaboration to the intuitive material. This re- 
 lationship, to which we shall return later, is the 
 typical process of Croce's own logic, the logic 
 of spiritual or mental grades, which he substitutes 
 throughout his system for the naturalistic or trans- 
 cendental logic of his early masters. 
 
 A further step in the deduction of the concept 
 of intuitive or aesthetic knowledge, is made by 
 identifying intuition with expression. Given the 
 active and conscious character of Intuition, we 
 are already prepared to admit that every true in- 
 tuition is at the same time an expression; that 
 which cannot objectify itself into an expression is 
 nothing but mere sensation. The mind does not 
 actually intuit except by doing, forming, and ex- 
 pressing. We must not think only of verbal ex-
 
 Intuition and Expression 107 
 
 pressions: there are intuitions which cannot be 
 expressed by words, but only by sounds or hnes 
 or colours. But in any case the two words are 
 interchangeable: what really exists in our spirit 
 is only what we can express. It is only when we 
 can express ourselves, that we are conscious of 
 actually possessing, that is, of having actually 
 formed, our intuitions. It is impossible to distin- 
 guish the expression from the intuition because 
 they are not two but one. 
 
 This identification runs counter to a number of 
 very common and very dear delusions: we con- 
 stantly imagine that the difference between our- 
 selves and a great painter or a great poet does not 
 consist in the power of seeing and feeling, but in a 
 supposed gift of merely external expression; and 
 again, we credit ourselves with a number of thoughts 
 and images, which we might express if we only 
 wished to. The easiest way to free ourselves of such 
 delusions is to try to express whatever it seems to 
 us that we possess: it becomes then apparent that 
 our pictorial or poetical intuitions are really mere 
 fragments, or echoes, of intuitions; are, in fact, not 
 more than that which we succeed in expressing. It 
 must however be borne in mind that we give here 
 to the word expression a purely mental or spiritual 
 significance: we mean by it the image that we form 
 in our mind, and of which the painting or the poem, 
 as objects, are the material extrinslcations. It 
 requires but little reflection to realize that there is
 
 io8 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 no painting or poem — there is no word that we utter 
 — unless it be a mtrt fiatus vocis, which has not been 
 preceded in our mind by an internal image, which 
 is the true expression. 
 
 The reader will have remarked that, in order to 
 give examples of intuitive knowledge, we have now 
 had recourse to poetry and to painting. The fact 
 is that there is no difference between intuitive 
 knowledge, or expression, and art, except a purely 
 extensive and empirical one: that is, we call a poet 
 or an artist a man who possesses this expressive 
 power in a higher degree than the rest of mankind; 
 we call a poem or a work of art an expression which 
 is fuller, more complex, more elaborate, than those 
 which are the product of our common intuitive 
 activity, mere waves of the continuous stream of 
 spiritual life, in which they are constantly inter- 
 rupted by and mixed with reflections and volitions, 
 with logical and practical facts. The difference 
 between the genius and the common man, in the 
 aesthetic as well as in the other spheres of human 
 activity, is a quantitative, not a qualitative one. 
 Art is not a peculiar spiritual function, and there- 
 fore a closed circle to which none but the elect are 
 admitted: the artist appeals to the intuitive man 
 in each of us, in a language of which every human 
 mind finds the key within itself. 
 
 The definition of art as expression emphasizes 
 the creative and formal character of art; and its 
 immediate consequence is the identification of form
 
 Intuition and Expression 109 
 
 and content, that is, the solution of one of the oldest 
 and most confused of aesthetic problems. Art is 
 form, not in the technical or formalistic sense, but 
 in the meaning which we have given to the word 
 when discussing the relation between sensation and 
 intuition; and the content of a particular work of 
 art cannot be abstracted from the work itself as 
 something that existed before it, and to which a 
 form has been added from outside. There is no 
 content, in art, which is not the content of a par- 
 ticular form, that is, that which has ceased to exist 
 as a possible content, and has transformed itself 
 into a definite form. This conception of the re- 
 lations of form and content implies also either a new 
 interpretation, or the repudiation, of the theory 
 of art as the imitation of nature, meaningless in a 
 mechanical sense, true, and synonymous with the 
 theory of intuition, in a creative and formative 
 sense. Through the same critical process, all dis- 
 cussions of the relations between art and the senses 
 appear as being founded on a confusion between 
 that which is still beyond the limit of spiritual activ- 
 ity, the sensation or impression, and the actual 
 aesthetic elaboration, which begins only when the 
 mind becomes aware of the impression that has 
 reached it through the channel of the senses. 
 
 We have mentioned, in connection with the 
 identification of intuition and expression, the fact 
 that every word that we utter is constantly pre- 
 ceded by an internal image; which is as much as
 
 no The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 saying that language is a perpetual spiritual creation, 
 on the same plane as all our other expressions, and 
 as art. We are accustomed to seeing dead words 
 and syllables in grammars and dictionaries, and we 
 consider them as something external, as a kind of 
 instrument that we use and accommodate to this 
 and that purpose. But words that grammarians 
 study, through a naturalistic process, as independent 
 elements of the linguistic organism, are really 
 alive and full of their meaning only in the active 
 context of speech. The reality of words is only in 
 the individual spirit that speaks, and every word 
 is new every time that it is employed because it 
 expresses that particular, individual moment of 
 spiritual activity, which cannot be the same as any 
 other one. Philologists have been divided on the 
 question of the origin of language for centuries, 
 some finding it in the logical activity, others in a 
 system of mechanical symbols and conventions, a 
 few admitting the conception of language as a pure 
 aesthetic creation only for a mythic, primitive 
 period, which is succeeded in the history of every 
 language by a period of dev^elopment by convention 
 and association. But, as in all other branches of 
 spiritual activity, it is here impossible to draw a 
 distinction between the problem of the origins and 
 the problem of the nature of language: linguistic 
 expressions have fixed themselves in the course of 
 centuries and stand before us as a body of language, 
 as a reality independent of the individual activity
 
 Intuition and Expression 1 1 1 
 
 that produces the particular expressions; this is what 
 prevents us from recognizing in the actual linguistic 
 facts the same creative energy that formed the first 
 words uttered by man. 
 
 In this reduction of the philosophy of language 
 to aesthetics, Croce again follows Vico, who pro- 
 fessed to have found the true origins of languages 
 in the principles of poetry, who first asserted the 
 functional identity of language and poetry. This 
 theory, however, seems to clash with the existence 
 of what we might call the implicit conceptuality of 
 language, of which we are constantly made aware 
 by our grammatical categories. The fact is that the 
 relation between language and concept is the same 
 as between intuition and concept: that is, on one 
 side, language is the material of our reflected thought, 
 and it would be impossible for the reflection to begin 
 without or before the language; but, on the other 
 hand, the concepts appear in language not as forms 
 but as matter. In other words, to speak it is not 
 necessary to think logically, but it is impossible to 
 think logically without speaking. The grammatical 
 categories are not real elements of language, but 
 products of abstraction, of a purely practical 
 character, of the kind that we shall soon have to 
 examine in the rhetoric of the arts. 
 
 What may help us, in thus conceiving of the active 
 and intuitive character of language, is a comparison 
 with other classes of expressive facts. When we speak 
 of musical or pictorial language, we are aware that
 
 112 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 we are using mere metaphors for the purpose of 
 collecting certain general characteristics which are 
 common to some of these facts. The various musical 
 grammars, the rules of harmony or of orchestration, 
 are nothing but summaries of abstractions: in the 
 presence of a certain music, or of a certain picture, 
 we cannot forget the principle that no expression 
 can give birth to a new expression without first 
 undergoing a new creative process. And this is as 
 true of the highest forms of artistic expression as 
 of the words which we use in our daily life. 
 
 A number of objections to Croce's aesthetics have 
 been prompted by his use of the word intuition. 
 To the reader who has followed our argument, it 
 is not necessary to explain that Croce's intuition 
 has nothing in common either with the mystic 
 intuition of the Neoplatonists or of the ultra- 
 romantics, or with the intuition which Bergson sub- 
 stitutes for the intellect as the proper organ of 
 absolute knowledge. It is not a mysterious instru- 
 ment of the mind, by which man can either come 
 in contact with supernatural realities, or, renouncing 
 that which is distinctively human in him, enter into 
 the actual movement and life of nature. The fact 
 that Croce has spent so much time and thought in 
 trying to understand this first, naive, elementary 
 grade of the theoretical activity, does not justify 
 his critics in putting him in the same class either 
 with romantic metaphysicians or with romantic 
 naturalists. That such a confusion has ever been
 
 Intuition and Expression 113 
 
 possible is only a further proof of the immaturity 
 and superficiality of a large part of our most solemn 
 contemporary thought. It shows how it has been 
 given to grown-up and apparently educated men, to 
 read a book without knowing what its subject was, 
 and without even being able to shield themselves 
 behind the saving grace of silence. 
 
 An objection of a quite different order was raised 
 by Croce himself, who found its solution in the 
 elaboration of his philosophy of the practical, or 
 of will. It can be said of the theory of art as intuition, 
 that it reduces art to a form of knowledge, to a 
 theoretical function, while what we look for in works 
 of art is life and movement, and the feeling and per- 
 sonality of the artist, that is, something that is not 
 theoretical but practical. The answer might be 
 that the feeling is content and the intuition form; 
 but such a dualistic point of view would in reality 
 destroy not only Croce's aesthetics, but the foun- 
 dations of his whole philosophy of mind. And we 
 would be back at a position which we thought we 
 had already criticised and surpassed. The truth 
 is that intuition, and the personality, or lyrical 
 character, of a work of art, are only different aspects 
 of the same spiritual process, that where one is, the 
 other too will have to be found. What we can 
 abstract as the psychic content of intuition, since 
 we have already excluded abstractions and concepts, 
 is only what we call appetition, tendency, feeling, 
 will — the various facts which constitute the practical
 
 114 The Philosophy oj Mind 
 
 form of the human spirit. Pure intuition cannot rep- 
 resent anything but the will in its manifestations, that 
 is, nothing but states of mind. And the states of mind 
 are that passion, feeling, and personality which we 
 find in art, and which determine its lyrical character. 
 In order properly to understand this new point 
 of view, it must be borne in mind that the lyrical 
 character of the poetry does not however coincide 
 with the practical passion of the poet: the relation 
 between the emotion and the intuition is not a 
 deterministic one, as of cause and effect, but a 
 creative one, as of matter and form. The poetical 
 vibration is different in kind from the practical 
 one. If I grasp Croce's meaning correctly, the feel- 
 ing and movement which we find in art is something 
 that belongs intrinsically to the intuitive activity — 
 it is the dynamic of the creative process itself. And 
 in fact, what we look for in the works of art is not 
 the empirical personality of the artist, but the to- 
 nality of his individual aesthetic activity, which is 
 always new and always unmistakably his own, — not 
 the rhythm of his passion but that of his vision or 
 contemplation, of his intuition of the passion. Any 
 other way of considering this relation would inevit- 
 ably lead us back to the conventional distinction 
 of form and content, to the attribution of aesthetic 
 characters to the emotions themselves, and to a 
 definition of intuition not as a simple and primitive 
 fact, but as a combination of the practical and the 
 theoretical, of will and knowledge.
 
 Intuition and Expression 115 
 
 I consider this deduction of the lyrical character 
 of intuition as one of the points of Croce's aesthetics 
 which opens the way to new problems and stand in 
 need of further elaboration; but what is important 
 in it, and already firmly established, is the recognition 
 of this character, through which the whole doctrine 
 of intuition gains a deeper and richer meaning, and 
 becomes more apt to deal with the concrete facts 
 of our aesthetic experience.
 
 III. THE CONCEPT OF ART 
 
 Further determinations of the concept of art — Theoretical and practical 
 activity — The progress of aesthetic theories — An American instance: 
 morahty and art — The typical — The ends of art — The process of 
 aesthetic production — Relations of the aesthetic with the practical 
 activity — The delusion of objective beauty — Aesthetic hedonism — 
 The aesthetic value. 
 
 The determination of the concept of art as pure 
 intuition would be little more than a verbal varia- 
 tion of older doctrines, if its validity and importance 
 could not be proved in the actual practice of thought 
 on aesthetic problems, in the study of the relations of 
 the aesthetic fact with the other facts of human 
 activity, and in the criticism of errors which have 
 invaded the field of aesthetic thought through a con- 
 fusion of the aesthetic with the intellectual or the 
 practical. We shall therefore not be able to grasp 
 the new concept in the fulness of its meaning until 
 we have surveyed the whole ground of the philosophy 
 of mind: the aesthetic concept cannot be said to 
 be fully determined until we have a clear conception 
 of the other fundamental grades or forms of the spirit. 
 For the purposes of our exposition, we may however 
 anticipate a summary or scheme of the essential 
 relations, which will be more fully developed in the 
 following chapters. 
 
 ii6
 
 The Concept of Art 117 
 
 We have already seen how the logical activity 
 springs from the soil of the pure intuition; how the 
 knowledge of the universal follows the knowledge 
 of the individual. The aesthetic and the logic grade, 
 of which the second implies the first, exhaust the 
 whole of knowledge, the whole theoretical life of man. 
 A third grade or form does not exist: not in history, 
 which Croce still considered, in the first years of this 
 period, as reducible to the concept of art, and differ- 
 entiated from it only by its employment of the 
 predicate of existence, of the distinction between 
 reality and imagination; and not in the natural 
 and mathematical sciences, which elaborate the data 
 ofintuition through fictions, hypotheses, and con- 
 ventions, which are practical and not theoretical 
 processes. 
 
 The relation between the theoretical and the prac- 
 tical activity is of the same kind as that between 
 the two grades of the theoretical activity: that is, 
 the first is the basis of the second. We can think of a 
 knowing which is independent from the will, but 
 not of a will which is independent of knowledge: 
 it is impossible to will without historical intuitions 
 and a knowledge of relations. Within the practical 
 activity, we can further distinguish two grades cor- 
 responding to the two grades of the theoretical 
 activity: the economic, which is the will of the indi- 
 vidual, of a particular end, and the ethic, which is the 
 will of the universal, of the rational end. The rela- 
 tion between the economic and the ethic activity is
 
 Ii8 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 again the same grade-relation as between the aesthetic 
 and the logic, the theoretical and the practical. 
 
 The concrete life of the human spirit consists in 
 the perpetually recurring cycle of the four grades 
 of its activity, which is the law of its unity and 
 development. The concept rises from the intuition, 
 and action from knowledge; ethical activity is not 
 conceivable without a theoretical foundation, and 
 the concreteness of a particular end. At the close 
 of the cycle, the spiritual life itself becomes the 
 object of a new intuition, from which a new concept 
 and a new action are reproduced ad infinitum. 
 
 In the history of aesthetics, the errors deriving 
 from the confusion of that which is distinctively 
 aesthetic with other forms of theoretical or practical 
 activity, present themselves as a series of doctrines, 
 which can be considered as gradual approximations 
 to the definition of art as intuition. It is not neces- 
 sarily, or not only, a chronological series, but rather 
 a succession of actual moments in the deduction 
 of the concept of art. Empirical aesthetics recog- 
 nises the existence of a clags of aesthetic or artistic 
 facts, without attempting to reduce them under a 
 single concept; practical (hedonistic or moralistic) 
 aesthetics makes a first attempt at interpreting 
 them by putting them in relation with one of the 
 categories of spiritual activity; intellectualistic aes- 
 thetics denies that they belong to the practical 
 sphere, though failing to discover their precise 
 theoretical character; agnostic aesthetics criticises
 
 The Concept of Art 119 
 
 all the preceding moments, and is satisfied with a 
 purely negative definition; mystic aesthetics, con- 
 scious of the difference of aesthetic from logical 
 facts, makes a new spiritual category of them, affirms 
 their autonomy and independence, but mistakes 
 the nature of their relation with conceptual knowl- 
 edge. We are all more or less familiar with the 
 various aspects of these doctrines, and it can be 
 said that none of them (with the exception of the 
 first, which is now represented by psychologic aes- 
 thetics) is now being held consistently by any 
 responsible thinker. The truth of the intuitive 
 theory, which we find adumbrated already in 
 classical antiquity in the Aristotelian theory of 
 mimesis, and of which artists and critics have always 
 had a kind of obscure presentiment, is now implicitly 
 recognised by all who have an intimate contact 
 with and a sincere feeling for art and poetry. The 
 literary and artistic development of the end of the 
 eighteenth and of the nineteenth century has been 
 accompanied by such a wealth of critical thought, 
 that a conscious understanding of the nature of art 
 is now much more frequent than in former ages. 
 The forces that were at work liberating logical and 
 moral thought from the shackles of the past, reacted 
 vigorously on aesthetic thought, and helped to make 
 it more and more independent from both intellec- 
 tuaHstic and moralistic errors. It would be possible 
 to extract aphorisms and meditations from the 
 writings of the greatest poets, artists, and musicians
 
 I20 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 of the period, to show how common among them 
 was and is the knowledge of the spiritual autonomy 
 and of the intuitive character of art. But because 
 the task of the artist is not that of elaborating a 
 philosophy of art, and a good many critics and 
 asstheticians, on the other hand, have very little 
 experience of the actual aesthetic processes, we find 
 that though the other doctrines are discredited, yet a 
 number of prejudices which have their roots in 
 them are still current, — the artists themselves re- 
 jecting them, as it were, by instinct and not by 
 reasoning, and the critics and aestheticians clinging 
 to them because they help them to gain a fictitious 
 possession of that artistic reality which escapes 
 them in its purity and actuality. An intellectualistic 
 or moralistic critic can easily mask his lack of aes- 
 thetic taste, his fundamental ignorance of art, by 
 talking at length and with great solemnity about 
 unessentials. Artists and poets, on the other hand, 
 are apt to react to these prejudices by falling into 
 the errors of aestheticism, that is by attributing to 
 their empirical selves the freedom that belongs to 
 their function, and by denying in the name of art 
 the autonomy and dignity of intellectual and moral 
 values. In both cases, what is manifestly lacking 
 is a proper understanding of the meaning of logical, 
 or ideal distinctions, for which the artists, I suppose, 
 ought to be more readily forgiven than the critics, 
 though aestheticism may be as dangerous to art as 
 moralism or intellectualism are to thought.
 
 The Concept of Art ill 
 
 A recent literary polemic in America offered some 
 striking examples of these prejudices. A critic of 
 the older school, in a discussion of the moral ten- 
 dencies of the age, introduced a criticism of the 
 proposition that art is not concerned either with 
 truth or morality, by affirming that this negative 
 proposition could legitimately be converted into 
 the positive one: the object of art is to deny that 
 which truth and morality affirm. The sophism of 
 this conversion is based on a confusion between 
 the two logical concepts of distinction and opposition. 
 The critic was not deducing a logical consequence 
 of the first proposition, any more than if he were 
 interpreting my saying that I am not interested as 
 a student of literature in the law of gravitation, as 
 implying a disbelief in the law of gravitation: he 
 was merely stating his own conception of art as a 
 conceptual and moral function, and of the value 
 of art as an intellectual and moral value; which is 
 the error of intellectualism and moralism. In his 
 reply to the older critic, a writer of the younger 
 generation contended that aesthetic values are 
 higher than either logical or moral values, and in 
 some mysterious way transcend and comprehend 
 them both. The younger writer was evidently 
 using the same kind of logic as his adversary, and 
 affirming on his own account the error of a variety 
 of sestheticism. 
 
 What the original proposition actually implies 
 is that judgments regarding the logical truth or the
 
 122 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 historical verity, the moral merit or demerit of a 
 work of art, do not treat art as art, but dissolve the 
 work itself into its abstract elements, and deal with 
 these elements in an entirely different context. If 
 I discuss the theology and philosophy of Dante, I 
 shall find a number of propositions which to my 
 mind are untrue; but the beauty of Dante's poetry 
 is incommensurable with the truth or falsehood of 
 his logical thought. The beauty of Francesca's 
 episode is not impaired by the quite reasonable 
 suspicion that the poetical idealization of a guilty 
 passion might have a dangerous influence on weak 
 and sentimental souls. 
 
 The imperfect distinction between art and logical 
 or scientific truth is responsible for the critical 
 prejudice of art as expressive of the typical. The 
 typical is a product of abstract thought, of the 
 kind that is employed in the natural sciences. 
 The expressions of art are essentially individual 
 and particular, and when we consider them as typical, 
 we merely use them as the starting point for our 
 own abstractions, that is, for the purposes of a quite 
 different mental process. Similar to the concept 
 of the typical are those of the allegory and symbol, 
 which are mechanical constructions of the intellect, 
 and which art is unable to represent unless it reduces 
 them to the particular and concrete. 
 
 The confusion between art and morality, being 
 ultimately founded on the supposition that art is 
 not a theoretical function, but an act of the will,
 
 The Concept of Art 123 
 
 gives rise to the theories of the ends of art, and of 
 the so-called choice of the subject. But the end 
 of art is art itself, expression or beauty, or whatever 
 other name we shall give to the aesthetic value, 
 just as the end of science is truth and the end of 
 morality is goodness; that is, the concept of end 
 coincides in every case with the concept of value. 
 And the artist cannot choose his subject, since there 
 is no abstract subject present to his mind, but only 
 the world of his own already formed intuitions and 
 expressions; which he can neither will nor not will. 
 This is the truth contained in the old idea of poetical 
 inspiration, which was merely another word for the 
 spontaneity and unreflectiveness of art. A choice 
 of the subject according to ends other than aesthetic 
 is a certain cause of failure. The only conceivable 
 meaning that advice as to the choice of a subject 
 may have, is a kind of artistic know thyself ^ a warning 
 to the artist to be true to himself, to follow his 
 inspiration, and that which is deepest and most 
 genuine in it. It is, however, a tautological meaning, 
 and the reverse of the one which is given to it by 
 the moralistic critic. 
 
 If it is impossible for us either to will or not will 
 our aesthetic vision, the internal image which is 
 the true "work of art," it is clear that an element 
 of will enters into the production of the physical 
 or external image, made of sounds or lines or colours 
 or shapes, which we call works of art in a natural- 
 istic or empirical sense. The complete process of
 
 124 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 aesthetic production is symbolized by Croce in 
 the four following stages: a, the impression; b, the 
 expression or aesthetic spiritual synthesis; c, the 
 feeling of pleasure or pain which accompanies the 
 aesthetic as well as any other form of spiritual ac- 
 tivity; d, the translation of the aesthetic fact into 
 physical phenomena. The only true aesthetic 
 moment of the whole process is in b, which alone is 
 real expression, while d Is expression in the natural- 
 istic and abstract sense of the word. Such a con- 
 ception clashes against a number of deep-rooted 
 fallacies, which in their turn are the source of in- 
 numerable aesthetic prejudices. It is clear, however, 
 that what we call a printed poem is no poem at all, 
 but only a collection of conventional black signs on a 
 white page, which suggest to me a number of move- 
 ments of my vocal organs destined to the produc- 
 tion of certain sounds; and again, that these sounds 
 are not the poem in itself, apart from my under- 
 standing of their meaning, from my re-creation of 
 the internal image which prompted their original 
 production now recorded in the pages of a book. 
 Physically, a painting is constituted by colours on 
 a wall, or board, or canvas: here, the first stage of 
 reproduction which is required for the written 
 poem is not necessary: the material (visual, as it 
 was auditive for the poem) on which the original 
 image fixed itself is directly present to me; and yet, 
 again, that material object is not the aesthetic 
 vision, but a mere stimulus for its reproduction.
 
 The Concept of Art 125 
 
 Starting from the material object, Croce symbol- 
 ized the inverse process of aesthetic reproduction 
 in the following series: <?, the physical stimulus; d-b^ 
 the perception of physical facts (sound, colours, 
 etc.), which is at the same time the aesthetic syn- 
 thesis previously produced; c, the aesthetic pleasure 
 or pain. Here, again, the only moment of true 
 aesthetic activity is in b^ where, at least in the hy- 
 pothesis of a perfect understanding, my vision co- 
 incides with the orignal creation. 
 
 It must be understood, however, that these succes- 
 sive stages are not real, but abstract or symbolical 
 distinctions. We cannot re-create an aesthetic vi- 
 sion except through the sounds or colours in which it 
 originally expressed itself; and those sounds or 
 colours coincide with the original expression. The 
 words and rhythm of a poem are to it what the body 
 is to the soul, and once you have dissolved that 
 form, there is nothing left. Hence the theoretical 
 impossibility of a translation, which can only exist as 
 a new creation. But when we consider those words 
 or that rhythm not within the expressive synthesis, 
 in which their reality is spiritual and not physical, 
 but outside it, as words, as rhythm, we build up 
 b)^ abstraction a category of physical facts, to 
 which we attribute a reality not inferior to that of 
 the spiritual activity. B and d, in the preceding 
 analysis, are not different realities, but different 
 elaborations, the first, ideal, the second, naturalistic, 
 of the same fact.
 
 1 26 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 We have now established a relation between the 
 aesthetic and the practical activity: the physical 
 expression is an act of the will, and as such it falls 
 legitimately in the domain of both economic and 
 ethical judgments. We may buy or sell the physical 
 stimuli, books, statues, and paintings, though no 
 amount of wealth can give the aesthetic vision: the 
 possession of the objects of art is of another order 
 than the possession of the spiritual creation. We 
 may consider that the communication of a certain 
 intuition is in certain cases morally undesirable, and 
 censure the artist for having willed it, or try to 
 prevent him from accomplishing it. The principle 
 of the spiritual autonomy of art, necessary to es- 
 tablish the nature of aesthetic value, cannot be 
 understood to imply the absolute practical free- 
 dom of the artist from the laws that bind all other 
 men. But even from this point of view, there is 
 no doubt that art is more likely to suffer from exces- 
 sive constraint than from excessive freedom; and 
 that the fanatics of morality in art are only too 
 often inclined to mistake a set of arbitrary rulings 
 for morality, and to overlook the intention of the 
 artist. It is a significant fact, and one which de- 
 serves more attention than it seems to have ever 
 received, that the so-called moral condemnation 
 of a true work of art has never outlasted one or 
 two generations, and their prejudices and weak- 
 nesses. 
 
 The existence of the physical stimuli or material
 
 The Concept of Art 127 
 
 helps for the aesthetic reproduction, fosters the illu- 
 sion of beauty as an intrinsic attribute of physical 
 objects, first as artistic, and then as natural beauty. 
 It is hardly necessary to criticise this illusion at 
 this point of our discussion: beauty is not an ob- 
 jective attribute, but a spiritual value. In the 
 same way as there is no intrinsic beauty, indepen- 
 dent of our either creative or re-creative activity, 
 in words or notes or lines or colours, there is also 
 no category of natural beauty. What we call beauty 
 of nature is either that which in nature is merely 
 pleasureable from a practical and sensuous stand- 
 point, or the presence of certain stimuli for the re- 
 production of a preexistent aesthetic vision. We 
 recognise the obvious truth of this fact, when we 
 remark that the beauty of a certain landscape is 
 not visible to everybody, but only to him who looks 
 at it with an artist's eye. And it would be possible 
 to write a history of the progressive development 
 of beauty in nature, which would practically coin- 
 cide with, or follow at a short distance of time, the 
 various stages of the history of poetry and paint- 
 ing. 
 
 Closely related with the confusion between the 
 physical attributes of the objects of art, and the 
 true aesthetic value, are all the theories of aesthet- 
 ics which consider that the end of art is pleasure, 
 or aesthetic hedonism in its various forms. Of 
 these the most ancient is the one that considers 
 beautiful that which gives pleasure to the higher
 
 128 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 senses, he hearing and the sight; and other forms 
 of it can still be found, if not among artists and 
 critics, at least among psychologists. Two of the 
 most recent interpretations of aesthetic facts, the 
 theory of empathy or Einjuhlung and the theory 
 of tactile values, are merely modern scientific varia- 
 tions of the old prejudice. But no hedonistic theory 
 can ever give a consistent account of aesthetic 
 facts, as it is impossible to draw a distinction, on a 
 purely psychological plane, between those pleasures 
 of the senses which may precede or accompany the 
 aesthetic fact, and those that are purely sensuous; 
 and the inevitable result is a complete reduction of 
 the aesthetic to the sensual. In such theories, 
 the real aesthetic problem does not even reach the 
 stage of being formulated. 
 
 The truth that the hedonist obscurely foresees 
 is that every spiritual activity is constantly ac- 
 companied by the practical reflex of satisfaction 
 and dissatisfaction, pleasure and pain, value and 
 dis-value. Value is every activity that unfolds 
 itself freely, dis-value is the coiitrasted, hindered, 
 impeded unfolding of the same activity. If we 
 call beauty the aesthetic value, then beauty is but 
 the successful expression, or better, the expression, 
 since an unsuccessful expression is not an expression 
 at all. And it is not necessary to repeat that by 
 expression we distinctly mean not the physical 
 stimulus, but the spiritual synthesis. 
 
 With this definition of aesthetic value we reach
 
 The Concept of Art 129 
 
 one of the most important points of Croce's thought: 
 the solution of what he calls the dualism of values, 
 or ideals, to the concrete realities. As the beautiful 
 expression is simply expressioji, the true thought 
 is simply thought, and so on, so the ugly expression 
 or the false thought are non-expression and non- 
 thought, the non-being which has no reality out- 
 side the moment of its opposition and criticism.
 
 IV. TECHNIQUE AND CRITICISM 
 
 Art and technique — Errors deriving from the common conception of 
 technique — The theories of the particular arts — The hterary genres 
 — ^The rhetorical categories — The categories of language — Genius 
 and taste — The aesthetic judgment — The idolatry of standards — 
 The aesthetic standard: the true objectivity — Criticism and history. 
 
 The relation between the aesthetic activity and 
 the practical moment of the production of the 
 physical objects of art may be regarded under the 
 aspect of the relation betweeen art and technique. 
 The only legitimate meaning of the word technique 
 is that of a body of naturalistic knowledge in the 
 service of the practical activity of the artist. In 
 this sense we can conceive of a great artist who 
 is a poor technician, as in the case of a painter who 
 should use colours subject to rapid change and 
 deterioration, a musician who should be a bad singer 
 or pianist, a poet who should not be able to recite 
 his own poetry. But in the common language of 
 critics, we mean by technique something quite 
 different — in painting what we call drawing or com- 
 position, in music, harmony or orchestration, in 
 poetry, metre and construction. Now it is quite 
 clear that we cannot conceive of a great painter 
 who could not draw, a great musician unable to 
 harmonize or to orchestrate, a great poet whose 
 
 130
 
 Technique and Criticism 131 
 
 lines are defective. What we here isolate as the 
 technical handling of an artistic subject is but 
 the process of aesthetic creation itself, the succes- 
 sion and progression of intuitions in the artist's 
 mind; using the naturalistic or psychological method, 
 we abstract certain moments of the creative process, 
 and we attribute a reality to such abstractions. 
 We talk of the technique of a poem or of a paint- 
 ing as being something that has been superadded 
 to the original intuition; we see the poet or the 
 artist engaged in learning the technique of his art; 
 we see him correcting or modifying his original ex- 
 pression according to certain technical standards. 
 But what we call the technique of a poem or of a 
 painting is that particular poem or painting in its 
 concreteness; and no poet or artist can learn a 
 technique except by re-creating in his own spirit the 
 work of the great masters, his technical education 
 being but one with his aesthetic education; and 
 finally, the process of correction or modification is 
 merely a stage of the expressive process itself: no 
 poet can correct a line in his poem, no painter change 
 a line or a shade in his picture, if the internal image 
 has not first spontaneously undergone such correc- 
 tions and changes in his mind. 
 
 The consequences of the common conception of 
 technique in criticism are more dangerous, because 
 more subtle and affecting a more intimate knowledge 
 of art, than those of any other aesthetic error. The 
 talk of the connoisseur and of the average musical
 
 1 3 2 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 or dramatic critic is full of such fallacies as the tech- 
 nical errors of great painters, the harmonic or 
 orchestral wonders of poor music, the faulty con- 
 struction of a great play; fallacies which may some- 
 times have originated from some real character of 
 the aesthetic fact, but which are mere contradic- 
 tions in terms. And the literary critic will speak 
 of t\iQ fine frc?2zy and the quiet eye^ meaning by the 
 one, the abstract inspiration, and by the other 
 the abstract production, and so miss the true aes- 
 thetic moment which is neither the one nor the 
 other, but the synthesis of the two. Or he will 
 oppose romanticism to classicism, in a similar sense, 
 without realizing that all art is at the same time 
 romantic and classic, truly inspired, and because 
 truly inspired, able to express itself. 
 
 Mere variations of the naturalistic or psycholog- 
 ical conception of technique, as an actual moment 
 of the aesthetic creation, are a series of theories 
 which Croce has extensively criticised, and of 
 which we can give but a cursory account. 
 
 The theories of the particular arts and of their 
 limits originate from the manuals of practical pre- 
 cepts useful to architects, sculptors, painters or 
 musicians, and are founded on the assumed pos- 
 sibility of finding a field of the aesthetic activity 
 corresponding to the physical means employed by 
 each category of artists. But we have already 
 seen that in the aesthetic fact there is no distinc- 
 tion between means and end: we can speak of
 
 Technique and Criticism 133 
 
 the various arts in a purely empirical sense, as an 
 external classification of the objects of art, but 
 not as classes of aesthetic activity. 
 
 A similar kind of classification is the one which 
 gives rise to the literary genre, and to similar ab- 
 stractions in the other arts: legitimate instruments 
 of work as long as we do not forget that there does 
 not exist anything like the idea of a tragedy or 
 sonata apart from all concrete tragedies or sonatas, 
 and as long as we do not condemn a new tragedy 
 or a new sonata simply because it is not like the old 
 ones, that is, as long as we do not transform an 
 abstract type into a law. Every new aesthetic 
 creation, far from being bound to obey external 
 laws, establishes new laws, or rather is its own law. 
 It must, and will, answer only for itself, and the 
 only claim that we can put upon it is that of in- 
 ternal coherence. Both the theories of the arts 
 and the theories of the genres, 'when we try to treat 
 them as true and rigorous, and not as mere practi- 
 cal expedients, manifest the absurdity of their 
 task through their incapacity to give precise and 
 absolute definitions. Every work of art expresses 
 a state of mind, and every state of mind is irre- 
 ducibly individual and new: a complete classifica- 
 tion would therefore be only that in which every 
 class has under itself a single intuition. 
 
 Another form of the technical prejudice is the 
 creation of rhetorical categories, which are also 
 abstract classes of expressions tending to trans-
 
 134 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 form themselves into precepts. The main prej- 
 udice of rhetoric, in literature as well as in all other 
 arts, is that of the distinction between the simple 
 and the ornate, which is founded on a conception 
 of beauty not as the value of the expression, but 
 as something that can be added, so to speak, mechan- 
 ically, to the expression. Because of its preceptive 
 character, rhetoric has done more harm in the history 
 of poetry and art, than any of the other classifica- 
 tions of the same order; and though it is generally 
 discredited among artists and critics to-day, in its 
 pure original form, yet rhetorical prejudices, both in 
 the creation and judgment of art, are still endowed 
 with an obstinately vigorous life. 
 
 These naturalistic classifications in art have their 
 counterpart in the study of language, in the creation 
 of grammatical genres or categories or parts of speech, 
 and in the attempts to reduce the empirical gram- 
 mars to preceptive or normative grammars: that is, a 
 practical or pedagogic expedient, to a rhetoric or 
 technique of language. But the individuality and 
 indivisibility of expression is in the nature of lan- 
 guage as well as of art, and language obeys not the 
 abstract precepts of grammarians, but the law of the 
 aesthetic spirit which makes us find a new expression 
 for every new intuition. Even phonetic laws, the 
 modern scientific instruments of grammar, are mere 
 descriptive summaries of observed facts, of physical 
 moments abstracted from their spiritual reality, and 
 therefore abstract or naturalistic laws, and never ac-
 
 Technique and Criticism 135 
 
 tually represent the concrete, individually deter- 
 mined facts of language. 
 
 A coherent theory of aesthetic (literary and artistic) 
 criticism can be deduced from the concept of art as 
 intuition, and we have already anticipated its main 
 theses in the discussion of the concept itself. We 
 have seen that in the process of reproduction of an 
 aesthetic process, the actual moment in which the 
 original image, through the medium of what we have 
 abstracted as the physical stimulus, reproduces itself 
 in a mind other than that of the creator (or, in what 
 we might consider as a particular case, in the mind 
 of the creator himself at a time other than that of 
 the original creation), is a moment of aesthetic ac- 
 tivity identical with that of creation. Given an 
 identity of circumstances, that which takes place 
 within my mind is the same aesthetic process which 
 took place originally in the mind of the artist. If 
 we call genius the creative, and taste the reproductive 
 activity, the corollary of these considerations is that 
 of the identity of genius and taste: in the act of con- 
 templating and judging a work of art, our spirit be- 
 comes one with the spirit of the artist. Though in 
 practice this identity may never be attained (because 
 of variations in the material conditions of the physical 
 stimulus, or in the spiritual attitude of the contem- 
 plator), yet if we deny it, and establish a difference 
 in kind between these two aspects of aesthetic ac- 
 tivity, we find ourselves inevitably led to exclude the 
 possibility not of the aesthetic judgment only, but of
 
 136 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 all forms of aesthetic communication. There is a 
 sense in which we can speak of the relativity of taste, 
 and which accounts for the actual variety of judg- 
 ments, not in relation to art only, but to all forms of 
 human activity: every judgment is relative to our 
 knowledge, at a particular moment, of the actual con- 
 ditions in which the work of art was originally pro- 
 duced. But this is the intrinsic relativity of all the 
 particular determinations of reality, not a relativity 
 pecuHar to aesthetic values, which are as real, though 
 of a different order, as those of logic or morality. 
 
 But the aesthetic judgment itself is not the mere 
 intuitive reproduction of the work of art, made pos- 
 sible by what we call historical criticism in the narrow 
 sense of the word, that is, by interpretation and 
 comment. These are the antecedent of the aesthetic 
 judgment, which consists in a logical proposition of 
 the form: "A is art," or "A is not art," "A is art in 
 a b c, A is not art in d e f"; or again: "There is a 
 fact. A, which is a work of art," "There is a fact. A, 
 which is falsely believed to be a work of art." The 
 aesthetic judgment, like all other judgments, estab- 
 lishes a relation between a particular, concrete fact, 
 and a universal category, which is that of art. And, 
 like all other judgments, it is at the same time a 
 judgment of value and an historical judgment, which 
 is the obvious consequence of Croce's identification 
 of value and fact. .T.sthetic criticism therefore coin- 
 cides with the history of the aesthetic activity, with 
 the history of poetry or art.
 
 Technique and Criticism 137 
 
 A frequent reaction to Croce's aesthetics, and to 
 its implications in the theory of criticism, especially 
 among literary critics, is a sense of irritation caused 
 by the loss of the so-called standards of judgment. 
 It would be interesting to analyze these supposed 
 standards, wnich generally are not explicitly enun- 
 ciated (probably because their clear enunciation 
 would manifest their true nature, and annul them as 
 standards of sesthetic judgment), but only more or 
 less obscurely referred to with a mixture of pride and 
 reverence. They would then show themselves to be 
 the critical duplicates of the various aesthetic errors 
 which we have already discussed. 
 
 If the standards of which the critics speak are, as 
 is often the case, moral or intellectual ideals, it is 
 clear that Croce's aesthetics does not question their 
 validity, but only their application. There is a large 
 number of literary critics, who are such only in name, 
 and whose real interests are intellectual or moral, 
 critics of thought and of the ethical life, and not 
 of art. They use works of art as documents 
 and undoubtedly works of art are, in the unity of 
 the human spirit, documents of intellectual and 
 moral life; but their error begins when they confuse 
 the issues, and censure or praise the art of the past, 
 or try to influence the art of the future, with criteria 
 which are no longer intellectual or moral, but, be- 
 cause they have been transposed outside their legiti- 
 mate sphere, intellectualistic and moralistic. 
 
 All other so-called standards are derived from the
 
 138 7*^1? Philosophy of Mind 
 
 abstract ideas of literary genres and of rhetorical 
 categories. It is easy to judge of a new tragedy if 
 you know what a tragedy ought to be, if you have 
 a catalogue of purely external characteristics which 
 you may either find, or not find, in the new work 
 that comes before you. This is, of course, the crud- 
 est form of rhetorical criticism; there is another 
 which is not less frequent, but more subtle. The 
 critic builds up an ideal of what art ought to be, not 
 with abstract categories, and classifications trans- 
 formed into arbitrary aesthetic precepts or standards, 
 but through his predilection for one particular author, 
 or for one particular epoch, the Middle Ages or the 
 Renaissance, the Classics or the Romantics: every 
 work of art which is different either in spirit or in 
 form from those that have been chosen is con- 
 demned in proportion to its variation from the ideal. 
 This form of criticism is often also vitiated by the 
 intrusion of intellectualistic and moralistic errors, 
 since an ideal which is a mere particular determina- 
 tion of the past assumed as a universal value is 
 likely to be mere rhetoric of thought and morality 
 as well as of art. 
 
 The only legitimate standard in sesthetic criticism 
 is the aesthetic standard, that of beauty or expres- 
 sion, as against ugliness or non-expression. Our 
 critical judgment is the reaction of our aesthetic per- 
 sonality in the presence of a work of art, as the moral 
 judgment is the reaction of our moral personality in 
 the presence of an action. Our knowledge of a work
 
 Technique and Criticism 139 
 
 of art, of a concrete and individual intuition, as our 
 knowledge of an action, approaches more or less to 
 the ideal limit, according to the breadth of our ex- 
 perience and the depth of our understanding; but 
 there exist no external criteria on which we can rest 
 our judgment, no mechanical props which will sup- 
 port it. This theory of criticism, far from justifying 
 a capricious and arbitrary subjectivism, requires from 
 the critic a constant vigilance against that which is 
 narrowly personal, capricious, and arbitrary in him- 
 self; a patient, unceasing effort in the labor of re- 
 capturing and recreating the material and spiritual 
 circumstances from which the work of art originally 
 sprang; and the quick sensitivity of the artist coupled 
 with the wide understanding of the historian and 
 the philosopher. 
 
 When aesthetic criticism is raised to this plane on 
 which it coincides with the history of poetry, or of 
 art, it transforms itself necessarily into a general 
 criticism of life. What to the aesthetic consciousness 
 appears as ugly or non-expressive, since in the world 
 of history there are no negative facts, will not, when 
 historically considered, appear as a negative value, 
 but as a value of another order, as an intrusion of 
 the logical or of the practical spirit in the work of 
 the poet or of the artist. What in the Divine Com- 
 edy is not poetry is the outcome of philosophical or 
 moral preoccupations which have not become art, 
 have not fused themselves into a new, coherent in- 
 tuition, and must be apprehended not as art, but as
 
 140 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 philosophy and morality. The allegory of the Faerie 
 ^ueene is not art, but it is an expression of certain 
 aspects of the Protestant spirit in the England of 
 EHzabeth. In a poet like Byron, the presence of 
 practical motives is felt all through his poetical pro- 
 duction; and the critic cannot limit his work to ex- 
 tracting the gems, and to saying of all the rest: this 
 is not poetry. He must tell us what it is, and only 
 by telling what it is, he criticises it completely as 
 poetry. It is impossible, in fact, to give to art its 
 place, without assigning its place to all the other 
 activities of life. The great aesthetic critic will also 
 be a critic of philosophy, of morality, of politics; but, 
 as Croce says of De Sanctis, the strength of his purely 
 esthetic consideration of art will also be the strength 
 of his purely moral consideration of morality, of his 
 purely logical consideration of philosophy, and so on. 
 The forms or grades of the spirit, which the critic 
 employs as categories for his judgment, are ideally 
 distinct in the unity of the spirit, but cannot ma- 
 terially be separated from each other or from that 
 unity without losing all their vitality. The distinc- 
 tion of aesthetic criticism from the other forms of 
 criticism, of the history of poetry and the arts from 
 the other kinds of history, is but an empirical one, 
 pointing to the fact that the attention of the critic 
 or historian is turned towards one aspect rather than 
 another of the same indivisible reality.
 
 V. THE PURE CONCEPT ' 
 
 The function of logic in the system — The concept — Logical concepts and 
 conceptual fictions — The pure concept as the unity of distinctions — 
 Singularity, particularity and universality — The dialectic process in 
 Hegel and in Croce — Opposition, distinction and value— The ex- 
 pressiveness of the concept — Definition and individual judgment: 
 their identity — Classification and numeration — The a priori syn- 
 thesis. 
 
 We have summarily examined in the three preced- 
 ing chapters the theory of aesthetic, or intuitive, 
 or individual, as distinct from logical, or conceptual, 
 or universal, knowledge. We must now leave the 
 aesthetic activity in the background as the mere ante- 
 cedent of the logical one, and proceed to investigate 
 the latter. 
 
 In a sense it may be said that the key to every 
 system of philosophy is to be found in the either 
 implicit or explicit solution given to certain logical 
 problems and that only by understanding the logic 
 of a philosopher can we be sure to give its true 
 meaning and value to his thought. The reverse is, 
 as a general rule, also true: any solution of a particu- 
 lar problem, any particular elaboration of the con- 
 cept, when fully understood, will lead us back to the 
 philosopher's logic, to his concept of the concept. 
 
 The main points of Croce's logic could easily be 
 
 ^ See Logica, part i, " II concetto puro," etc., pp. 1-170, 
 141
 
 142 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 deduced from his aesthetics; but an untrained mind 
 might unwittingly transpose the whole aesthetic the- 
 ory on a purely psychological plane, and involve it 
 again in the errors and contradictions of which it 
 aims at being a conclusive refutation. A study of 
 Croce's logic will render such a shifting of the per- 
 spective impossible. It will show that a discussion of 
 Croce's aesthetics has no meaning except on the logical 
 plane on which Croce has put it, and that therefore 
 any serious objection to it ought necessarily to imply 
 either a revision of the logical premises, or a demon- 
 stration that the actual logical processes are not rigor- 
 ously in accord with these premises. What is here 
 said of Croce's aesthetics is valid also for Croce's 
 economics or ethics, and the reason is obvious. 
 Croce's Logica is not a manual of logic, in a scholastic 
 and formalistic sense: it is the exposition of his con- 
 ception of the logical activity, and therefore the 
 philosophy of his philosophy. 
 
 This method of approach to the logical problems, 
 although unusual in our times, and antagonistic to 
 the general tendencies of our culture, is not only, as 
 its opponents assume, that of Kant and Hegel, but 
 that of the whole tradition of European philosophy, 
 beginning with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. It was 
 only in epochs of philosophical decadence that logic 
 reduced itself to a mere formalism or instrumental- 
 ism, to a doctrine of the means of thought, as op- 
 posed to its proper function, which is that of inquir- 
 ing into the nature of thought, and therefore, since
 
 The Pure Concept 143 
 
 there is no way by which we can reach reality except 
 through thought, into the nature of reality itself. 
 To Croce, as before him to Hegel, the philosophical 
 tradition is not a capricious sequel of unrelated specu- 
 lations, but a series of connected efforts through 
 which the human mind becomes progressively con- 
 scious of its own functions and structure. Nothing 
 is more alien from him than that type of philosophical 
 criticism, which exhausts itself in an attempt at re- 
 ducing under a common denominator apparently 
 similar solutions of problems, which in fact are pro- 
 foundly different in their historical determination: 
 but this consciousness of the historical factor in 
 philosophy, far from breeding in him a sense of 
 scepticism and of the relativity of truth, impels him 
 to consider every effective thought as a necessary 
 moment of truth, and to represent therefore the suc- 
 cession of effective thoughts, critically separated from 
 what in the various concrete philosophies is merely 
 postulated or imagined, as a perpetual integration 
 of truth. This attitude explains why the immediate 
 foundations of Croce's logic should be Kant's a priori 
 synthesis and Hegel's dialectic, that is, the highest 
 stages of the development of European thought be- 
 fore the positivistic antimetaphysical reaction which 
 swept away for a time, not the last traces of trans- 
 cendental metaphysics only, but philosophy and 
 logic itself; and why also, among all the recent 
 critics of Kant and Hegel, Croce should be one of 
 the keenest and sharpest. His sure grasp of funda-
 
 144 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 mentals made it easy for him to demolish all that is 
 artificial and unessential in their systems; as is 
 particularly evident in the case of Hegel, who 
 emerged from Croce's criticism as the discoverer of 
 one great principle and at the same time the creator, 
 through the misapplication of the same principle, 
 of many a false science. 
 
 This return to the philosophical tradition, which 
 between the end of the last and the beginning of 
 this century, was not limited to Croce and to Italy 
 only, was accompanied and indirectly favoured by 
 the researches of pure scientists on the method of 
 exact and natural sciences. The economic theory 
 of the scientific concept, such as it appears especially 
 in the works of Mach and x^venarius, and to an 
 understanding of which Croce had been prepared 
 by his own studies on Marxism, was probably the 
 most efficient instrument in destroying from within 
 the pseudo-scientific constructions of positivism. 
 The scientists themselves, by defining the limits 
 of scientific thought, proved the impossibility of 
 building a philosophy which should be at the same 
 time a synthesis of all particular sciences and a 
 system of reality. The conclusions of this new 
 scientific methodology are on the whole accepted 
 by Croce, and the fact that they naturally fall into 
 their proper place in his logic is the most valid 
 justification of his method, to which the distinction 
 between the concept of philosophy and the concepts 
 of the sciences is essential.
 
 The Pure Concept 1 45 
 
 We need not point to the object of logic, or con- 
 cept, as we did in a former chapter to the object 
 of esthetics, or intuition. The writing of this book 
 implies a belief in its existence, and we could take 
 practically any page of it as an example of what we 
 mean by concept, or logical knowledge. We shall 
 not therefore pause to confute logical scepticism, 
 except by repeating the old argument that it is 
 impossible to deny the existence of the concept 
 except through the formulation of a concept. Such 
 affirmations as that there is no other knowledge 
 than the aesthetic one, or the one which is given 
 by the ineffable intuition of the mystic, or by prac- 
 tical fictions, are in their turn neither aesthetic 
 knowledge nor mystical intuitions, nor practical 
 fictions, but affirmations, however contradictory 
 in themselves, of a universal value and of an absolute 
 character, that is, concepts. Through them, it is 
 possible immediately to distinguish the logical form 
 of knowledge, as represented by such affirmations, 
 from the aesthetic or representative one, from the 
 sentimental or practical state of mind of the mystic, 
 and from those concepts which are mere empirical 
 fictions. It is evident, in this last instance, that the 
 theory of the fiction cannot be a new fiction, but 
 must belong to an activity of a different kind, the 
 logical activity, whose value is truth. 
 
 Of those three forms of logical scepticism, aes- 
 theticism, mysticism, and empiricism, the third 
 one leads us to the distinction between the logical
 
 146 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 concept and the scientific concepts, or fictions. The 
 logical or pure concept is beyond all individual 
 representations, and must therefore not contain 
 any particular representative element; but, on the 
 other hand, being the universal as opposed to the 
 individuality of representations, it must refer to all 
 and each of them. If we think, for instance, of the 
 concepts of beauty, truth, quality, development, 
 and such like, it will be impossible for us to represent 
 or imagine a sufficiently large fragment of reality 
 that will exhaust them, or such an infinitesimal one 
 as will not admit them. This is what is meant by 
 saying that the concept is at the same time universal 
 and concrete, or, in other words, that it is transcen- 
 dent in respect to every single representation, and 
 yet immanent in all of them. A third characteristic 
 of the pure concept, besides those of universality 
 and concreteness, is that of expressivity: being a 
 product of knowledge, it must be expressed and 
 spoken, and cannot be a dumb act of the mind, 
 such as practical acts are. 
 
 The conceptual fictions, or, as Croce called them 
 on account of their non-theoretical character, the 
 pseudo-concepts differ from the pure concept in being 
 either concrete and representative but not universal, 
 or universal without any possible reference to indi- 
 vidual representations, that is, without concreteness. 
 The first class is that of empirical concepts, which 
 contain some objects or fragments of reality, but 
 not the whole of reality: such as the concepts of
 
 The Pure Concept 147 
 
 house, cat, rose. The second is that of abstract 
 concepts, which contain no object or fragment of 
 reahty: such as those of triangle in geometry or 
 of free movement in physics. The first are real, 
 but not rigorous, the second rigorous, but unreal. 
 Neither the ones nor the others can be considered 
 as mistaken concepts or errors, since after having 
 criticised them from a logical point of view, we still 
 continue to use them for what they are; nor as 
 imperfect concepts, and preparatory to the perfect 
 ones, since their formation presupposes the existence 
 of the perfect and rigorous ones: it would be impos- 
 sible to conceive the house, the rose, the triangle, 
 before conceiving quantity, quality, existence, and 
 other pure concepts. It is true that in the actual 
 development of thought, conceptual fictions have 
 again and again given birth to true concepts; but 
 in that case they have lost their intrinsic nature, and 
 have assumed the characters of the genuine logical 
 activity. In order to understand the proper function 
 or nature of the conceptual fictions, it is necessary 
 to fix our attention on the moment of their formation, 
 which is practical and not logical. Their justification 
 lies in their practical end and in their usefulness: 
 they are instruments by the help of which we can 
 recall with a single word vast groups of representa- 
 tions, or which indicate in a single word what kind 
 of operation is required in order to find certain 
 representations. The act of forming intellectual 
 fictions is neither an act of knowledge nor of not-
 
 148 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 knowledge; logically, it is neither rational nor 
 irrational (true or untrue); its rationality is of an- 
 other order, practical and not logical. The activity 
 which produces pure concepts, and that which pro- 
 duces empirical or abstract concepts, have been called 
 respectively Reason and x'\bstract Intellect, or In- 
 tuition and Intellect; to which terminology Croce 
 objects that the word intellect is certainly inappro- 
 priate to a non-theoretical activity. Croce himself is 
 in no need of a new name for it, since he considers it 
 one with the general practical activity, will or action. 
 The definition that we have given of the pure 
 concept seems to clash against an insuperable 
 difficulty arising from the multiplicity of concepts. 
 If the concept is an elaboration of reality as a uni- 
 versal, how can we admit the existence of more than 
 one concept? Beauty and truth are both concrete 
 universals, and yet they are not the same universal: 
 they have the same logical form, but they denote 
 different aspects of reality. If this variety of the 
 concepts, that is, of the aspects of reality, were 
 insuperable, we should fall from the irreducible 
 multiplicity of representations into a not less irre- 
 ductible multiplicity of concepts, which would in 
 the end justify a new logical scepticism and take us 
 back to a mystical solution of the problem of the 
 unity of reality. The passage from the multiple 
 universals to the true universal would be logically 
 impossible, and to be performed only by the help 
 of some sort of mystical intuition.
 
 The Pure Concept 149 
 
 The solution of this difficulty has already been 
 hinted at in the discussion of the relations between 
 intuition and concept, and between knowledge and 
 will. The theory of the successive grades of reality, 
 in their progressive implication, is the true form of 
 the concept. Croce affirms the unity of reahty, as a 
 consequence of the unity of the concept, of the form 
 through which only reality is known. But if we 
 suppress the distinction, the unity that we reach 
 is an empty and ineffable one: a whole is a whole 
 only inasmuch as it has parts, as it is parts; a unity 
 can be thought only through its distinctions. There- 
 fore the unity and the distinctions are both necessary 
 to the concept: the distinctions are not something 
 outside the concept, but the concept itself, which 
 is a unity of distinctions. The mind or spirit is one, 
 but it is impossible to think of it as a pure and 
 simple unity, outside of the forms in which it realizes 
 itself, and of these forms in their necessary relations. 
 Which is but a more comprehensive way of saying 
 what we have already said speaking of one of those 
 forms in particular, the aesthetic one, that it is 
 impossible to conceive any of them except by deter- 
 mining its relations with the others. 
 
 It is necessary, however, not to convert these 
 distinctions of the concept into abstractions: by 
 approximation, and for a practical purpose, we 
 can speak of a given action as a theoretical or prac- 
 tical one, an economic or moral one. In fact, in 
 every fragment of reality we find the universal,
 
 150 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 and therefore all the forms of the universal. But 
 on the other hand it is impossible to think any con- 
 crete datum, and to recognize it as an affirmation 
 of the spirit as a whole, unless we distinguish each 
 of its aspects in the most rigorous fashion. We 
 shall then have a criticism of art and poetry, from 
 the aesthetic point of view; or of philosophy, from 
 the logical one; and a moral judgment which takes 
 into account only the individual moral initiative. 
 The distinctions of the concept are then used as 
 directing principles of thought, but not, in the way 
 empirical concepts are used, as criteria for a classifi- 
 cation of objects; nor, again, as characteristics of 
 epochs of actual historical development, which in 
 the end reduce themselves to types of material 
 classification. 
 
 Croce's theory of the unity and distinctions of 
 the concept coincides with the old division of con- 
 cepts into universal, particular, and singular ones. 
 The true logical definition is reached only by deter- 
 mining the singularity of a distinction in relation 
 with the other distinctions (particularity), and with 
 the whole (universality). For instance, the concept 
 of beauty is intuition (singularity), knowledge 
 (particularity), and finally spirit or mind (uni- 
 versality). The symbol corresponding to this 
 peculiar relation is not that of a line or succession, 
 but of a circle: there is not a first and a last term 
 of the series, a beginning and an end, but a perpetual 
 revolution, in which every distinction in turn may
 
 The Pure Concept 151 
 
 appear as the beginning and the end of the series. 
 Art or philosophy, knowledge or action, may be 
 postulated with equal reason as the end of the spirit: 
 the true end, however, is not any of the particular 
 forms, but only the spirit or mind or reality as a 
 whole. 
 
 Readers who are familiar with Hegelian logic will 
 at once perceive the difference between Croce's 
 and Hegel's treatment of logical distinctions. There 
 is no attempt on the part of Croce to apply to them 
 the dialectic process, which pervades the whole of 
 Hegel's philosophy, and which is retained by Croce 
 only in its legitimate sphere which is not that of 
 distinctions but of oppositions. The dialectic proc- 
 ess, of which the remote ancestor is Plato, and the 
 more immediate forbears those Renaissance philoso- 
 phers, Cusanus and Bruno, who more or less ob- 
 scurely affirmed the principium coincidentice opposi- 
 torum^ only with Hegel reaches its rigorous logical 
 expression. The most famous instance of its applica- 
 tion is to be found in Hegel's formula of the opposi- 
 tion of being and non-being, and of their unity in the 
 becoming: the pure being is identical with the pure 
 non-being, or, to say the same thing in different 
 words, we cannot think the one without the other, 
 and we do actually think the one and the other when 
 we think the actual reality, which is neither being 
 nor non-being, but becoming. Being and non-being 
 are a true couple of opposites, as ideal and real, posi- 
 tive and negative, value and non-value, activity and
 
 152 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 passivity, and so on. By the application of the 
 dialectic process, all these couples are shown to be 
 not couples of concepts, but single concepts, each 
 couple containing the affirmation and the negation of 
 a single concept. Croce's criticism of Hegel is 
 founded on an interpretation of the dialectic process 
 as logically valid for such couples only, and inappli- 
 cable to the distinctions of the concept, or to empir- 
 ical and abstract concepts; and this criticism, while 
 emphasizing the importance of Hegel's main con- 
 tribution to philosophical thought, sweeps away at 
 one stroke all that in his philosophy has generally 
 been considered as most distinctly Hegelian both by 
 his followers and by his adversaries. 
 
 Croce's interest in such couples of opposites as 
 those that we have mentioned is very far from being 
 as keen as Hegel's. Their dialectic solution into 
 single concepts is implicit in every phase of Croce's 
 philosophy. This can best be seen in the constant 
 interchange of such words as spirit and reality; each 
 of them, when taken by itself, a pure, formal spirit, 
 and a pure, material reality, are meaningless, while, 
 once they have been correlated, both indicate the 
 same concept, the spirit perpetually realizing itself 
 in the concreteness of life: a formula which contains 
 the whole of Croce's immanentism. But within the 
 distinctions of the concept, the dialectic process is 
 constantly applied by Croce to such oppositions as 
 those of good and evil, true and false, beautiful and 
 ugly, which are nothing but the double aspect.
 
 The Pure Concept 153 
 
 affirmative and negative, respectively, of the con- 
 cepts of goodness, and truth, and beauty. We need 
 only recall what we have said of Croce's conception 
 of aesthetic value, and of value in general. The 
 dialectic process is the logical structure of Croce's 
 concept of value. The positive element of each con- 
 cept is the only real one, and a negative judgment of 
 value is not a purely logical judgment, but a state- 
 ment to which is added the expression of a desire 
 or of an exigency. I f we say : A is immoral, we mean : 
 A follows his own immediate pleasure (a logical state- 
 ment), and also: A ought to follow a higher end (the 
 expression of a desire). A positive judgment of 
 value, on the other hand, coincides entirely with a 
 logical judgment, or a statement of fact. The op- 
 position of value to fact is of the same kind as that of 
 spirit to reality; verbal and apparent and not logical 
 and real. The underlying reality of the opposition 
 can be grasped only through the distinction; what in 
 the opposition is a negative and therefore a mere 
 abstraction can never be anything but a positive 
 value of another order, a distinct form of activity. 
 The action that we have judged as morally evil, if it 
 is an action at all, belongs to the economic order, is 
 economically rational, directed towards a particular 
 end which confers on it its particular value; and the 
 same applies to all the other categories of reality, in 
 which error and evil cannot be introduced except by 
 the substitution of one form for the other. It is im- 
 possible to distinguish a concept from its opposite as
 
 154 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 two concepts; but when a distinction is introduced, 
 the opposition loses its negative character, and iden- 
 tifies itself with a distinct but positive value. Error 
 and evil as such are never present except in the act 
 that transcends them, in the conscience that, realizing 
 itself in a higher sphere, turns against them and con- 
 demns them. It is superfluous to point to the im- 
 portance that this process lends to the distinctions 
 themselves, which are now seen at last not as mere 
 logical instruments, but as the actual differentiations 
 of reality, the necessary conditions of all life and 
 progress. 
 
 The concept does not exist outside its verbal ex- 
 pression, but the relation between logical thought and 
 language, because of the purely aesthetic or intuitive 
 nature of language, is not of the rigorous character 
 which is postulated by the Aristotelian logician, and, 
 in more recent times, by the student of symbolic 
 logic, who both assume language to be an essentially 
 logical function. It would be impossible for Croce to 
 fall into that extreme of idealism which is the com- 
 mon vice of the verbal realist, for whom propositions, 
 judgments, or syllogisms have a kind of absolute 
 reality of their own, independent of the mind that 
 thinks them. It may seem paradoxical to assert that 
 nowhere is Croce's realism more apparent than in his 
 treatment of the verbal forms of the concept; and yet 
 his criticism of the old logical principles and forms, 
 running parallel to that of the rhetorical categories 
 and genres in the field of aesthetics, allows him to
 
 The Pure Concept 155 
 
 reach the actual workings of the logical activity with 
 much greater intimacy than is possible through any 
 kind of formalistic logic. 
 
 The logical judgment, or concept, appears In two 
 main forms: the definition, and the individual judg- 
 ment. In the definition, the subject is one with the 
 predicate, both being universal; In the Individual 
 judgm.ent, the subject Is an Individual, the predicate 
 a universal. "The intuition Is the aesthetic form of 
 the spirit," Is a definition; "The Divine Comedy is 
 poetry," Is an individual judgment. The Individual 
 judgment is one with the perception, or perceptive 
 judgment, with the historical judgment, and, for 
 the reason given before, with the positive judgment 
 of value; it is the last and most perfect form of knowl- 
 edge. But the distinction between the definition and 
 the individual judgment Is not an ultimate and ir- 
 reducible one. The concrete logical act is always an 
 individual judgment, that is, the affirmation of the 
 unity of the individual and the universal in relation 
 to a particular subject; and every definition is an 
 individual judgment inasmuch as it cannot be but 
 the solution of a particular problem, Individually and 
 historically determined. The particular problem, the 
 group of facts, from which a particular definition 
 arises. Is the Individual subject of which the defini- 
 tion predicates the concept. This identification of 
 the definition and the individual judgment disposes 
 of the familiar distinctions of formal and material 
 truths, of truths of reason and of fact, and of analy ti-
 
 156 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 cal and synthetical judgments; which all are reduced 
 to mere abstractions, partial aspects of the only logi- 
 cal act, consisting in the thinking of the pure concept, 
 as a concrete universal. 
 
 The practical imitations of the concept, or pseudo- 
 concepts, also may appear in the double form of 
 definitions and individual judgments. From the 
 empirical concepts we can form empirical judgments, 
 which consist in the inclusion of an individual sub- 
 ject within a class or type, and therefore can also be 
 called classificatory judgments. From the abstract 
 concepts, the passage to the individual subject cannot 
 be effected without the intervention of an empirical 
 concept, that is, without a previous reduction of the 
 individual subjects to classes and types: this reduc- 
 tion enables us to form empirico-abstract judgments, 
 or judgments of numeration and mensuration. The 
 function of these judgments is, as that of the concepts 
 with which they are related, not theoretical, but 
 practical: to classify or to enumerate is not the same 
 as to understand, though they are both essential 
 operations of the human mind. The corresponding 
 judgments are therefore called by Croce pseudo- 
 judgments, or practical imitations of the individual 
 judgment. 
 
 The reduction of the pure concept to the individual 
 judgment is the fundamental innovation of Croce's 
 logic. It entirely disposes of any form of transcen- 
 dental thought, of an Absolute or a Universal as some- 
 thing beyond and above reality, and therefore of the
 
 The Pure Concept 1 57 
 
 last remnants of metaphysics in philosophy. It 
 means, translated into terms of common language, 
 that there is no thought outside the thinking of in- 
 dividual minds, individually, that is, historically 
 determined; and, conversely, that there is no reality 
 outside the reality of thought, since the postulation 
 of an external reality is nothing but one more act of 
 thought. In the light of this doctrine, the relation 
 between the intuition and the concept, between 
 aesthetic and logical knowledge, can be restated by 
 saying that while the intuition is the autonomous, 
 creative mental act, by which the individual is known 
 as individual, the concept is the autonomous, crea- 
 tive mental act, by which the individual is known as 
 universal, that is, not simply known, but understood. 
 Since Kant, an autonomous creative act of the hu- 
 man mind has received in modern philosophy the 
 name of a priori synthesis, a synthesis which cannot 
 be resolved into its components, or material elements, 
 because its form, and therefore its true being, cannot 
 be traced in them, but is imposed on them by the 
 mind. Croce's intuition is an aesthetic a priori 
 synthesis, through which the obscure psychic mate- 
 rial rises to the light of consciousness; his concept, a 
 logical a priori synthesis, in which the intuition is no 
 longer form, but matter, subject to a new form which 
 is judgment and reason. The a priori synthesis is 
 thus employed by Croce as the peculiar dialectic proc- 
 ess of the distinctions of the concept, the rigorous 
 logical form of the double-grade relation between the
 
 158 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 individual and the universal, between intuition and 
 concept, between knowledge and action, and, as we 
 shall see in his philosophy of the practical, between 
 the economic and the ethical will. It is, however, not 
 a mere logical form, or rather, it is a logical form, 
 because it is the actual process of the spirit, which 
 cannot either know or act except by forming a priori 
 syntheses (aesthetic or logical, economic or ethical), 
 that is, by constantly re-creating itself and its own 
 reality and values.
 
 VI. THE FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE i 
 
 The elementary forms of knowledge — Philosophy as the pure concept — 
 Development of Croce's theory of history — The identity of history 
 and philosophy — Subjectivity and objectivity — Distinctions and 
 divisions of history — The historical determination of philosophy — 
 The economic theory of science — The natural sciences — History 
 and science — The naturalistic method and the concept of nature — 
 Mathematical processes. 
 
 The result of Croce's inquiry into the forms of 
 man's theoretical activity can be summed up by 
 saying that there are two pure theoretical forms, the 
 intuition and the concept, of which the second can be 
 subdivided for convenience' sake into the definition 
 and the individual judgment; and two modes of the 
 practical elaboration of knowledge, the empirical 
 concept and the abstract concept, from which are 
 derived the classificatory judgment and the judg- 
 ment of numeration. Already in aesthetics we have 
 found no rigorous criterion of distinction between the 
 general intuitive activity of man, as it manifests 
 itself in language, and those empirically constituted 
 bodies of particular intuitions, which we call Poetry 
 and the Arts: every man is a poet and an artist, 
 though we reserve these names only for those among 
 ourselves in whom the esthetic activity manifests 
 
 ' See Logica, part ii, La filosofia, la storia, etc., pp. 171-269. 
 159
 
 1 60 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 itself in a higher degree, dominates the whole life of 
 the individual spirit. The concept and the pseudo- 
 concepts are also elementary, fundamental forms of 
 knowledge, of which all men partake: every man, as 
 he is a poet, is also a philosopher and an historian, a 
 scientist and a mathematician: but, again, we reserve 
 these names only for the most conspicuous manifes- 
 tations of those common spiritual activities, and 
 form the empirical concepts of Philosophy and 
 History, of Science and Mathematics. We may 
 speak of vulgar knowledge and of pure or scientific 
 knowledge, but only by approximation and without 
 forgetting that the only claim to rationality and 
 intelligibility on the part of pure knowledge lies in its 
 relationship with the elementary forms, in the same 
 way as Poetry owes its power and beauty to the 
 language in which it spreads its roots. A particular 
 treatment of these higher degrees of knowledge is not, 
 therefore, logically justified; the problems that they 
 present are the same that have been met with in the 
 general discussion of the theoretical activity, and all 
 they will have to ofTer will be but a confirmation, and 
 in some points a clarification, of what has already 
 been said. 
 
 As x-^rt is intuition, so Philosophy is the pure con- 
 cept: it is easy to see that all the formal definitions 
 of Philosophy that have ever been given, as science of 
 the first principles, of the ultimate causes, of the 
 origins of things, of norms, of values, of categories, 
 are mere verbal variants of the pure concept. Even
 
 The Forms of Knowledge i6i 
 
 the most materialistic and realistic philosophies, 
 since matter itself or nature or reality are assumed by 
 them as principles of universal validity, as concepts 
 or ideas, fall within the limits of this definition. In 
 this sense there is no philosophy which is not ideal- 
 istic: the differences between one philosophy and 
 another are nothing but differences in the elaboration 
 of the pure concept. What follows from this identifi- 
 cation of philosophy with the pure concept is that 
 all philosophies are, of necessity, systematic, inas- 
 much as it is impossible to think the pure concept as 
 a singular or particular one, outside its relations 
 with the whole. This systematic character belongs 
 to every philosophical proposition, and not only to 
 the actual systems of philosophy: the solution of 
 every particular philosophical problem implies a 
 vision of that problem in its universality, that is, in 
 the system. We are constantly reminded of this 
 exigency by the fact that a new and original elabora- 
 tion of particular problems does actually react on the 
 whole of our thought; and that we are often com- 
 pelled to revise our fundamental opinions by the 
 discovery of a difficulty which at first presents itself 
 in one sphere of thought only. 
 
 Of such a process, the whole of Croce's philosophy 
 is a continuous exemplification, but nowhere so 
 clearly apparent as in the progress of his conception 
 of history. His first step had been that of reducing 
 history to the general concept of art, thereby em- 
 phasizing the concreteness and individuality of
 
 1 62 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 history, as opposed to the abstractness of the natural 
 sciences, the concepts of which, in that early stage, he 
 could not yet distinguish from those of philosophy. 
 In the Estetica the conception is still practically the 
 same, history resulting from the intersection of art 
 and philosophy through the application of the predi- 
 cate of existence to the intuitive material. In his 
 first Lineamenti di Logica, history appears as the 
 ultimate product of the theoretical spirit, " the sea to 
 which the river of art flowed, swollen by the waters 
 of the river of philosophy." But in the same 
 Lineamenti he had not yet arrived at the identifica- 
 tion of the definition and the individual judgment, 
 which in his second Logica constitutes the final form 
 of the pure concept, Croce's original interpretation of 
 Kant's a priori synthesis. Between the first and the 
 second Logica^ Croce wrote his Filosojia delta pratica^ 
 in which he denied the duality of intention and action, 
 as in the Estetica he had denied the duality of intui- 
 tion and expression: an intention which was not also 
 an action appeared to him, as we shall see, incon- 
 ceivable. It was by analogy with his treatment of 
 this duality, that he solved the duality between the 
 concept (in the sense of definition) and the individual 
 judgment, which was also a duality of philosophy as 
 antecedent and history as consequent, as he per- 
 ceived that a concept which is not at the same time a 
 judgment of the particular is as unreal as an intention 
 which is not at the same time an action. 
 
 These are the successive steps by which Croce
 
 The Forms of Knowledge 163 
 
 reached his doctrine of the identity of history and 
 philosophy, one of the most discussed and of the 
 least understood among his theories. We shall 
 come back to it later. But a few more hints on its 
 meaning can already be given here. It is clear 
 that by introducing the predicate of existence as 
 essential to history Croce had already abandoned 
 the conception of history as pure, that is, non- 
 logical, non-intellectualized intuition: but the pred- 
 icate of existence is insufficient to form a judgment, 
 without the addition of the other predicates, that 
 is, of the whole concept. The predicate of existence 
 can only tell us that something exists, but not what 
 It is that exists: the determination of the singular, 
 in its relations with the particular and the universal, 
 is implicit in the historical judgment, even when it 
 is not openly enunciated. Such judgments as: This 
 thing is, or has been, seem to present the proper 
 form of the historical judgment; no other predicates 
 than that of existence are here visible, but my talk- 
 ing of this thing implies that I know what this thing 
 is; the other predicates are concealed in the subject. 
 Every historical statement is, therefore, a perfect 
 individual judgment. Its concrete and individual 
 character, which Croce had asserted in his early 
 theory, is here maintained by the presence of the 
 subject, though the subject itself, in history, is 
 seen not in its intuitive purity, as In poetry, but as a 
 concrete determination of the concept. The identi- 
 fication of philosophy and history is not so much
 
 164 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 the effect of a more intellectualized view of the 
 historical processes, as of the progressive conscious- 
 ness acquired by Croce of the inherent concreteness 
 and individuality of the universal — of that realistic 
 view of the concept as expressed by his elaboration 
 of the logical a priori synthesis. 
 
 The old distinction between a subjective and 
 an objective treatment of history receives a new 
 light from the foregoing considerations. It is im- 
 possible to make history without judgment, and, 
 therefore, history is in a sense irreducibly subjective. 
 But the subjectivity of history is not the arbitrary 
 and capricious subjectivity of the individual his- 
 torian, who introduces his own passions and ten- 
 dencies into the historical narrative: it is the sub- 
 jectivity of thought, of the earnest and dispassionate 
 research of truth, which coincides with the only 
 conceivable objectivity. What we call objective 
 truth is not reached by renouncing thought, but 
 only by making our thought deeper and truer. The 
 historian who permeates with his thought his recrea- 
 tion of the past (and if he did not, he would be recreat- 
 ing the past as poetry, and imagination, not as 
 history) needs not add a judgment of value to his 
 statements of fact: the identity of value and fact 
 presents itself once more to us in the intrinsic struc- 
 ture of the historical judgment. Whatever the 
 aspect of reality to which we turn our attention, 
 true history and true criticism coincide. 
 
 A consequence of this identification of history and
 
 The Forms of Knowledge 165 
 
 philosophy is that the only legitimate divisions of 
 history are those that correspond to the distinctions 
 of the concept, — history of knowledge and of action, 
 of art, of thought, of the practical activity of man; 
 and that the relation among the different branches 
 of history is similar to that of the distinctions of the 
 concept within the concept itself: that is, the history 
 of one particular form of human activity is nothing 
 but the history of the whole spirit of man as it 
 realizes itself under one of its aspects, a statement 
 that we have already illustrated when speaking of 
 the history of art and poetry. Other divisions of 
 history are possible and useful, deduced from em- 
 pirical concepts (such as the state, the church, the 
 drama, the novel, society, religion, etc.), but they 
 are divisions of practical convenience, mnemonic 
 and didascalic expedients, and not rigorous distinc- 
 tions. Empirical concepts are, in fact, in constant 
 use in history, but as instruments, not as constituents 
 of historical thought. History is of the individual 
 sub specie universalis, and not of the practical gen- 
 eralizations. This peculiar function of the empirical 
 concept in history marks the distinction between 
 history and the natural sciences, the final irreduci- 
 bility of history to sociology. 
 
 As history is reduced to philosophy through the 
 identification of the historical with the individual 
 judgment, so philosophy is reduced to history 
 through the identification of the definition with the 
 individual judgment. Since every philosophical
 
 1 66 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 proposition is an answer to a given question, and 
 every question or problem is individually and his- 
 torically determined, the whole course of the history 
 of philosophy is in constant function of the general 
 course of history. This is the truth contained in 
 Hegel's formula of the identity of philosophy and 
 history of philosophy, which had been revived in 
 Italy, when Croce was meditating on these prob- 
 lems, by his friend Gentile: a formula which he 
 finally accepted and transformed into that of the 
 identity of history and philosophy, in accordance 
 with his view of philosophy as a moment or grade 
 of the spirit of man. The a priori synthesis which 
 constitutes the reality both of the definition and 
 of the individual judgment is, at the same time, the 
 reality of both philosophy and history. The dis- 
 tinction between the two is a purely didactic one: 
 in the first the emphasis is laid on the definition and 
 the system, in the second on the individual judg- 
 ment and the narrative. But because the narrative 
 includes the concept, every narrative clarifies and 
 solves philosophical problems, and, on the other 
 hand, every system of concepts throws light on the 
 facts which are present to the mind. The confirma- 
 tion of the soundness of the system is in the power 
 it displays to interpret and narrate history; the 
 touchstone of philosophy is history. The concept, 
 in affirming itself, conquers the whole of reality, 
 which becomes one with it. 
 
 We shall deal more briefly with Croce's treatment
 
 The Forms of Knowledge 167 
 
 of the organization of the empirical and abstract 
 concepts in the natural and mathematical sciences 
 because his views coincide in their general lines 
 with the economic theory of science, which is the 
 view of scientific method elaborated by the scientists 
 themselves in the last decades, and differ from it 
 only in so far as they are comprehended in a vaster 
 system of thought. Croce's polemic against pseudo- 
 scientific philosophy, which was amply justified at 
 the beginning of his career, has now lost a good deal 
 of its actuality, since the ambitious attempts to 
 organize the concepts of science into a system of 
 ultimate truth have finally collapsed under the blows 
 inflicted on their authors by science itself, and are 
 now relegated into a few academic and journalistic 
 backwaters. On the other hand, there is no doubt 
 that his discussion of scientific methods, though 
 sufficient for his purposes, is far from being as ex- 
 haustive as his discussion of either art or philosophy. 
 The natural sciences are systems of empirical 
 concepts, that is, of practical elaborations of knowl- 
 edge, and, therefore, they do not belong to the 
 sphere of theoretical, but to that of practical ac- 
 tivity. This proposition must not be understood 
 as referring to the practical ends, or applications, 
 of science: action requires a knowledge of the in- 
 dividual fact with which we are to deal, and, there- 
 fore, the true antecedent of action is not science, 
 but an individual (or historical) judgment. The 
 natural sciences are not subservient to action, but
 
 1 68 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 they are actions in the service of knowledge. Be- 
 cause of the empirical and pragmatic character of 
 their concepts, it is impossible either to unify them in 
 a single concept, or to divide them according to 
 rigorous distinctions. The natural laws which they 
 evolve are the same empirical concepts, which give 
 rise to the creation of classes and types, expressed 
 in a different form; their empirical character is 
 confirmed by what Boutroux called their contin- 
 gency, which is nothing but the reflex of their ar- 
 bitrary formation. Even the most general of those 
 laws, that of the constancy and uniformity of na- 
 ture, assumed as the foundation of so much pseudo- 
 scientific thought in the nineteenth century, is a 
 mere postulate of practical opportunity, without 
 which it would be hardly possible to construct any 
 science: it is the first economic principle of scientific 
 method, not an attribute of objective reality. 
 
 The truth of the natural sciences, that truth of 
 which they and their empirical concepts are an 
 abbreviated transcription, is the historical datum, 
 the knowledge of actual individual happenings. 
 History is the hot and fluid mass which the natural- 
 ist solidifies in the schematic moulds of classes and 
 types. The naturalistic discoverer is, therefore, an 
 historical discoverer and the revolutions of the natu- 
 ral sciences are steps in the progress of historical 
 knowledge. The difference in method between history 
 and the natural sciences is not due to the supposed 
 difference between a higher and a lower reality
 
 The Forms of Knowledge 169 
 
 (spirit and nature), or to the fact that nature has no 
 history; nature is perpetual activity and change, 
 that is, history, as much as the spirit, but the 
 progress of nature is less clearly perceptible and 
 less interesting to us than that of the human reality, 
 and, therefore, an abbreviated transcription is 
 more apt to satisfy our needs in relation to the 
 knowledge of what we call nature than to that of 
 the spirit. The nature that has no history, and 
 which is opposed in dualistic systems of philosophy 
 to the spirit of man, is not the actual, historical 
 reality of nature, but the empirical concepts of the 
 natural sciences, their classes, types and laws, con- 
 ceived as an objective reality and substituted for 
 that reality. In this sense, nature is not a special 
 object, but only a method of treatment, as is proved 
 by the fact that that same method, applied to the 
 so-called higher and spiritual reality, by such sci- 
 ences as psychology, sociology, or comparative 
 philology, creates the same kind of naturalistic 
 categories in the domain of the spirit. It is of nature 
 in this sense that the idealist denies the real exist- 
 ence, since the time when Bishop Berkeley repudiated 
 matter as a mere abstraction. And here again, 
 the scientist comes to the support of the idealist 
 with his keen awareness of the pragmatic character 
 of his hypotheses on the ultimate physical constitu- 
 ents of reality. 
 
 It is through this theory of the natural sciences 
 that Croce succeeded in eliminating naturalistic
 
 170 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 transcendence from his thought, and, singularly 
 enough, his first impulse in this direction came to 
 him from his aesthetic studies, through his criticism 
 of literary genres, of grammars, of the particular 
 arts and of rhetorical forms. He saw how through 
 them "nature " introduces itself, as a construction 
 of the human spirit, in the pure spiritual world of 
 art; and having denied its reality in art, he proceeded 
 to discover it everywhere not as reality, but as an 
 product of abstracting processes. This must not 
 be interpreted as meaning that the naturalistic 
 method is an illegitimate hybrid: it has its uses in 
 its proper place, and not less in the study of mind 
 than in the study of nature. It is only by mistaking 
 its constructions or fictions for realities, that we 
 can be tempted to deduce from the natural sciences 
 a philosophy of nature, or from the applications of 
 the naturalistic method to art and to the history 
 of man, an aesthetics or a philosophy of history. 
 But the natural sciences themselves are not respon- 
 sible for the errors of philosophical naturalism. 
 That such errors should not be limited exclusively 
 to philosophers, but very often appear within the 
 body of sciences like biology or psychology or sociol- 
 ogy, is easily explained by the fact that no scientist 
 is a pure scientist: but poor philosophy does not be- 
 come science simply because it finds place in scien- 
 tific books. The quarrel between vitalists and 
 mechanicists, for one instance, is a philosophical 
 (or historical), not a scientific dispute: and it re-
 
 The Forms of Knowledge 171 
 
 veals itself, ultimately, as the opposition not of 
 conceivable realities, but merely of different methods 
 in the elaboration of the historical datum. The 
 coherent and clear-minded biologist is to-day a 
 mechanicist, not because mechanism is the essence 
 of reality, but because it is the postulate of his re- 
 search. The vitalist, on the other hand, is inevitably 
 brought by the trend of his thought to abandon 
 science and to become more or less deliberately a 
 philosopher. It is enough to mention in this connec- 
 tion such names as Driesch or Bergson. 
 
 The fictitious or conventional character of mathe- 
 matics is still more apparent than that of the natural 
 sciences; and we shall not add anything to what we 
 have said in the preceding chapter about the ab- 
 stract concept, the non-concrete universal, which 
 is the distinctive process of mathematical thought. 
 The application of the mathematical processes, 
 through the empirical concepts, to the historical 
 datum, gives origin to what we have called the 
 judgment of numeration (and mensuration), and 
 to the mathematical sciences of nature. All that 
 has been observed of the natural sciences in general 
 is valid for these also. Their truth is still only the 
 truth of the intuitive, historical datum of which 
 the empirical concepts are practical elaborations; 
 the addition of a further practical elaboration, the 
 abstract concept, can add to their mnemonic or, 
 as it is more often called, technical efficiency, but 
 not to the value of their original content. This
 
 172 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 process, as the purely naturalistic one, can be applied 
 to the human as well as to the natural reality, but 
 it is evident that its usefulness decreases in the 
 passage from the one to the other, following the 
 same standards that apply to the natural sciences 
 in general, those of the relative perceptibility and 
 importance of the individual happening. It is at 
 its highest in physics or astronomy, less notable in 
 biology or economics; practically inexistent in 
 psychology or sociology, the two sciences that suffer 
 not less from the delusions of misapplied statistics 
 than from the invasions of cheap philosophy. 
 
 Croce's theory of science, as we have already re- 
 marked, differs from the generally accepted method- 
 ology of modern science only in its context, which 
 is usually agnostic in the pure scientist, while, in 
 Croce, it consists in the affirmation of the pure 
 concept, or of the autonomy of philosophy: a 
 proposition with which the scientist qua scientist 
 has no reason to quarrel. In both cases, the auton- 
 omy of scientific thought is only relative, and the 
 difference of context is a difference in the deter- 
 mination of its limits. In both cases, scientific 
 thought is recognised as thoroughly legitimate only 
 within limits. The cry of the bankruptcy of science, 
 of which we heard so much a few years ago, is as 
 meaningless for Croce as for the pure scientist; 
 science cannot become bankrupt except by over- 
 stepping its logical limits, that is, by first ceasing to 
 be science and becoming the ape of philosophy.
 
 VII. THE THEORY OF ERROR i 
 
 The practical origin of theoretical error — Confirmations of this doctrine — 
 The forms of error — Aestheticism and empiricism; mathematicism — 
 Philosophism: the philosophy of history and the philosophy of 
 nature — Mythologism: philosophy and religion — Dualism, scepti- 
 cism, mysticism — The conversion to truth — The function of error. 
 
 One of the most original developments of Croce's 
 thought — a doctrine that does not owe its validity 
 only to its connection with the system, since we 
 can find it adumbrated already in such widely 
 divergent philosophies as those of Socrates and 
 Thomas Aquinas, of Descartes and Rosmini, but 
 which in Croce's system acquires a new and wider 
 meaning — is the theory of the practical origin of 
 theoretical error, which we shall briefly discuss in 
 this chapter. 
 
 From a strictly logical standpoint, every error 
 is mere privation or negativity, the opposite of the 
 logical value which is truth, and therefore inexistent 
 outside the moment of opposition. As there are 
 not two values in aesthetics, the beautiful and the 
 ugly, but one only, beauty or expression, of which 
 ugliness or non-expression is merely the negative 
 aspect, so in logic also there is but one value, thought 
 or truth, and error is non-thought, that which logi- 
 
 1 See Logica, part iii, "Le forme degli errori," etc., pp. 271-421. 
 173
 
 174 ^'^^ Philosophy of Mind 
 
 cally has no being or reality. There is no thought 
 which is not a thinking of truth. 
 
 Let us pause for one instant to consider this last 
 proposition, which at first sight undoubtedly has a 
 somewhat paradoxical air. And yet it is impossible 
 not to accept it, unless we are willing to fall into the 
 most radical scepticism, which would imply a re- 
 nunciation not only of every form of thought, but 
 even, since there is no action which is not founded 
 on knowledge, of every kind of action. If we be- 
 lieved that it were possible for our thought to think 
 that which is not true, no external criterion or 
 standard of truth could even be substituted for that 
 which thought intrinsically would lack, since the 
 apprehension of such external standards would in 
 itself be an act of thought, and therefore suffer from 
 the indetermination and uncertainty of thought 
 itself. This belief in the validity of human thought 
 is in fact, however disguised or even openly denied, 
 present in every thinking and acting being: every 
 thought, every action of man is an implicit decla- 
 ration of this faith. And once we have consciously 
 acquired it, as an inalienable, intrinsic characteristic 
 of our whole spiritual activity, it is evident that it 
 leaves no place for faith as such, for an obscure, 
 independent faculty, a mystical intuition, different 
 from and superior to our human thought, and which 
 could mysteriously endow thought itself with the 
 gratuitous gift of truth. 
 
 And yet, after we have denied the logical existence
 
 The Theory of Error 175 
 
 of error, we are still confronted with the mass of 
 positive errors which we can more or less easily 
 identify in the course of history and in our daily 
 experience. Positive errors, that is, affirmations of 
 knowing that which we do not know, are real prod- 
 ucts of our activity: but since the theoretical value, 
 truth, is absent from them, they cannot be products 
 of the theoretical activity. They must therefore 
 be products of the only other form of spiritual 
 activity, the practical. Ignorance or obscurity or 
 doubt are not errors; they are the inexhaustible 
 matter to which the spirit of man is perpetually 
 giving form and reality. To be aware of one's 
 ignorance is in fact the first stage in the research 
 of truth, the initium sapientice. Thought and truth 
 are affirmation; the positive error is an affirmation 
 also, which simulates truth. We cannot think an 
 error, but we can pass from thought to action, by 
 making a false affirmation, a purely practical affirm- 
 ation, which consists in the act of producing sounds 
 to which no thought corresponds, or, which amounts 
 to the same, only a thought without value, without 
 coherence, without truth. What we have qualified 
 in its negative aspect as a theoretical error mani- 
 fests itself in its positive aspect as an act of will, 
 directed to a certain end, a practical act, and, as 
 such, having its own rationality, which is neither 
 logical, nor moral, but purely economic, consisting 
 in the adequacy of that particular affirmation to the 
 individual purpose by which it has been prompted.
 
 176 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 Morality requires that the thinking spirit should 
 realize itself as truth; and therefore the economic 
 act which is error, though logically unreal, though 
 .economically useful, finds inevitably its ultimate 
 sanction in a moral condemnation. 
 
 Though this doctrine may appear unfamiliar to 
 the logician, yet we all constantly depend on it in 
 our analysis of error. We know that error is due 
 to the passions or interests of men, which cloud the 
 intellect, and the more an error is foreign to our 
 own ways of thinking, the easier it is for us to dis- 
 cover the practical motives which help us to explain 
 it away. That category of errors which goes under 
 the name of national prejudices, for instance, is 
 transparent in its origins to every man belonging 
 to a nation other than the one in which a particular 
 set of such prejudices is commonly accepted. And 
 other categories of errors^ social, professional, re- 
 ligious, and so on, are of the same kind, affecting 
 only certain classes of men, because of the passions 
 or interests or traditions which belong to them by 
 reason of their peculiar practical associations. In 
 the field of politics, or in any kind of heated dis- 
 cussion, this research of the practical motive is even 
 pushed to the extreme, and the bad faith of the 
 adversary becomes an obvious axiom. In such 
 cases, the same passions being active on both sides, 
 the research of the practical motive is evidently not 
 pure and disinterested, but is itself moved by a 
 practical motive, and therefore likely to produce a
 
 The Theory of Error 177 
 
 new error, rather than a clear judgment. Therefore, 
 though rigorously speaking there is no difference 
 between the error which is a deliberate lie and that 
 which is due to a more or less justifiable weakness, 
 and there is no error which is not in bad faith, which 
 is not due to a deliberate act of will, yet, from an 
 empirical standpoint we may distinguish between 
 errors in bad and in good faith, and recommend 
 tolerance and indulgence for the latter kind. But 
 tolerance is not indifference. Croce went so far, in 
 drawing the consequences of his doctrine, as to 
 justify the Holy Inquisition; and in fact all our 
 modern advocates of religious and political tolerance 
 have really shaken our faith in its methods, but 
 not in its principle, which is that of the moral re- 
 sponsibility of error. The Holy Inquisition more- 
 over was bound to clash with true freedom, which 
 is not the freedom of error but the freedom of 
 truth, because it placed its faith in a static, extra- 
 human truth, as against the Veritas fill a temporisy 
 the truth which is engendered and conditioned by 
 history, by the peculiar problems and intellectual 
 climate of the age, and which is the object of our 
 modern faith; and therefore defeated its own end 
 by striking at the roots of the value for the upholding 
 of which it had been established. 
 
 Passing from the problem of the nature of error 
 to that of the forms actually assumed by philosophic 
 error, Croce accepts Vico's definition of error, as an 
 improper combination of ideas, and therefore de-
 
 lyS The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 fines such forms, by deducing the number of possible 
 improper combinations from his own conception of 
 the legitimate forms of theoretical activity. This 
 phenomenology of error is one of the main tasks of 
 logic, while the refutation of particular philosophical 
 errors is the task of philosophy as a whole. We shall 
 rapidly survey these general forms, in which it will 
 be easy for the reader to recognize the logical (or 
 illogical) structure of many particular errors criti- 
 cised in the preceding chapters. 
 
 The pure concept can be improperly combined 
 with, or exchanged for, the pure intuition (art), or 
 the empirical and abstract concept (the natural and 
 mathematical sciences); or it can be improperly split 
 in its unity of intuition and concept {a priori syn- 
 thesis), and arbitrarily put together again, either as 
 a concept which simulates an intuition or as an in- 
 tuition which simulates a concept. Hence the five 
 fundamental forms of error: eestheticism, empiricism, 
 mathematicism, philosophism, and historicism or 
 mythologism. To these must be added other forms 
 originated from combinations of the preceding ones: 
 dualism, scepticism, and mysticism. 
 
 We have dealt elsewhere with both aestheticism 
 and empiricism. Of the first, the most recent form 
 is that which pretends to build a philosophy of 
 pure intuition or of pure experience, that is, of 
 an experience which, not being touched by any in- 
 tellectual category, is also pure intuition. Empiri- 
 cism is practically all the current philosophy of our
 
 The Theory of Error 179 
 
 times, from the positivism of Comte and Spencer to 
 the more modern types of the so-called philosophic 
 elaboration of scientific knowledge. Mathematicism 
 is a rarer and more aristocratic form of error: it does 
 not consist in the application of the mathematical 
 method to the exposition of philosophical concepts, 
 which is a mere didactic expedient, more or less 
 convenient, but insufficient to characterize the qual- 
 ity of the concepts themselves; its true exponents are 
 those philosophers or mathematicians who take 
 mathematical fictions, such as the dimensions of 
 space, for realities, and proceed to speculate on such 
 a foundation. The near future seems to promise a 
 great extension of this kind of philosophy, through 
 the prevailing interest in the theory of relativity, 
 which is fondly supposed to contain the germs of a 
 revolution in thought. Both empiricism and mathe- 
 maticism lead to a dualistic conception of reality, by 
 opposing either the facts of scientific and historical 
 knowledge, that is, a collection of facts limited in 
 space and time, to an infinite reality beyond that 
 knowledge, or our actual world of space and time, 
 to worlds, spaces and times mathematically conceiv- 
 able, but of which we have no experience. The pas- 
 sage from this dualism to spiritualism and other 
 kinds of superstition, which in our times seem to be 
 so closely associated with certain forms of pseudo- 
 scientific thought, is of the easiest. The naturalistic 
 experiments by which we attempt to peer into the 
 mystery of the so-called unknown or unknowable.
 
 1 80 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 hoping to detect the spirit itself as matter, however 
 subtle or light, and such theories as that of the iden- 
 tity of the spiritual world with the four-dimensional 
 space, are evidences of this immediate connection 
 between superstition and science, for which, ob- 
 viously, not science is responsible, and not ignorance 
 even, but a chain of more or less deliberate errors in 
 each case reducible to definite practical motives. 
 From the point of view of the ethics of intellect, 
 there is no difference between the frank impostor 
 who is moved to speculate on other people's feelings 
 only by greed, and the scientist who makes his 
 science minister to his own private feelings, and is 
 hardly, if at all, conscious of his fraud. 
 
 Of the other two forms of philosophic error, philos- 
 ophism, consisting in the abuse of the purely logical 
 element, and therefore in an usurpation on the part 
 of philosophy against either history or science, tend- 
 ing to the formation of a philosophy of history and 
 of a philosophy of nature, is less common now than 
 in times of more active and original speculation. 
 The most conspicuous examples are to be met with 
 among Germany's classical thinkers; and we have 
 already hinted at the connection between one par- 
 ticular logical error, the undue extension of the 
 dialectic process to the distinctions of the concept, 
 and to the empirical concept, which is the basis of 
 Hegel's philosophies of history and nature. Both 
 these sciences attempt an a priori deduction of the 
 individual and of the empirical, a process which is
 
 The Theory of Error l8l 
 
 in itself absurd and contradictory. They duplicate 
 history and science with a series of concepts, which, 
 unless they are the same which constitute history 
 and science (in which case we have history and we 
 have science, and not a philosophy of history or of 
 nature), are necessarily empty of any concrete de- 
 terminations. But though Croce points to philos- 
 ophy of history and philosophy of nature as to the 
 two typical instances of philosophism, yet he is ready 
 to acknowledge that a good deal of thought that 
 has gone under those names in the past has had a 
 large influence in moulding many of our historical 
 and philosophical conceptions, and, in the case of 
 the second one, in helping us to realize the unity and 
 spirituality of nature, and to recognize in the history 
 of nature the same principles operating in the history 
 of man. Croce's idealism, in fact, does not divide 
 nature from the spirit except in the logical sense 
 which has been made clear in the preceding chapter; 
 it does not relegate nature in an unknowable sphere 
 beyond the reach of human minds. It unifies spirit 
 and nature, but a parte subjecti^ and not a parte ob- 
 jecti^ and reduces nature to the spirit, rather than 
 the spirit to nature; which is the only process that 
 makes such a unification intelligible and significant. 
 The last of the five fundamental forms of philo- 
 sophic error consists in the arbitrary separation of 
 the subject from Its predicate, of history from philos- 
 ophy, and In the consequent position of the subject 
 as predicate, that Is, of a mere representation as a
 
 1 82 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 concept. This may sound rather abstruse, but can 
 immediately be made clear by adding that what 
 Croce has in mind in this definition is the production 
 of myths. This error he therefore calls either his- 
 toricism (from the logical process by which it is pro- 
 duced), or mythologism (from the form which it 
 comm.only assumes). \ myth is to him not a mere 
 poetic or aesthetic imagination, but necessarily in- 
 cludes an affirmation or logical judgment. It differs 
 also from allegory, in which the relation estab- 
 lished between a poetic fiction and a concept is al- 
 ways more or less openly declared to be arbitrary, 
 and the two terms are not confused with each other. 
 In a myth, on the contrary, the poetic fiction as- 
 sumes the actual function of the concept, transform- 
 ing both philosophy and history into a fable or legend. 
 Errors of this class are frequent in every system of 
 philosophy, when the thinker, either consciously and 
 deliberately, as in the case of Plato, or unwittingly, 
 as In Kant's Ding a77 sick or in Schopenhauer's Willy 
 fills the gaps of his real speculation with a mere 
 image. But mythologism is more generally the form 
 of religious error, since there is no religion without a 
 logical affirmation embodied in a myth. If myth and 
 religion coincide, as the distinction between myth and 
 philosophy is that of error and truth, of a false and 
 a true philosophy, we must conclude that religion as 
 truth is one with philosophy, or, as Croce expresses 
 it, that the true religion is philosophy; and this ap- 
 pears to Croce to be the conclusion of all ancient and
 
 The Theory of Error 183 
 
 modern thought in regard to the history of religions. 
 Philosophies have sprung up in all times from the 
 soil of religious thought, and more or less completely 
 resolved in themselves, and logically clarified, the 
 obscure substance of myth. This is Croce's clear-cut, 
 unequivocal solution of the problem of the relations 
 between philosophy and religion: there is no place 
 reserved anywhere in his system for an either in- 
 ternal or external revelation other than that per- 
 petual revelation of truth, which is at the same time 
 history and philosophy. 
 
 From the possible combinations of these five funda- 
 mental forms of error, three more complex ones are 
 derived: dualism, when two contradictory methods, 
 one logically legitimate and the other illegitimate, or 
 both equally false, are brought together, and con- 
 sidered to be both philosophically valid; scepticism, 
 when the mind, in the presence of confusion and error, 
 asserts the mystery of reality, which is the problem 
 itself, but denies its own power to deal with it; and 
 finally, mysticism, when even that last semblance of 
 thought, by which the sceptic affirms that there is a 
 mystery, is abandoned, and the immediate actuality 
 of life is regarded to be the only truth. Dualism 
 leads inevitably to the conception of a double reality, 
 and we have already seen how the whole of Croce's 
 speculation continually tends towards the logical uni- 
 fication of dualities, as with spirit and nature, value 
 and fact. Every philosophical problem seems to 
 present itself to his mind as involved in a dualistic
 
 184 The Philosophy 0} Mind 
 
 difficulty; every solution becomes satisfactory to him 
 only when the last shreds of dualism are eliminated 
 from it. While scepticism is a logical error (the af- 
 firmation of a purely negative position), it contains 
 within itself one of the essential moments of every 
 progress in thought, the scepsis, or philosophical 
 doubt, which is the negation of an error, and there- 
 fore the germ of every true affirmation. As for mys- 
 ticism, we have dealt with it elsewhere as being one 
 of the untenable aspects of logical scepticism; we may 
 add that, if it ever obeyed the laws of internal co- 
 herence, we should not even be able to discuss it, 
 since its only conceivable expression would be an 
 ecstatic silence. 
 
 The same character of necessity that invests these 
 forms of the logical error is present also in the false 
 solutions of other philosophical problems, and we 
 need only refer the reader to our discussion of 
 aesthetic theories. In both cases, not only the num- 
 ber, but also the logical succession, of the necessary 
 forms of error, depends on the number of possible 
 arbitrary combinations of the spiritual forms, or con- 
 cepts of reality. But infinite, on the other hand, are 
 the individual forms of error, as infinite are the in- 
 dividual forms of truth: the problems are always 
 historically conditioned and variable, and so are also 
 the solutions and the false solutions, determined by 
 feelings, passions, and interests. 
 
 From error to truth, there is no gradual ascent. 
 The passage is described by Croce as a kind of spirit-
 
 The Theory of Error 1 85 
 
 ual conversion: the erring spirit, fleeing from the 
 hght, must convert itself in a researching spirit, eager 
 for Hght; pride must yield to humility; the narrow- 
 love for one's abstract individuahty, widen and lift 
 itself to an austere love, to an utter devotion to that 
 which is above the individual, becoming Bruno's 
 eroico furore^ Spinoza's amor Dei intellectualis. In 
 this act of love and enthusiasm, the spirit becomes 
 pure thought and attains the truth, or, rather, trans- 
 forms itself into truth. And the possession of truth 
 is at the same time possession of its contrary, of error 
 transformed into truth; to possess a concept is to 
 possess it in the fulness of its relations, and therefore 
 to possess, in the same act, all the ways in which 
 that concept, for instance, of the aesthetic activity, 
 is at the same time the concept of hedonism, intel- 
 lectualism, empiricism, and so on. The two kinds of 
 knowledge, that of truth and of its contrary, are in- 
 separable: the concept is at the same time affirma- 
 tion and negation. 
 
 From this absolute possession of truth, we may 
 distinguish a stage of research, which is not yet 
 thought, but only the operation of the practical will 
 creating certain conditions for thought. Seen in 
 the light of this process, the series of errors through 
 which a mind goes, when guided by a will to gather 
 its materials and prepare itself to think, transforms 
 itself into a series of attempts or hypotheses. An 
 error is an error when there is a will to err; the 
 hypothesis, however, into which the error is trans-
 
 1 86 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 muted by the new will is not yet truth, and be- 
 comes truth only in the act of its verification; but 
 it is no longer an error, because it does not affirm 
 itself as truth, but only as a means or help for the 
 conquest of truth. 
 
 From this double consideration of the nature of 
 error, first, as error which is conquered and com- 
 prehended by truth, and then as attempt or hypoth- 
 eses in the service of truth, Croce derives the identi- 
 fication of the history of error with the history of 
 truth, or philosophy. But not in the sense in which 
 Hegel had considered the successive apparition of 
 the various philosophical categories and of the 
 various forms of error, seeing in them a kind of 
 gradual revelation of his own philosophy. To 
 Croce such a conception of the progress of philosophy 
 is unacceptable. Philosophy as an abstract category, 
 as one of the forms of the spiritual activity, has no 
 origin in time, is not limited to the men we call 
 philosophers, but acts in every moment of the life 
 of the spirit on the material offered by history, which 
 it contributes to create, and does not, therefore, 
 progress any more than the categories of art or of 
 morality. But it progresses in its concreteness, as 
 art and the whole of life do; because life is de- 
 velopment, and development is progress. Every 
 affirmation of reality is conditioned by reality and 
 conditions a new reality, which in its turn Is, in its 
 progress, the condition of a new thought and a new 
 philosophy. In this perpetual cycle, though in-
 
 The Theory of Error 187 
 
 dividual errors are conquered, no form of error can 
 be definitely abolished; but they constantly reap- 
 pear, because of the intrinsic necessity of their 
 structure, and when they reappear not as wilful 
 errors, but as attempts and hypotheses, they have 
 their appointed function in the progress of truth 
 and reality. To this constancy of error corresponds 
 a constancy of truth: truth is not attained once 
 and for ever, but is true in the act of its affirmation, 
 and in proportion to its adequacy to the particular 
 problem, to the individual conditions of fact, which 
 necessarily include, at every given moment, the 
 whole history of the past. Thus, from a different 
 angle, Croce's theory of error reaches the same con- 
 clusion as his general theory of logic, the identity 
 of philosophy and history; and philosophy appears 
 as a perpetual development, a history that never 
 can repeat itself, since every affirmation of the 
 truth transforms itself into a new element of reality, 
 Into one of the conditions determining every new 
 problem and every new solution.
 
 VIII. THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY i 
 
 Philosophical introspection — Affirmation of the practical activity — The 
 category of feeling — The theoretical activity as the antecedent of 
 the practical — Identity of intention and volition — Identity of voli- 
 tion and action — The practical judgment: philosophy and psychol- 
 ogy — The problem of free will: liberty and necessity — Croce's 
 solution in the context of his philosophy — The practical value: 
 good and evil — The unreality of evil, and the function of ideals — 
 The sanction of evil — The volition and the passions — The empirical 
 individuality — Development and progress. 
 
 The reality of the practical activity as distinct 
 from the theoretical activity^ of will as distinct from 
 knowledge, can never be proved through the nat- 
 uralistic method of psychology, by merely pointing 
 to a class of facts — actions — different from another 
 class of facts— thoughts. The so-called action 
 manifests itself, at a closer analysis, as infinitely 
 complex and rich in purely theoretical elements; 
 the so-called thought, as partly at least a work of 
 the human will. The concrete life of the spirit is 
 always both practical and theoretical, and the dis- 
 tinction we are looking for is an ideal distinction, 
 to be ascertained by the method of philosophical, 
 not psychological, introspection; by the direct 
 witness of consciousness, and by the deduction of 
 
 ' See Filosojia della Pratica, part i, '' L'attivita pratica in generale," 
 pp. 1-209. 
 
 j88
 
 The Practical Activity 1 89 
 
 its function in the concept of the spirit, or of reality, 
 as a whole. The complete affirmation of a form, or 
 grade, of spiritual activity is the philosophy of 
 that form, and of its relations with the others; in 
 this case, the philosophy of the practical, or of will. 
 It is hardly necessary, at this stage of our exposi- 
 tion, to observe that the philosophy of the practical 
 will not be practical philosophy, a collection of 
 rules for the attainment of the useful and the good, 
 any more than the philosophy of art is a collection 
 of aesthetic precepts: it will be a purely formal 
 science, a universal concept, the content of which 
 is the infinite wealth of the individual determina- 
 tions of the will, the history of the practical activity. 
 
 In the following chapter we shall deal more par- 
 ticularly with the two forms of the practical ac- 
 tivity, economic and ethic, corresponding to the 
 two forms of the theoretical, aesthetic and logic. 
 Here we shall consider the undifferentiated practical 
 activity, first, in Its relations, and then, in its in- 
 ternal dialectic. The contents of this chapter are, 
 therefore, intended as applying both to economics 
 and ethics, to the useful and to the good. 
 
 There are two typical forms of scepticism regard- 
 ing the practical activity. The first denies that it 
 is a spiritual activity, by denying that man is con- 
 scious of his will, in the process of willing; con- 
 sciousness comes only after, and is not consciousness 
 of the will, but of our representation of the will. 
 Therefore, the will is nature, and consciousness, or
 
 IQO The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 spiritual activity, is only our thought. The second 
 does not exclude the will from consciousness, but 
 affirms that there is no real distinction between 
 will and thought. The first doctrine is evidently 
 founded on a confusion between reflected and in- 
 trinsic consciousness; and maintains something 
 that is always true of reflected consciousness, not 
 in relation to the will only, but to every form of 
 spiritual activity; carried to its extreme conse- 
 quences, it would banish consciousness from the 
 whole life of human mind, since every act of con- 
 sciousness would always be consciousness of some- 
 thing else, and never of itself. Against this view, 
 Croce insists on the concept of an intrinsic conscious- 
 ness, which accompanies every act of the spirit: the 
 consciousness of the creative artist, for instance, 
 which is certainly other than that of the critic, but 
 not less real. The will may be regarded as nature, 
 only when apprehended by the theoretical activity; 
 as every other act of the spirit becomes nature, 
 outside its immediate actuality, when consciously 
 reflected upon. The second form of sceptism, identi- 
 fying thought and will, cannot maintain itself in 
 its purity, because of the difficulties involved by 
 the denial of what seems to be the immediate evi- 
 dence of consciousness; it, therefore, qualifies itself 
 by recognizing that the will is thought, but of a par- 
 ticular kind, thought impressing itself on nature, or 
 realizing itself in action: which is but an indirect way 
 of admitting the autonomy of the practical activity.
 
 The Practical Activity 191 
 
 But do the theoretical and the practical activity 
 exhaust the whole of the spirit of man? There is 
 at least one more psychological category which 
 clamours for admission within the precincts of 
 philosophy, that of feeling or sentiment. For 
 Croce, feeling as a form of spiritual activity does 
 not exist: the corresponding psychological class 
 covers a number of heterogeneous facts, which 
 cannot be reduced to a single concept. Its function 
 in philosophy has always been that of serving as a 
 temporary term for that which philosophy had not 
 yet fully determined and understood; in aesthetics, 
 for the intuitive character of art, against the fallacies 
 of hedonism and intellectualism; in the theory of 
 history for the individual and concrete element of 
 history, or even for the subjective historical judg- 
 ment, against positivism and sociologism; in logic, 
 for the pure concept against the empirical and 
 abstract. Its function in the philosophy of the 
 practical is of the same order: feeling or sentiment 
 are among the names by which the peculiarity of 
 the practical activity first began to be recognized, 
 being labels for classes of psychological facts in which 
 the moment of will is more important than that of 
 reason, practice more essential than theory. But 
 the psychological facts thus classified resolve them- 
 selves ultimately either into acts of knowledge or of 
 will; and the witness of direct consciousness does 
 not find feeling or sentiment within Itself as a dis- 
 tinct form of spiritual activity. Obviously, this
 
 192 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 exclusion does not imply that Croce denies the 
 existence of the empirical groups of facts gathered 
 in those classes; it means only that he has reduced 
 those facts to the immediate data of consciousness 
 of which they consist, and divested them of that 
 mysterious halo, the halo of ignorance or of deliberate 
 error, with which an appeal to sentimental reasons 
 is sure to be accompanied when introduced into a 
 philosophical discussion. When we hear, for in- 
 stance, that philosophy and science belong to the 
 sphere of reason, and religion to that of sentiment, 
 since there is no sentiment which is not either 
 reason or will, we at once understand that what is 
 meant is that the speaker is willing to believe, for 
 practical motives, what his reason tells him to be 
 untrue; and we know also that this error contains, 
 sometimes at least, an element of truth, which is 
 the affirmation of a truer reason than the one em- 
 ployed by a certain type of philosophy, by a ra- 
 tionalism which treats the human spirit as a thing 
 of abstract logic. The error consists in the putting 
 of one's will in the place of one's reason; the ger- 
 minal truth, in the attempt to make one's reason 
 wider, more comprehensive. It is, therefore, one 
 of those positions in which it is a sin against the 
 spirit to acquiesce, but which are the beginning of 
 wisdom in the man of good faith. 
 
 The practical activity presupposes the theoretical 
 activity: no will is conceivable without knowledge, 
 and our will is such as our knowledge is. But this
 
 The Practical Activity 193 
 
 presupposition is of an ideal and not of a temporal 
 order: the mind in its concreteness, at every moment 
 of its life, is both practical and theoretical. The 
 particular kind of knowledge which conditions our 
 will is neither the purely intuitive nor the ab- 
 stractly logical one, but the historical or perceptive, 
 or concretely logical knowledge, which is at the 
 same time a knowledge of things and of the rela- 
 tions of things, constantly changing with the per- 
 petual development of the world around us, and, 
 therefore, constantly re-creating and renovating 
 itself as the antecedent of every particular volition. 
 No other theoretical fact precedes the act of will: 
 the so-called practical judgments or practical con- 
 cepts, which some thinkers consider as a necessary 
 intermediate step between the historical judgment 
 and the volition, are nothing but classes of historical 
 judgments relating to volitions in the past, mental 
 formations similar to the rhetorical categories in 
 the domain of art, and, therefore, do not really 
 precede but follow the actual volitions. In the 
 process of willing, the recognition of a certain action 
 as good or useful, that is, as belonging to one of the 
 practical categories, and, therefore, desirable, is 
 not an act that precedes the volition, but is the 
 volition itself. The qualification of an action as 
 useful or good is not distinguishable from the vo- 
 lition except when it comes after the action, and is 
 then a reflection on the act itself, not different in 
 kind from any other historical judgment.
 
 194 ^^^ Philosophy of Mind 
 
 The conclusion to be drawn from these premises 
 is that, in relation to every particular situation, in- 
 tention and volition coincide; or, that what we call 
 intention, the abstract volition, the imaginary 
 volition, opposed to the concrete and real one, is 
 not a moment of the will at all, and the only voli- 
 tion is the one that is determined by the concrete 
 situation, the real and concrete volition. The dis- 
 tinction between intention and volition has in all 
 times been the fertile ground for the growth of all 
 kinds of hypocrisy, as it is easy to connect in 
 one's mind a certain concrete volition, which is 
 evil, with an imaginary intention of good; and the 
 doctrine that justifies the means for the sake of the 
 end is but a variety of this process. The identifica- 
 tion of intention and volition is, therefore, not 
 merely a matter of good logic; it is the necessary 
 foundation of a realistic doctrine of the will, which 
 cannot will anything but itself, and can never be 
 abstracted from its real basis, from the actual de- 
 terminations of the moment of reality by which it 
 is conditioned. 
 
 Once the concrete character of volition has been 
 recognized, there remains no difficulty in the way 
 of further identifying volition and action. The 
 relation between the two is analogous to the relation 
 between intuition and expression in sesthetics: 
 there is no volition which is not also an action, and 
 vice versa. Volition and action are not two distinct 
 phases of one process, but two different ways of
 
 The Practical Activity 195 
 
 looking at the same reality: the same fact which is, 
 from the point of view of the spirit, a volition, is, 
 naturalistically speaking, an action: we are in the 
 presence of one more aspect of the old dualism of 
 spirit and nature. And here again the duality van- 
 ishes when we observe that there is not a single act 
 of will which does not manifest itself in a physical 
 movement, however imperceptible, and that on the 
 other hand there is no physical action, not even the 
 so-called instinctive or habitual ones, which are 
 not either direct or indirect products of the will. 
 That which is independent of the will is not the 
 action itself, but the success of the action, — what 
 Croce calls a happening. The volition coincides 
 with the action, which is the work of the individual, 
 and not with the happening, which is collaboration 
 or contrast of wills, the work not of the individual, 
 but of the whole. No action ever realizes itself 
 entirely in the happening, and no action, however 
 hindered in its realization, is ever entirely without 
 influence on the happening. The measure of the 
 adequacy of the historical judgment preceding the 
 action to the particular situation is given in some 
 degree by the relation between the action and the 
 happening; but it is impossible, and it is in fact 
 never done, though we may affirm our inclination 
 to do it, to derive the value of an action, of the actual, 
 concrete volition, from its success. When we praise 
 a practical hero for his success, we imply that his 
 success was not accidental, not a mere happening,
 
 196 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 but entirely due to acts of his will; if the praise is 
 misplaced, the error is not in the theory, on which 
 we all implicitly agree, but in our knowledge and 
 judgment of the facts of his life. And when we rise 
 from the consideration of purely economical to that 
 of ethical values, the importance of success gradually 
 diminishes, because we fix our attention more to 
 the spiritual reality, to the quality of the individual 
 soul, and less to the material concomitants. The 
 great majority of mankind's moral heroes would be 
 utter failures from the standpoint of success, granted 
 that it should be possible to speak of such a contra- 
 diction in terms as moral success, a phrase in which 
 a true spiritual value, morality, is applied to a mere 
 material abstraction. 
 
 The practical judgment, which is, as we have al- 
 ready seen, nothing but a particular kind of his- 
 torical judgment, is a reflection on the action and 
 not on the happening; and we shall not repeat here 
 what has been said elsewhere of the relation be- 
 tween fact and value: the practical value is the 
 action itself, and cannot be deduced or derived 
 from standards, principles, ideals, which are but 
 combinations of preexistent judgments. The prac- 
 tical judgment, economic or moral, is a philosophical 
 judgment in the sense in which every other judgment 
 is also philosophical. A philosophy of the practical 
 activity, not in the technical sense in which we speak 
 of treatises and schools of philosophy, but in that 
 universal sense in which every man is a philosopher.
 
 The Practical Activity 197 
 
 as he is a poet, is therefore the necessary condition 
 of the practical judgment. But this philosophy is 
 fundamentally distinct from the psychological or 
 naturalistic elaboration of the facts of the will, 
 though at times it may have been materially con- 
 nected with it. A psychologically descriptive 
 science of the practical activity is, however, as 
 legitimate in its own field as all other natural sciences; 
 it constitutes a practical rhetoric which has as 
 glorious a tradition as the rhetoric of literature, 
 from Theophrastus to Spinoza and Descartes. It 
 creates its classes or types of actions, the value of 
 which is similar to that of all other empirical con- 
 cepts, and by giving them a categorical form, it 
 transforms them into maxims, rules, and precepts. 
 As long as these types and precepts are taken for 
 what they are, no harm can come from them; we 
 all make similar formations as helps to our individual 
 conduct, and find them more than helpful, necessary. 
 But when they are taken as philosophy, then we 
 have the usual results of this kind of logical con- 
 fusion: either the empirical concepts, under a rigorous 
 analysis, lose their consistency, and types or rules 
 which were useful instruments for the treatment 
 of particular problems are discarded for philosophical 
 concepts, which are immaterial to the discussion, 
 or they are treated as philosophical concepts, and 
 invested with the character of universality and 
 necessity which belongs to the latter. Of the first 
 process, we shall give as an example the man who
 
 198 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 maintains that war is necessary and eternal; which 
 is true, if by war we mean the perpetual conflict 
 and struggle which is the life of reality (a philo- 
 sophical concept), but which is at least a gratuitous 
 assertion, when it is said of that particular kind of 
 war which is waged between state and state, with 
 arms and armies. Of the second, the moralist who 
 identifies morality with a particular system or set 
 of precepts, or the philosopher who turns his philos- 
 ophy into a special pleading for his cause or party. 
 Turning now from the discussion of the relations 
 between the practical and the theoretical activity, 
 to consider the intrinsic problems of the will, and 
 the most complex and difficult of all, that of the 
 freedom of the will, we shall find that Croce's solu- 
 tion, though reached by a totally difi^erent method, 
 is very similar to the one offered by Bergson. Both 
 Croce and Bergson refuse to take sides in the quarrel 
 between free-will and determinism, but transfer 
 it to a higher or deeper ground where the contrast- 
 ing terms acquire more significant, and no longer 
 opposite, meanings. Bergson accomplishes his aboli- 
 tion of the dilemma through a masterful psychological 
 analysis of the immediate data of consciousness, 
 Croce comes to the same result by applying to this 
 problem his logic of the distinctions of the concept, 
 which we have already seen so often at work. Every 
 act of the will is determined, in the sense that it is 
 conditioned by a given situation, and varies with 
 the varying of the situation; it is free. Inasmuch as
 
 The Practical Activity 199 
 
 it Is something new and different, which was not 
 given in the situation, and without which there 
 would be no change, no growth, no development. 
 Necessity and freedom, which so often appear as 
 antagonistic views of the same fact, are both present, 
 though distinct, in the volition, which is the unity 
 of the two, being at once determined and free. 
 The volition is thus regarded as a practical a priori 
 synthesis, the autonomous creative act of the 
 practical mind, as the intuition is the aesthetic, and 
 the concept the logical a priori synthesis; the 
 spirit never realizes itself except by acting, and it 
 never acts except under given conditions of place 
 and time. But as these conditions are nothing 
 but what we have called happenings, which in 
 their turn are complex results of single volitions, 
 the concept of the freedom of the spirit coincides 
 with that of its activity. 
 
 This solution is the one that we were obviously 
 led to expect from the whole context of Croce's 
 philosophy, a solution in keeping with his logic 
 and with his general theory of knowledge. A 
 similar parallelism we can observe In respect to 
 the other solutions of the problem of the will: deter- 
 minism Is connected with a mechanistic materialism, 
 as indeterminism with one form or other of mythl- 
 cism. The doctrine of the double causality, which 
 admits of a double series of facts, some subject to a 
 mechanical necessity, others free and creative — 
 a solution which Is probably the most commonly
 
 200 The Philosophy oj Mind 
 
 accepted to-day — corresponds to the logical dualism 
 of nature and spirit. This last one can be con- 
 sidered as an approximation to the abolition of the 
 dilemma, as proposed by both Croce and Bergson, 
 when we contrast it with the strictly deterministic 
 position, though it still preserves the opposition of 
 fact and value, of experience and philosophy, of 
 reality and spirit. In the new conception of the will, 
 necessity and freedom stand in the same relation 
 as all these other dualities in Croce's system; and 
 the emphasis is laid, as usual, on the second term, 
 through which only we can understand the first. 
 The agreement between Croce and Bergson in this 
 particular instance points to a closer similarity 
 between their respective philosophies than is ap- 
 parent to a casual observer. That external reality 
 which seems to confront the spirit as a separate 
 existence, and which Bergson considers as the prod- 
 uct of a purely mechanical, practical intellect, 
 corresponds to what Croce defines as the naturalistic, 
 not theoretical, but practical, elaboration of reality; 
 and in Bergson's intuition and ela'n vital^ Croce's 
 concept of reality as spiritual activity is mythically 
 adumbrated. 
 
 If activity is freedom, then freedom coincides with 
 the value of activity. If we use the words good and 
 evil, not with any special ethical connotation, but 
 as the general terms of practical value and non-value, 
 good and evil are activity and non-activity, freedom 
 and absence of freedom. Evil, like all other purely
 
 The Practical Activity 201 
 
 negative values, is unreal. This does not mean 
 that the actions that we call evil have no real exist- 
 ence, any more than the unreality of ugliness or 
 falsehood imply the non-existence of bad poetry 
 or of logical errors; bad poetry and logical errors 
 have no aesthetic or logical reality, but they are 
 products of the practical spirit, directed towards 
 the satisfaction of practical ends; and every real 
 action, inasmuch as it is an action, considered in 
 itself as adequate to its particular end, is good. It 
 is only by substituting to that end another end, 
 that the first end may appear as evil, and the second 
 as good; but if this substitution takes place before 
 the action, then the action is inevitably directed 
 towards the second end, and therefore again, it is 
 not evil, but good. It is through a psychological 
 delusion that we imagine ourselves in a position in 
 which we see the good, and yet do the evil: what 
 we do is that which appears to us as the most 
 desirable end, and therefore as good. The intention, 
 outside the actual volition, is, as we have seen, un- 
 real; if it were real, it would realize itself as an action, 
 and be one with it. The negative practical judg- 
 ments, whether economic or ethic, are judgments 
 which affirm the reality of a certain action, and 
 therefore its value, at the same time comparing 
 that value with a different one, which has not been 
 realized in that particular instance. The negative 
 moral judgment usually consists in the affirmation 
 of a purely economic value contrasted with an ethical
 
 202 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 value which is absent from the action which is the 
 subject of the judgment. 
 
 The doctrine of the unreality of evil has always 
 been regarded with deep mistrust by the practical 
 moralist; but that mistrust is utterly unjustified by 
 the doctrine itself. For practical purposes it may 
 be convenient to consider life as intrinsically evil, 
 and to oppose to it a set of ideals, or abstract moral 
 values to which we must strive to conform our ac- 
 tions; in fact, every one of us is constantly doing 
 something of the kind, and finding in those ideals 
 a help and an Inspiration. But shall our ideals lose 
 their value when we understand that they have no 
 separate, transcendent reality? That every action 
 carries its own value within itself, and that therefore 
 unless we constantly realize those ideals in our con- 
 crete and individual actions, in every one of our ac- 
 tions, the ideals themselves will be but empty 
 shadows? Every ideal, however high and compre- 
 hensive, is but an empirical concept derived from a 
 class of actions in which we have recognised a moral 
 value; moral standards have the same character as 
 aesthetic standards, and are useful and active only 
 as long as we understand their nature. But the 
 creation of moral values is a constantly renovated, 
 spontaneous, original activity, in the same sense in 
 which art and poetry are. We can be directed, both 
 in our activity and in our judgment, by standards 
 and ideals; that is, standards and ideals may help 
 us to put ourselves in a position practically favourable
 
 The Practical Activity 203 
 
 to the creation or judgment of aesthetic or moral 
 values. But the actual creation, as the actual judg- 
 ment, takes place, both in art and morality, so to 
 speak, at the risk of our whole life: it is a new ac- 
 tivity, in a situation which cannot be identical with 
 any previous situation, and to which no rule will 
 ever give us the key. 
 
 While on one hand our sense of responsibility Is 
 rather heightened than diminished by Croce's con- 
 ception of value, if we look at the same doctrine from 
 another angle. It tells us that there is no evil where 
 there Is no consciousness of evil; that evil becomes 
 something positive, acquires an Independent exist- 
 ence, only when It Is reflected In a higher plane of 
 consciousness. The only conceivable sanction of the 
 evil that we have willed is in the will that, tending 
 towards a better end, apprehends Its former volition 
 as inadequate and therefore evil; but until that light 
 has shown itself to the spirit, all other sanctions are 
 meaningless. This Is the foundation of the Christian 
 doctrine of repentance, of the uses of remorse, or 
 grace; and the individual intimate quality of moral 
 values was first proclaimed by the voice that said: 
 nolite iudicare. If the Kingdom of Heaven is not 
 within you, it Is not to be found anywhere else. 
 
 We can consider the actual volition as Intrinsically 
 good, if we also approach It from the point of view 
 of the multiplicity of possible volitions — impulses, 
 passions, desires — striving to realize themselves at 
 every moment of our life. Every single volition is
 
 204 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 the result of a struggle from which it emerges after 
 having conquered all the other possible volitions. 
 When, in this struggle, the single volition does not 
 assert itself fully, we become the prey of that multi- 
 plicity, willing a volition which is not the one that 
 we ought to will, and that in a way we feel we will; 
 hence a will that is divided against itself, an action 
 which is not positive but negative, not a true ac- 
 tion, but a kind of passivity. When the single 
 volition conquers the passions, when one impulse or 
 desire becomes the will, all the other possible voli- 
 tions lose their actual value, multiplicity gives way 
 to unity, passivity to action, evil to good, death to 
 Hfe. 
 
 The passions can be empirically regarded as habits 
 of the will, as inclinations towards one or another 
 category of actions; by a further empirical elabora- 
 tion, we can divide them into the various classes of 
 virtues and vices, virtues being the passions or habits 
 of rational actions, and vices the contrary ones. In- 
 dividuality or personality, as an empirical concept, 
 is nothing but a complex of more or less lasting 
 habits, some natural and some acquired, or, more 
 rigorously, the historical situation of the universal 
 spirit in every instant of time, and therefore that 
 complex of habits which historical conditions have 
 produced. These habits are the material out of 
 which we mould our life, and the first duty of every 
 individual consists in exploring his own dispositions, 
 in establishing what attitudes the progress of reality
 
 The Practical Activity 205 
 
 has deposited in him, at the moment of his birth 
 and in the course of his individual Hfe — to acquire a 
 consciousness of what in rehgious terms we might 
 call his vocation or mission; it is impossible for any- 
 one to act except on the basis of his preexisting per- 
 sonal habits of will. But temperament, or the em- 
 pirical individuality, is not yet character, or virtue; 
 and the respect that we owe to it, as the necessary 
 condition of our action, must not be confused with 
 the ultra-modern tendency which expresses itself in 
 the cry for the rights of the individual temperament 
 and for the free development of the passions. The 
 individual has the duty of seeking his own self, but 
 also that of cultivating himself in the light of reason; 
 his empirical individuality is a mere datum, and his 
 life is his own work. An education aiming only at 
 the expression of individual idiosyncrasies (as so 
 much of our modern education, at least in theory, is) 
 is no education at all. The ideal is rather to be 
 sought in such a perfect fulfilment of one's individual 
 mission, however humble, that it should at the same 
 time fulfil the universal mission of man. 
 
 The law of life is in the unity that conquers the 
 multiplicity, in the will asserting itself above the 
 passions. The reality is perpetual development, an 
 infinite possibility transforming itself into an infinite 
 actuality, gathering itself at every instant from the 
 multiple into the one, only to disrupt itself again and 
 produce a new unity. Multiplicity, contradiction, 
 evil, non-being, on one side, and unity, coherence,
 
 2o6 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 good, being, on the other, are unthinkable outside 
 the synthesis of Hfe, which is activity, becoming, 
 evolution. This concept of becoming or evolution 
 is the one that modern thought has substituted for 
 that of an immobile reality and of a transcendent 
 divinity. And in Croce it becomes wide enough to 
 embrace Hegel's speculative dialectic on one side, 
 and the naturalistic evolutionism of the scientist on 
 the other. The dialectic of will is the dialectic of 
 reality, both spiritual and natural — or rather only 
 and always spiritual, since nature cannot be dis- 
 tinguished from the spirit as a concrete reality of 
 another order, but only as an abstraction of the prac- 
 tical intellect. What we call life in nature is con- 
 sciousness in the spirit, and the history of nature is 
 not qualitatively different from the history of man. 
 The whole course of history cannot be regarded 
 otherwise than as a continuous progress, a perpetual 
 triumph of life over death; and its rationality, which 
 we call Fate or Providence, is not the work of a 
 transcendent Intelligence, but is a Providence realiz- 
 ing itself in the individual, working not outside or 
 above, but within history itself. The mystery of 
 which we are all conscious is not a part of reality, 
 but only the presentment of future realizations, the 
 infinity of evolution. The God transcendent, the 
 empirical immortality, are mere figures and myths 
 for the God living in nature and in the spirit of man, 
 for the spirit of man, for the spiritual activity, which 
 is life and death in one.
 
 IX. ECONOMICS AND ETHICS i 
 
 The distinctions of the practical activity — The autonomy of ethics: 
 utihtarianism — The autonomy of the economic form: abstract 
 moralism — Relations of the ethical to the economic form — Pleasure 
 and duty, happiness and virtue — Importance of the economic prin- 
 ciple — Philosophy and the science of economics — The ethical prin- 
 ciple; material ethics — Ethical formalism; the universality of the 
 principle — The object of the ethical will — Croce as a moralist. 
 
 The preceding chapter deals with the practical activ- 
 ity in general, with the general concept of will 
 or action. We must now introduce in that concept 
 a distinction analogous to that by which the the- 
 oretical activity has appeared to us first as the 
 knowledge of the individual or intuition, then as 
 the knowledge of the universal or concept. But 
 here, again, we shall not employ the merely descrip- 
 tive and psychological method, nor yet attempt to 
 deduce this distinction from the analogy between 
 the theoretical and the practical activity; we shall 
 appeal once more to the immediate test of con- 
 sciousness, which in fact reveals two distinct forms 
 of the will, the economic and the ethic. Economic 
 activity is the one that wills and realizes only that 
 which relates to the conditions of fact in which the 
 
 ^ See Filosofia della Pratica, part ii, " L'attivita pratica nelle sue 
 forme speciali," pp. 21 1-3 19. 
 
 207
 
 2o8 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 individual finds himself; ethical activity, the one 
 that wills and realizes that which, though related 
 to those conditions, at the same time in some way 
 transcends them. To one correspond individual, to 
 the other, universal ends; on one is based the judg- 
 ment on the coherence of the action in itself, on its 
 adequacy to its individual end; on the other, the 
 judgment on its adequacy to universal ends, which 
 transcend the individual. If we recognise only 
 the ethical form, we perceive very soon that it 
 implies the other one, which we intended to exclude, 
 since our action, though universal in its meaning, 
 must always be something concrete and individually 
 determined. We do not realize morality in the 
 universal, but always a given moral volition, not 
 the abstract virtues, but the concrete works, x^l- 
 though a moral action Is not only our individual 
 pleasure, yet it must be that, too, or we should 
 never be able to realize it. On the other hand, the 
 mere economic action, the satisfaction of our im- 
 mediate pleasure, though it satisfies us in relation 
 to our individual end, yet it leaves constantly un- 
 satisfied that which we are beside and beyond our 
 individual determinations, our deepest and truest 
 being. And this dissatisfaction will last until we 
 succeed in lifting ourselves above the infinite suc- 
 cession of individual ends, and in inserting in them 
 a universal value. This passage or conversion from 
 the purely economic to the ethic, from pleasure 
 to duty, is designed by Croce as the conquest of
 
 Economics and Ethics 209 
 
 that peace which is not of a fabulous future, but of 
 the present and real: in every instant is eternity, 
 to him who knows how to reach it. Our actions 
 will be always new, because always new problems 
 are put before us by the course of reality; but in 
 them, if we accomplish them with a pure heart, 
 seeking in them what lifts them above themselves, 
 we shall each time possess the Whole. Such is the 
 character of the moral action, which satisfies us not 
 as individuals but as men, and as individuals only 
 because the individual is a man, and as men only 
 through the medium of individual satisfaction. 
 
 The denial of the autonomy of the ethical form, 
 the attempt to reduce the ethic to the economic, the 
 morally good to the individually useful, is the sub- 
 stance of the many theories that go under the name 
 of utilitarianism. But this reduction of the practical 
 activity to a single principle clashes in every instant 
 of our life against the distinction between mere 
 pleasure and duty, between the useful and the honest 
 action, between the things that have a price and 
 those that have none, between actions which have 
 a moral motive and those that have only a utili- 
 tarian one. The utilitarians themselves, unable 
 to pass over the distinction, have tried to explain 
 it away as a purely quantitative one, defining 
 morality as the utility of the greater number or as 
 the interest or egotism of the race; but it is clear 
 that these so-called quantitative distinctions are 
 really qualitative ones: the utility of the greater
 
 2IO The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 number is no longer individual utility or immediate 
 pleasure, the egotism of the race is no longer egotism, 
 but a value which transcends the individual. A 
 further attempt in the same direction consists in 
 considering morality as born from the association 
 between certain acts which are means to a pleasure, 
 and that pleasure itself: a savage fights to defend 
 his personal liberty or his life, a civilized man, for- 
 getting that the tribe, or the city, or the state, are 
 but means to preserve his Hfe and his property, 
 defends them for themselves, and allows himself 
 to be deprived of both his property and his life for 
 love of his country. But only through stupidity is 
 it possible to mistake the means for the end, and, 
 therefore, this theory actually reduces morality 
 to what is practically irrational, a product of con- 
 fusion and illusion; that is, to the contrary of the 
 practical activity, which is, in its own sphere, ra- 
 tionality and wisdom. The mere enunciation of 
 this theory, if true, ought to produce the dissolu- 
 tion of those false associations, and, therefore, the 
 destruction of morality; if morality subsists, this 
 is due to its rational character, which associationism 
 has not succeeded in disproving. The last refuge 
 of utilitarianism is in theology and mystery: the 
 utility of moral actions is not of this world, but 
 derived from the conception of another world in 
 which God punishes or rewards us for our conduct on 
 earth. But this kind of utilitarianism puts itself 
 outside the field of philosophy, by emptying the
 
 Economics and Ethics 211 
 
 symbols of religion of their moral content, which 
 is their only logical justification. 
 
 The converse form of error, which consists in 
 eliminating the economic moment from the con- 
 cept of practical activity, is criticised by Croce as 
 abstract moralism. The economic moment has 
 been regarded as purely technical, that is, as the 
 theoretical moment that precedes action, action 
 itself being always and only ethical; but some sort 
 of knowledge precedes every action, and the dis- 
 tinction between the useful and the good cannot 
 be reduced to that between knowledge and will; 
 we can consider the useful as the means and the 
 good as the end, only by forgetting that there 
 is as much difference between knowing the useful 
 and willing the useful, as between knowing the good 
 and willing the good. The useful has also been 
 identified with the egotistic and immoral; but the 
 merely useful is amoral, and not immoral, in the 
 same sense in which the pure intuition is alogical, 
 and not either logical or illogical. The imagination 
 of the poet cannot be submitted to the logical judg- 
 ment, any more than the immediate pleasure of 
 the child, or any action which precedes the awaken- 
 ing of the moral consciousness. And besides, the 
 useful is so far from being immoral, that there is 
 no moral action which is not also useful, as there 
 is no logical truth which can express itself except 
 through language. Finally, the useful has been 
 defined as an inferior form of practical conscious-
 
 212 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 ness; but what this definition actually accomplishes 
 is to recognise, though imperfectly, the true dis- 
 tinction, which is a relation of higher and lower only 
 in the metaphorical sense in which these adjectives 
 can be employed for the relation between the in- 
 tuition and the concept. 
 
 Economics and ethics are the double grade of 
 the practical activity: it is possible to conceive of 
 actions having no moral value, and yet economically 
 effective, but not of moral actions which should not 
 at the same time be useful, or economic. Morality 
 lives concretely in utility, as the universal in the 
 individual, the eternal in the contingent. But we 
 can never sufficiently emphasize the true character 
 of the distinction, which, taken as a purely abstract 
 and psychological one, might justify the persistence 
 of morally indifferent actions within the moral con- 
 sciousness. The moral consciousness, once it is 
 awakened, invests the whole life of the practical 
 mind, as the logical consciousness does for the 
 theoretical mind, and it abolishes that condition of 
 innocence, in which the purely economic is not yet 
 subject to the moral judgment, in the same way as 
 perception and reflection destroy our naive belief in 
 the reality of purely poetical imaginations. On the 
 other hand, there are no actions w^hich are economic- 
 ally indifferent, or, as they are generally called, dis- 
 interested; morality requires that the individual 
 should transform a universal interest into his in- 
 dividual one, make of morality itself his personal
 
 Economics and Ethics 213 
 
 utility, but it cannot ask for the abolition of all 
 interests, which would mean the abolition of moral- 
 ity as well. The value of a moral action is in direct 
 proportion with the passion and fervour with which 
 we identify our individual ends with ends tran- 
 scending our empirical individuality. 
 
 In the light of this distinction, the old oppositions 
 of pleasure and duty, of happiness and virtue, lose 
 a good deal of their rigour and sharpness. Pleasure 
 as the positive economic activity or feeling can 
 never be in real contrast with duty as the positive 
 moral activity: a moral action brings with itself 
 its own satisfaction or pleasure, and if it brings 
 pain also, either the good action was not entirely 
 good, not willed with all our heart, or it was ac- 
 companied by a new practical problem, which has 
 yet to be solved. Similarly, happiness is not neces- 
 sarily virtue, but there is no virtue which is not 
 happiness; the sorrows of the virtuous are not in- 
 trinsic to morality, being but the limits of human 
 activity, which the good share with the wicked. 
 We all can transform our limits into sorrows, by 
 our restlessness and unreasonableness; or, through 
 resignation, our sorrows in limits and conditions of 
 activity. Asceticism, which regards pleasure and 
 happiness as essentially immoral, is the extreme 
 form of moral abstractism; by destroying the 
 economic category, it deprives morality of its 
 reality and concreteness. It is, in fact, in the 
 practical sphere, the counterpart of mysticism in the
 
 214 ^^^ Philosophy of Mind 
 
 theoretical, which makes thought impossible by 
 dissociating it from expression. 
 
 The recognition of the autonomy of the economic 
 moment as one of the fundamental forms of spiritual 
 activity, and the study of its relations with morality, 
 appears to me as Croce's most important con- 
 tribution to modern thought. We have seen what 
 light the problems of the ethical will receive, when 
 they are seen in their unity and distinction with 
 the facts of the economic, or individual, will. 
 We shall see in the next chapter what a vast field 
 of human activity, comprising the whole po- 
 litical life of mankind, reveals a new rationality, 
 once it is regarded as a legitimate product of the 
 human mind, to be judged according to its own 
 standards and values, and not to standards and 
 values belonging to a different order of facts. Croce's 
 discovery of the will of the individual as the first 
 grade, the elementary form of the practical spirit, 
 is analogous to Vice's discovery of the purely 
 intuitive activity as the first grade of knowledge; 
 and it establishes between economics and ethics, 
 between politics and morality, the same relation as 
 between esthetic and logical values. The aesthetic- 
 ally true is the adequately expressive, as the econom- 
 ically good is the useful; but in both cases, we can 
 never repeat it sufficiently, once the logical and 
 the moral consciousness are awakened, neither the 
 aesthetic can be apprehended otherwise than as 
 logically true or untrue, nor the economic otherwise
 
 Economics and Ethics 215 
 
 than as morally good or bad. The standards which 
 are illegitimate when applied to art as art, to politics 
 as politics, become rational again in the all pervading 
 light of truth and morality. The predecessors of 
 Croce in this line of his speculation are, on one side, 
 the poHtical writers who, from Aristotle to Machia- 
 velli, attempted to define the relations between 
 politics and morality; on the other side, the econo- 
 mists, who, by isolating a type of value, which was 
 not an aesthetic, intellectual, or ethical value, and 
 which could not be identified with the reverse of the 
 ethical value, or egotism, had prepared the ground 
 for the establishment of a philosophy of economics. 
 As a matter of actual, historical derivation, it was 
 from his study of Marxism, from his meditations 
 on contemporary economic science, that Croce 
 drew, as we saw in one of the first chapters of this 
 book, his conception of economic value as one of 
 the universal values. 
 
 After what has been said of the general relation- 
 ship between philosophy and science, it will not be 
 difficult to determine the place that economic science 
 occupies in Croce's thought, in relation to his phi- 
 losophy of economics. Economics as a philosophical 
 science is that branch of philosophy, the object of 
 which is the economic activity in its universality, the 
 determination of the concept of volition or action as 
 the volition or action of the individual, that is, as the 
 predicate of the economic judgment or judgment of 
 utility. The economic judgment, in its turn, is but a
 
 2 1 6 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 form of historical judgment, and, therefore, the con- 
 crete form of the philosophy of economics is economic 
 history, the history of the spirit of man as it realizes 
 itself in the individual action or volition. Between 
 that philosophy and that history, there is no place, 
 as we know, for any intermediate form of knowledge, 
 but only for the practical (empirical or abstract) 
 elaboration, of the economic datum. This is what 
 the science of economics actually is: an applied 
 mathematical science, founded on empirical con- 
 cepts. The postulates and types of economic science 
 are among the most perfect examples of conscious 
 fictions, beginning with the fundamental one of the 
 homo oeconomicus: they are empirical concepts by 
 which the economic reality is simplified to such an 
 extent that it becomes possible to submit it to 
 mathematical calculation, and thereby to recognise 
 promptly its necessary aspects and consequences. 
 Economic science partakes, therefore, of the rigour 
 and absoluteness of mathematics, which is obtained, 
 as we know, only by sacrificing the concreteness of 
 its object. Its laws are arbitrary and tautological, 
 consisting, like all scientific laws, in the definition of 
 those characteristics of reality which have been ab- 
 stracted to form its postulates or empirical concepts; 
 but it is only through the acceptance of such defini- 
 tions that it succeeds in dominating, ordering, de- 
 scribing, and classifying the mass and variety of eco- 
 nomic facts and, most important of all, in treating 
 them quantitively. It has, in fact, the same structure
 
 Economics and Ethics 217 
 
 as another science with which it has been frequently 
 compared, and which is here assumed as typical 
 of the proceedings of applied mathematics — me- 
 chanics. I believe that very few economists would 
 quarrel to-day with Croce's characterization of 
 economic science, since its mathematical character 
 is now universally recognised; but Croce proves 
 conclusively that even in its non-mathematical 
 phases, economics has always been a purely quanti- 
 tative science. Volition and action are assumed in 
 it in their indistinction; and moral facts being vo- 
 litions and actions as well as the economic facts, 
 they can also be included in the economic calculus, 
 because from a merely abstract point of view there 
 is no way of differentiating them from the latter. 
 
 Between the philosophy and the science of eco- 
 nomics there is neither agreement nor disagreement, 
 but a total heterogeneity, and, therefore, a recip- 
 rocal tolerance. It is only when one invades the 
 field, or adopts the methods, of the other, that 
 conflict and error arise. Economics as a science 
 may then deny the legitimacy of the philosophical 
 study of the economic moment; or it may attribute 
 a universal value to its empirical concepts (as it has 
 happened again and again in the disputes between 
 free-traders and protectionists, or as it constantly 
 happens when economic laws are referred to as 
 endowed with a character of absolute necessity); 
 or, finally it may transform its fictions into reali- 
 tieSj attributing for instance to the concrete human
 
 21 8 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 being, and to the exclusion of any other quality, 
 the qualities it has abstracted for the creation of 
 its homo osconomicus. But, in all such cases, though 
 we may meet these errors among the economists, 
 they are not scientific errors but logical errors; or 
 rather, they are poor science only because they 
 are bad philosophy. The true function of the ab- 
 stract economic schemes is that of an instrument 
 in the hands of the historical and sociological ob- 
 server, who needs many other similar instruments, 
 if he wants to gain a concrete and direct knowledge 
 of actual historical and social conditions. 
 
 It is now time for us to return, from this dis- 
 cussion of the two different elaborations of the 
 economic datum, to a closer consideration of the 
 second form of the practical activity, or of the 
 ethical principle. In the same way as the empiri- 
 cal concepts of economic science are insufficient to 
 exhaust the infinite wealth of the economic principle, 
 no single action or group of single actions can de- 
 fine the ethical principle, which is universal, and 
 therefore merely formal. By identifying the prin- 
 ciple with a series, however vast, of particular 
 determinations, that is, by substituting a material 
 ethics for a formal one, we fall back inevitably 
 Into utilitarianism, since the volition of a single ob- 
 ject or class of objects is not a volition of the un- 
 iversal but of the particular, not an ethical but an 
 economic act. Even the highest forms of moral 
 ideals, such as benevolence, love, altruism, human-
 
 Economics and Ethics 219 
 
 itarianism, etc., once they are apprehended mate- 
 rially, and not as mere verbal approximations to 
 the formal ethical principle, acquire a contingent 
 and utilitarian character, and are apt to come in 
 actual conflict with the truly moral will. The same 
 criticism applies, and with greater force, to insti- 
 tutionalized ideals, such as the family, the state, the 
 social organism, the interest of the race, etc.; none 
 of them can be the object of the moral will without 
 exceptions and restrictions, that is, without losing 
 in the act of the will its Institutional character, 
 and appearing as one of the particular conditions 
 under which the particular moral volition takes 
 place. The religious principles themselves are 
 subject to this reduction from the ethical to the 
 economic, when, as in the case of theological utili- 
 tarianism, they are taken as empirical limitations, 
 as particular objects, of the ethical will. The 
 material ethical principles are in fact analogous to 
 those material aesthetic principles which we have 
 criticised as rhetorical; they constitute a rhetoric 
 of the virtues not less deadly to the creative moral 
 will than the rhetoric of the arts is to the creative 
 intuition. 
 
 The ethical principle must be formal, but not 
 formalistic, and therefore Croce Is not satisfied 
 with any of the so-called universal laws or cate- 
 gorical Imperatives, or with any of the many for- 
 mulas which attempt to define the moral actions 
 through one constant determination which ought
 
 220 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 to be present in each of them. Such formulas 
 are mere symbols or metaphors, and can be used 
 as the equivalents of the ethical principle, as some 
 of the categories of material ethics can be used; 
 but their danger consists in giving the illusion of 
 possessing the true principle, while what we are 
 given is an empty and tautological one, which will 
 again give way to purely empirical determinations 
 and therefore to utilitarianism. This empty form- 
 alism, or absolute indetermination, of the ethical 
 principle, corresponds to two conceptions of phi- 
 losophy, which Croce respectively calls partial and 
 discontinuous. According to the first, man may 
 know a portion of reality, but never reality as a 
 whole; as regards morality, he may hear the voice 
 of his own conscience, but never grasp with his 
 intellect the content of the moral law. According 
 to the second, he may know the reason of morality, 
 but not within the sphere of ethics, whose task con- 
 sists only in establishing the moral law and de- 
 ducing the moral precepts; the problem of the 
 essence of morality belongs to another science, 
 metaphysics. The reader who has followed us to 
 this point knows that Croce's philosophy is neither 
 partial nor discontinuous; that he does not admit of 
 any limits to human thought, nor of any division 
 in the body of philosophy. The whole of philos- 
 ophy is already included for him in the first philo- 
 sophical proposition, and though it may didactically 
 be useful to divide the problems of philosophy in
 
 Economics and Ethics 221 
 
 groups, or even to deal separately with the partic- 
 ular philosophical science on one hand, and with 
 general philosophy or metaphysics on the other, 
 yet truth does not belong to the distinctions outside 
 their unity, to the parts outside the whole, to the 
 segments outside the circle. It is this totality and 
 continuity of Croce's philosophy that makes Croce's 
 ethical principle a form, but not an empty one; a 
 form which is full in a philosophical and universal 
 sense, which is at the same time content, and un- 
 iversal as content not less than as form. He has 
 defined the ethical principle, not, tautologically, 
 as a universal form, but as the volition of the uni- 
 versal: a definition which is at the same time the 
 distinction of the ethical from the economical form, 
 or volition of the individual. We may here recall, 
 to test once more the coherence of Croce's thought, 
 and to make this definition clearer, his definition of 
 the concept as knowledge of the universal; by it 
 the concept is distinguished from the intuition, or 
 knowledge of the individual, and the logical principle 
 is seen as unidentifiable either with an abstract 
 logical form or with any particular system of phi- 
 losophy. The concept is real only in the infinite 
 individual determinations of actual thought, as the 
 ethical principle in the infinite concrete volitions of 
 the human spirit sub specie universalis. 
 
 The universal which is the object of the ethical 
 volition is not something that we shall need to de- 
 fine at this point of our exposition, since the whole
 
 222 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 of Croce's philosophy is nothing but a definition 
 of the universal. The universal is mind or the 
 spirit; it is reality, as unity of will and thought; 
 it is life grasped in its depth as that same unity; it 
 is freedom, since a reality thus conceived is per- 
 petual development, creation, progress. Man, in 
 willing the universal, turns from his individuality 
 to that which transcends it, to the spirit, or reality, 
 or life, or freedom, not as abstract ideals, but as 
 they realize themselves in his individual action. 
 The volition of the individual, of one's individual 
 existence, is necessarily the first step; there is no 
 man, however deeply moral, who does not begin by 
 affirming his own individual life; without this 
 affirmation, he would never be able to transcend it 
 and to deny it. But he who should limit himself 
 to this affirmation, and accept as a place of rest 
 what is only the beginning of his development, 
 would find himself in contradiction with his real, 
 intimate self. He must will not only his individual 
 self, but that self also, which being the same in all 
 selves is their common Father. It is thus that he 
 promotes the realization of reality, lives the full 
 life, and makes his heart beat with the heart of 
 the universe: Cor cordiiim. The moral individual 
 is conscious that he is working for the Whole. 
 Every action which is in accord with the ethical 
 duty is in accord with Life, and would be contrary 
 to duty and immoral, if instead of promoting life, 
 it should depress and mortify it. The most humble
 
 Economics and Ethics 223 
 
 moral action resolves itself into this volition of the 
 spirit in its universality. The soul of a simple and 
 ignorant man wholly devoted to his modest duty 
 is in perfect unison with that of the philosopher whose 
 mind receives within itself the universal spirit. What 
 one does, the other thinks; and both reach by dif- 
 ferent roads their full satisfaction in an act of life, 
 in a fecund embrace with reality. 
 
 It is in pages like the ones from which we have 
 extracted this enthusiastic definition of morality, 
 that the true quality of Croce's philosophy is best 
 perceived. But what is here affirmed as a prin- 
 ciple lives as an ever present spirit in innumer- 
 able discussions of particular moral problems in his 
 Filosqfia della Praiica^ In his moral essays, in his 
 literary criticism (there is no living literary critic 
 who has a keener perception of moral values than 
 this Implacable enemy of moralism), in the whole 
 of his work. It is this moral enthusiasm, together 
 with his capacity to see clear and deep, his catholic 
 tolerance for all forms of beauty and truth and 
 goodness, however distant from his tastes and in- 
 clinations, and his courageous, outspoken Intoler- 
 ance for all hypocrisies, compromises, half-truths, 
 wilful errors, that has given Croce, In the last 
 twenty years, in Italy, a right to moral as well as 
 intellectual leadership. He is the true heir of an 
 infinitely complex moral tradition, and placed high 
 enough to do justice to all Its elements, though 
 apparently contrasting with each other. But when
 
 224 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 recognizing the symbolical and practical value of 
 the various positive ethical systems that appear to 
 him as gradual approximations to the full concrete- 
 ness and universality of the ethical principle, he 
 emphasizes the connection of his own ethics with 
 one of those elements in preference to every other, 
 with the religious and Christian element, for which 
 morality is already what it is for the philosopher, the 
 love and will of the universal spirit. There is no 
 truth of ethics which for him cannot be expressed 
 in the words that we have learned as children from 
 our traditional religion. Between the religious 
 man and the philosopher, between religion and 
 philosophy, there is no enmity, but continuity and 
 development; in the affirmation of the ethical prin- 
 ciple, which is the crucial test of every philosophy 
 as of every religion, the substantial identity of 
 religion and philosophy is finally established.
 
 X. THE LAWS 1 
 
 Economic society as an empirical concept — The philosophical concept of 
 society — Sociology, philosophy of law and political science — The 
 definition of law — Laws and customs — The laws, the natural laws 
 and the practical principles — Mutability of the laws: the jus 
 naturale — ^The function of the laws — Legalism: the Jesuit and the 
 Puritan — ^The legislative activity as a genetically economic activity — 
 The juridical activity — Law and language. 
 
 One of the fundamental empirical concepts of the 
 science of economics is that of economic society, 
 which is formed by abstracting certain classes of 
 economic relationships from the mass of relation- 
 ships of all kinds among which the life of the in- 
 dividual realizes itself. Any treatise of economics 
 can be considered as a definition of economic society; 
 and we know how those definitions are apt to vary 
 according to the choice of the groups of facts studied, 
 and the method employed, by different schools of 
 economists. The economic society of the Marx- 
 ian is not the economic society of the classical 
 economist; the Catholic economist, differing from 
 both, will include in his treatment the considera- 
 tion of certain ethical relations which give a greater 
 complexity to his scheme. It would be possible 
 to study the economics of the individual in perfect 
 
 ' See Filosofia della Pratica, part iii, " Le Leggi," pp. 321-407. 
 
 225
 
 226 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 isolation from all other human beings, limiting the 
 elements of this particular form of society to one 
 man, and that portion of nature from which he 
 draws his food, his clothing, his shelter; on the 
 other hand, the whole of mankind and the whole 
 of nature may enter into a single, all-including, 
 economic body. We may even study animal species, 
 in their relations within themselves, or with man, 
 or with other animal species, or with nature at 
 large, from an economic standpoint (symbiosis 
 and parasitism are facts bearing a close resem- 
 blance with human economy) — and thus form an 
 infinite number of new economic societies. Each 
 of these empirical concepts can be varied ad infini- 
 tum^ by the mere inclusion or exclusion of certain 
 classes of relationships. 
 
 The empirical, non-rigorous character of the con- 
 cept of economic society is self-evident; and it can 
 therefore be usefully employed to prove by analogy 
 the similar character of the concept of society as 
 manufactured by jurists, sociologists, and political 
 scientists. It is against such fictions that philosophy 
 reacts by building a concept of the isolated individ- 
 ual, that is, of the individual isolated from the 
 particular classes of relationships which enter into 
 the formation of particular empirical concepts of 
 society; but it does this only to plunge the individual 
 again in the midst of that infinite multiplicity, 
 which is one aspect, and an essential one, of reality, 
 Society as a philosophical concept cannot be identi-
 
 The Laws 227 
 
 fied with any form of economic or political society; 
 of such, as mere abstractions, no philosophical 
 treatment is possible. Society is that real multi- 
 plicity, without which we should have neither 
 knowledge nor action, neither art nor thought, 
 neither utility nor morality; and from society in 
 this sense, the individual cannot be isolated, with- 
 out reducing him, in his turn, to a merely abstract 
 concept. 
 
 The sociologist, the jurist, the political scientist 
 use their concepts of society for their purposes, 
 which are, in the sense which is now familiar to our 
 reader, scientific purposes. But very often they 
 lose sight of the character of these concepts, and 
 treat these instruments of classification and descrip- 
 tion as substitutes for the actual reality which 
 they are, by reason of their abstractness, utterly 
 unable to reproduce. The sociologist talks of the 
 collective mind, and of collective representations, 
 as if they had a reality outside the thought and 
 action of the individual; the jurist builds a philos- 
 ophy of law, in which society is opposed to the 
 individual as a being to another being, and law, 
 as a product of society, at every point transcends 
 the individual will. The political scientist deals 
 with the community, or the association, or the 
 State, as with concepts of which it were possible 
 to give a philosophical definition, valid for all times, 
 and from which the rules of perfect government 
 could be rigorously deduced. Of these types of
 
 228 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 philosophical degenerations of legitimate scientific 
 thought, it can be roughly said that, because of the 
 peculiar cultural development of the various na- 
 tions of Europe, the first belongs more particularly 
 to England and France, the second to Italy and 
 Germany; though they are all more or less common 
 in European culture as a whole. As an Italian, 
 Croce was particularly interested in the second, 
 the philosophical degeneration of juridical thought, 
 and therefore his particular treatment of the eco- 
 nomic facts underlying the problems of political 
 society naturally took the shape of an inquiry 
 into the nature of law. But it ought not to be diffi- 
 cult for the English or American reader, for whom 
 these problems are not part of a practically in- 
 existent philosophy of law, but of a long tradition 
 of political science and theory of government, to 
 translate Croce's thought into terms of his own 
 cultural experience. 
 
 A law is an act of will, whose content is a series or 
 class of actions. This definition excludes from the 
 concept of law any empirical social determination; it 
 includes within it all laws which are merely individ- 
 ual, the laws that the individual lays down to and for 
 himself, the rules of conduct and programs of life 
 and action, which the individual follows of his own 
 accord. It may be objected that individual laws 
 differ from social and political laws, because the 
 latter are coercive and constrictive, while the former 
 are not. There is no law, however, that is truly
 
 The Laws 229 
 
 coercive; the individual is always free either to ob- 
 serve or not to observe the law. What a law does is 
 to offer a choice or alternative, and this is as true of 
 individual as of social laws. We may disregard our 
 own rules of conduct or programs of action, and 
 suffer from doing so, and inflict a punishment on 
 ourselves for having done so; or we may alter our 
 individual laws as social laws are altered when they 
 no longer respond to the need of a community, and 
 are either violently overthrown by rebellion or 
 quietly allowed to fall into desuetude through non- 
 observance, or modified by the proper organs of 
 legislation. But the importance of the concept of 
 individual laws lies In the fact that the so-called 
 social laws have no reality outside the individual: in 
 order to observe a law it is necessary to make it one's 
 own, and to rebel against a law is to expel it from 
 one's personality, of which it was, or tried to be- 
 come, a part. The only real laws are, therefore, 
 individual laws. 
 
 If the criterion of sanction or coercion Is Insuffi- 
 cient to draw a distinction between individual and 
 social laws, we can still less use it to divide the social 
 laws into customs or unwritten laws, and political and 
 juridical laws. Both customs and laws carry with 
 them sanctions, though of a different order, or, to 
 put It in more precise terms, both offer a choice be- 
 tween probable consequences to the free individual 
 will. This distinction, like every other subdivision of 
 the laws (civil, penal, national, international, laws
 
 230 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 and by-laws, etc.), is a purely empirical one. But 
 the concept of law comprehends these and many 
 more in which the jurists have no interest, such as the 
 literary or artistic laws (that a tragedy should have 
 five acts, or, as at one time in England, that a novel 
 should fill three volumes), or the rules of religious 
 life, or the precepts of chivalry, down to the statutes 
 of a criminal gang and to Balzac's droit parisien. 
 In fact, the empirical distinctions of the laws are 
 coextensive with the empirical concepts of society, 
 and partake of the same characteristics: to the pre- 
 ceding examples of laws correspond respectively the 
 republic of letters, a monastery, the order of knight- 
 hood, a band of robbers, and le beau monde. But the 
 only reality, both of the society and of the law, is the 
 individual assent. 
 
 The laws have one point in common with the so- 
 called natural laws; both are concerned with em- 
 pirical concepts, or classes. But while the natural 
 laws are mere indicative statements of fact, the laws 
 can always be translated from the indicative to the 
 imperative; that is, they contain a volitive element 
 which is absent from the natural laws. The volitive 
 element is present, on the other hand, in the practical 
 principles which have some time received the names 
 of moral or economic laws, and which can be con- 
 verted into such imperatives as Will the universal, or, 
 in particular. Will the good, the useful, the true, the 
 beautiful. But these principles are concerned with 
 the universal, that is, with the spirit of man in the
 
 The Laws 231 
 
 necessary forms of its activity, not with a particular 
 product of the spirit, a class or type of actions, as do 
 laws in the strict meaning of the word. This dis- 
 tinction between the practical principles and the 
 laws opens the way to the recognition of a very im- 
 portant character of the laws: while the practical 
 principles, because of their universality, have no 
 limits and no exceptions (and we have already seen 
 that a morally indifferent action is a contradiction in 
 terms), the laws can never exhaust the universal, and 
 therefore will always leave outside themselves a 
 margin of actions, not included in any of the classes 
 to which they refer, and therefore legally indifferent. 
 In more technical language, we may express the same 
 idea by saying that all laws, whether imperative or 
 prohibitive or permissive (a law, according to the 
 ancient iormxA^., aut iubet aut vetat aut permittit), can 
 be reduced to permissive laws: an order is always at 
 the same time a prohibition, and both orders and pro- 
 hibitions implicitly permit all actions which are not 
 contemplated by the law. 
 
 Moreover, while the practical principles are im- 
 mutable, always capable of giving form to the most 
 varied historical material, the laws are in perpetual 
 flux and change. The particular modes of change, 
 whether by evolution or revolution, do not concern 
 the philosopher, for whom all can be reduced to a 
 single one: the free will producing a new law under 
 new conditions. Against the perpetual mutability of 
 the laws, due to the contingent and historical charac-
 
 232 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 ter of their content, clashes the concept of an Eternal 
 Code, or Law of Nature {jus naturale)^ which pre- 
 sumes to determine the content and form of the laws, 
 according to abstract reason, once and forever. This 
 conception is due to an error with which we are now 
 familiar, consisting in the transformation of empirical 
 concepts into principals of universal validity. But 
 from this particular error, as from all errors, we must 
 distinguish certain elements of actual and concrete 
 thought which have been historically associated with 
 it. In the attempts to establish a Law of Nature, 
 we shall then recognise either new concrete legislative 
 programs, the new laws appearing as natural and 
 rational by contrast with the old ones, or an attempt 
 to deduce from, and through, juridical concepts, the 
 principles of a philosophy of the practical. The prin- 
 ciple of nationality, fighting for realization against 
 the old dynastic law, appears to its defenders as a 
 typical natural right; and Rousseau, when deducing 
 the principles of the jus naturale, warns us that he is 
 not dealing with historical truths, but with hypothet- 
 ical and conventional reasonings, that is, with princi- 
 ples which transcend every particular determination 
 and have not a positive, but an ideal value. We no 
 longer speak of a Law of Nature, but the error which 
 gave rise to that conception is still vigorous in current 
 social and political discussions; every attempt to 
 change legal conditions is always advocated or 
 resisted by an appeal either to natural rights, which 
 are but arbitrary rationalizations of historical con-
 
 The Laws 233 
 
 tingencies, or to abstract reasons, principles, or 
 ideas, of which the particular laws or institutions 
 are assumed to be the final and necessary expression. 
 But rationality, morality, and naturality, in the 
 sense in which these qualities are predicated of one or 
 another type of laws and institutions, do not belong 
 to any particular historical determination more than 
 to another; they belong only to the spirit of man and 
 to the concrete values that it realizes among the 
 everchanging conditions of history. 
 
 A law, being a volition of a class of actions, and 
 therefore of an abstraction, is in itself an abstract or 
 unreal volition. What we actually will is not the 
 law, but the single, individual action under the law: 
 the reality of the law is only in its execution. In the 
 individual execution, however, what realizes itself is 
 not the law, but the practical principle, economic or 
 ethic, of which both the observance and the non- 
 observance of the law are particular determinations; 
 the individual practical problems can never be fore- 
 seen by the law, which is by its nature general and 
 abstract. What is then, it may be asked, the use of 
 the laws? Croce's answer is that the laws are helps to 
 the real volition, in the same way as the empirical and 
 abstract concepts, though not real knowledge them- 
 selves, are helps to knowledge. In order to determine 
 ourselves to the single action, it is useful to begin by 
 fixing our attention to the class of which that single is 
 an element; in order to know either the individual, or 
 the universal, it is useful to create, between the
 
 234 ^^^ Philosophy of Mind 
 
 universal and the individualj classes and types, gen- 
 eral concepts, or, as Croce calls them, relatively con- 
 stant variables, through which the process of actual 
 knowledge is made easier and quicker. We cannot 
 think the pseudo-concepts, but they help us to think; 
 we cannot will the laws, but they help us to will. 
 The concept of law is akin to that of plan or design; 
 in practice, a plan or design, and its execution, are 
 one and the same thing, as we act by constantly 
 changing our design, because reality, which is the 
 foundation of our action, is in perpetual change. But 
 this unreality of the plan, as distinct from the con- 
 crete individual action, does not deprive the plan 
 itself of its practical uses, which are universally 
 recognized, and which are identical with the uses of 
 law. 
 
 When we identify the empirical laws with the 
 universal practical principles, economic or ethic, we 
 fall into "legalism," which can be defined as the 
 belief that universal principles can be definitely 
 embodied in a limited number of laws, and that, on 
 the other hand, these laws partake of the character 
 of absoluteness which belongs to those principles. It 
 is especially in the treatment of ethics that this con- 
 fusion has caused its worst effects. The two out- 
 standing types of legalists are the Jesuit, who admits 
 of the morally indifferent, the justification through 
 the intention, the pious fraud, and other practical 
 means for the purely literal observance of the law, 
 supposed to be a sufficient satisfaction of the moral
 
 The Laws 235 
 
 obligation, and the Puritan, who maintains that the 
 unchangeable letter of the law is the only, and always 
 certain, guide of the moral consciousness. Both 
 Jesuit and Puritan, or to give them the names they 
 assumed in a historical controversy, both Molinist 
 and Jansenist, have often been in practice much 
 better than their theories; but we are here interested 
 only in their theoretical pronouncements, which, 
 though apparently contrasting, yet combine in sub- 
 stituting the letter for the spirit, and in drying up, in 
 the name of morality, the living springs of moral 
 activity. And in both cases, moral legalism is asso- 
 ciated with theological utilitarianism; it is, in fact, 
 but another aspect of the same error. 
 
 The will that wills classes of actions, the legislative 
 activity. Is either moral or merely economic, and can 
 therefore be judged as either moral or immoral, 
 economic or anti-economic. But as the laws are will 
 In the abstract, our judgment of the laws will also be 
 an abstract judgment. To pronounce a concrete judg- 
 ment, we must turn to the moment of the execution 
 of the law, to the Individual practical action, in which 
 the law realizes Itself. In this sphere, it is vain to 
 dispute whether a law is essentially economic or 
 moral: the economic or moral character of the law is 
 not determined by the abstract intention of the 
 legislator, but by the manner of Its execution, by the 
 quality of the Individual executor. The punishment 
 which a law assigns for a category of crimes may be 
 intended by the legislator either to deter or to emend
 
 236 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 the criminal; but in the man who abstains from that 
 particular kind of crime, the law is an economic one 
 if the abstention is entirely due to the fear of the 
 punishment, it is a moral one if it coincides with a 
 sincere abhorrence of the crime. No law, therefore, 
 can be said to be intrinsically moral, and if we want 
 to define the legislative activity in its full extension, 
 we must define it as genetically practical or merely 
 economic. 
 
 The same definition obviously applies to the will 
 that executes the law, as distinct from the will that 
 formulates it: the juridical activity, as Croce names 
 it, is also genetically practical or merely economiic, 
 and as such united to and distinct from the moral 
 activity. As the juridical activity, however, does not 
 partake of the abstractness of the legislative, but is as 
 concrete and determined as the economic activity, 
 there is actually no possibility of distinguishing the 
 one from the other; the juridical activity is therefore 
 identical with the economic activity. This is Croce's 
 original solution of the fundamental problem of the 
 philosophy of law; a solution which is closely con- 
 nected with his recognition of a utilitarian practical 
 category, distinct from but not opposed to the moral 
 category, and with his reduction of all laws to individ- 
 ual laws. The reader must recall what has been said 
 elsewhere of the relations between economic and 
 moral values; and he will then understand in what 
 sense it can be said that Croce's theory of law is an 
 answer to the secular disputes on the relations be-
 
 The Laws 237 
 
 tween law and morality, between positive and ideal 
 law, historical law and the Law of Nature. And he 
 will also be able to perceive the difference between 
 the reduction of the juridical to the mere economic 
 activity, which, as we know, is also the form through 
 which only morality realizes itself, and the theories of 
 law as the pure embodiment of force and of the 
 positive, established right as the only conceivable 
 right, which are nothing but the counterpart of 
 moral utilitarianism in the field of law. Croce's 
 theory of law is, as all the rest of his philosophy is, a 
 purely formal doctrine; not intended to defend one 
 type of laws and institutions against any other, but 
 attempting to furnish a conception of law, as an in- 
 dividual, perpetually new activity of the spirit of 
 man, of which all laws and institutions, all phases and 
 tendencies of political history, appear as concrete 
 historical manifestations. 
 
 The philosophy of law has often had recourse to the 
 philosophy of language for analogies by which its own 
 problems could be clarified. A doctrinaire view of 
 the juridical and political problem, for which the 
 origin of law and society is to be found in an abstract 
 convention, and which therefore tends to build up, by 
 new conventions, a model legislation, or an Eternal 
 Code, shows its real nature when related to the cor- 
 responding conception of language as a collection of 
 signs, a purely symbolical organism, which can be so 
 perfected by reason as to become an absolute, uni- 
 versal language, embodying in its signs every con-
 
 238 The Philosophy of Mind 
 
 ceivable type of logical operations: a universal 
 language, which should also be a universal symbolic 
 logic. Sharply opposed to the doctrinaire, the tradi- 
 tionalist views certain types of positive laws and 
 institutions as endowed with a character of necessity 
 which puts them above the reach of the individual 
 judgment of man; and as he fails to discover the ever 
 present creative activity, by which man constructs 
 his juridical and political world, he also withdraws 
 from the human spirit the power to create its own lan- 
 guage, and makes of words a divine institution. 
 Equally remote from the sociological as from the 
 theological concept, which are the extreme theoreti- 
 cal forms of popular errors, Croce establishes between 
 law and language an analogy by which both mani- 
 fest their intrinsic creative and human character. 
 The reality of law is the individual juridical or 
 economic activity, as the reality of language is the 
 concrete intuitive activity. Law is the will of the 
 individual, as language is the knowledge of the indi- 
 vidual. Grammars and dictionaries are the codes of 
 language, mere abstractions from the actual living 
 flux of the creative expression, as the written laws 
 and codes are but the grammars of law, mere ab- 
 stractions from the actual living flux of political 
 history. Language is not logic, and yet the logical 
 thought cannot realize itself except through lan- 
 guage; law is not morality, and yet the ethical 
 activity cannot live except by incorporating itself in 
 laws and institutions, and in the execution of laws,
 
 The Laws 239 
 
 the concrete, individual life of institutions, that is, 
 in the juridical and economic activity. 
 
 Thus, the end of this exposition of Croce's system, 
 the doctrine of language with which the system opens 
 links itself intimately with this doctrine of law, with 
 which it closes. And both as regards language and as 
 regards law, the last word is, of necessity, a new im- 
 plicit affirmation of the identity of the philosophical 
 with the historical method. The true history of a 
 language is not a history of abstract grammatical 
 schemes, but the history of the poetry and literature 
 in which that language has realized itself, a history of 
 individual expressions; the true history of law is one 
 with the social and political history of a people, which 
 is, and cannot be but the history of its practical 
 activity in its effective, individual realization, that 
 is, juridical and economic history.
 
 PART THIRD 
 PHILOSOPHY AS HISTORY 
 
 (1911-1921)
 
 I. WORKS AND DAYS 
 
 A retrospective view of the system — Germs of development — The return 
 to history — Croce's attitude during the war — Essays on the great 
 poets. 
 
 To the reader of the three volumes of the Filo- 
 sqfia dello Spirito^ which were published before 
 1910, the whole of Croce's thought appeared as a 
 solidly constructed system, in which the four grades 
 or forms of spiritual activity were studied in their 
 intrinsic essence, and presented in their relations as 
 completing the cycle of living reality, in contrast 
 with that reality which the mind postulates outside 
 its living self, and which the system reduces to a 
 complex practical product of the mind, a collection 
 of material helps subservient to the essential forms 
 of its activity. Knowledge and action, reciprocally 
 implicated, are the substance of reality; and both 
 knowledge and action, rising, the first, from the 
 intuition to the concept, the second, from the eco- 
 nomic to the ethical will, attain the universal, all- 
 including values which we express by the words 
 Beautiful, True, Useful and Good, but only and in 
 so far as they realize themselves in the concrete 
 and individual. A universal more universal than 
 that which is present in the individual act is in- 
 existent, or exists only as an impotent abstraction 
 
 243
 
 244 Philosophy as History 
 
 renouncing the concreteness and reality of the 
 individual, and therefore also that true universality 
 which has no being outside this action, this thought, 
 this life. The soul of the system, slowly extricating 
 itself from the traces of naturalism or intellectualism, 
 which are still visible in the Estetica, is the logic of 
 the pure concept, which resolves in the concrete 
 universal the dualisms of nature and spirit, of fact 
 and value, of life and thought, and, finally, of history 
 and philosophy. But while this logic can be seen 
 at work in all the parts of the system, and is, in fact, 
 the form towards which all Croce's thoughts seem to 
 have constantly tended from the time of his earliest 
 philosophical essays, yet, to an attentive eye, it is 
 possible to discover the successive stages by which 
 it actually incorporated itself in the system. In 
 particular, we have been able to point to the effects 
 of the later meditations on the philosophy of will, 
 on one side, on a more intimate understanding of 
 the pure intuition as the lyrical intuition, on the 
 other, on the identification of the definition with 
 the individual judgment, and thereby on the re- 
 lations between history and philosophy. On the 
 whole it can be said that two apparently contrasting 
 directions were at work within the system itself: 
 one reflecting Croce's mental need for clear and fine 
 distinctions, the other, that deep consciousness of 
 the unity of the real, without which all distinctions 
 tend to solidify themselves into dead abstractions. 
 If we imagine two students of Croce's philosophy,
 
 Works and Days 245 
 
 endowed with antagonistic philosophical tempera- 
 ments, the one a dialectician, the other a mystic, we 
 can easily conceive them as the founders of two 
 diametrically opposed schools of thought. The 
 first would have emphasized the rigorous distinctions, 
 the formal character, the intellectual precision of 
 the system; he might have retained the identification 
 of philosophy and history, but to him these words 
 would have stood only for the names of two formal 
 disciplines, and not for the concrete life of the human 
 spirit which is present in them. The second would 
 have passed lightly over the distinctions, and prob- 
 ably considered them as partaking of the same 
 unreality which belongs to scientific or legal ab- 
 stractions; and by obliterating the logical processes 
 without which the mind of man is unable to grasp 
 and to express itself, he would have taken refuge 
 in an ineffable, though not necessarily silent, con- 
 templation of the underlying unity. This hypoth- 
 esis is not a criticism of Croce's philosophy; it is 
 merely the indication of the fact that, when the 
 system appeared as completed, new problems, and 
 therefore new errors or new truths, were bound to 
 grow out of the elements of the system itself. And 
 nobody was more conscious of this fact than Croce 
 himself, who concluded his volume on the Filosofia 
 della Pratica by expressly warning his readers of 
 the inexhaustibility of thought, which is one with 
 the infinity of reality and of life. No philosophical 
 system is final, because life itself has no end. Every
 
 246 Philosophy as History 
 
 system of philosophy, being conditioned by life, 
 can do no more than solve a group of problems 
 historically given, and prepare the conditions for new- 
 problems and new systems. Of his own work in 
 relation to his readers, he conceived as of nothing 
 more than an Instrument of work. 
 
 In these last few chapters we shall see Croce him- 
 self at work on the new problems generated by his 
 own system, trying "more rigidly to eliminate the 
 last remnants of naturalism, and to put a stronger 
 accent on the spiritual unity," ^ yet constantly 
 defending his conception of the spirit as the unity 
 of distinctions, especially against the mystical 
 tendencies of the new actual idealism. While never, 
 in the course of his whole life, has he limited his 
 activity to mere systematic thinking, during the 
 last eleven years he has shown a more marked ten- 
 dency to return from a philosophy, which is all 
 a meditation of the formal problems of history, to 
 those concrete works of history, by which he was 
 started on his philosophical career; to return to 
 them, however, with a mind in which the original 
 uncertainty and obscurity has given place to a 
 definite consciousness of the nature and purpose 
 of history. The passage from the more philosophical 
 to the more historical stage is marked by the publi- 
 cation of a fourth volume of the Filosojia dello 
 SpiritOy in which, under the title of Teoria e Storia 
 della Storiografia^ he collected a number of essays 
 
 ^ Contributo, p. 74.
 
 Works and Days 247 
 
 written between 191 2 and 1913, containing an 
 elaboration of the theory of history already ex- 
 pounded in the Logica. This volume does not form 
 a new part of the system, but rather the natural 
 conclusion of the whole work, since the problem 
 which it discusses is the one towards which tended 
 all his former inquiries into the forms of the spirit, 
 into their concrete life which is development and 
 history, and the consciousness of which is historical 
 thought. But before proceeding to analyze this 
 final form of Croce's theory of history, we shall give 
 a rapid account of the rest of his intellectual activity 
 from 1 9 10 onward. 
 
 As during the preceding eight years, the Critica 
 continues to this day to be the main organ of Croce's 
 work and influence, and in the Critica the greatest 
 part of his writings are still published for the first 
 time. The general features of the Critica have re- 
 mained practically unchanged, except that his 
 series of essays on the Italian literature of the last 
 fifty years (which he collected in 1914-15 in the four 
 volumes of La Letteratura delta Nuova Italia) has 
 been followed by studies on Italian historiography 
 from the beginning of the nineteenth century to our 
 day (since 1914), by essays on some of the greatest 
 European poets (since 1917), by notes on modern 
 Italian and foreign literature (since 1917), and by 
 the Frammenti di Etica (since 1913), containing 
 discussions of particular problems of contemporary 
 morality. But practically all the reviews and essays
 
 248 Philosophy as History 
 
 published in the Critica and elsewhere are now being 
 collected in the edition of his complete works, of 
 which a full list will be found at the end of this 
 volume. In 191 2, for the inauguration of the Rice 
 Institute in Houston, Texas, he wrote his Breviario 
 di Estetica, which we have partly utilized in our 
 exposition of his eesthetic doctrine, and which he 
 reprinted in 1920 in his Nuovi Saggi di Estetica^ 
 which also contains his most significant philosophical 
 essays of the last four or five years. His Coyjtributo 
 alia critica di me stesso (" Contribution to the Crit- 
 icism of Myself") was written in April, 1915, on the 
 eve of Italy's entrance into the war, and is the best 
 essay in existence on the development of his thought. 
 Of Croce's attitude during the war we shall say 
 but a few words. He was one of the very few 
 European philosophers or scholars who did not 
 transform themselves into improvised statesmen, 
 or into passionate defenders of national prejudices 
 and proclaimers of national hatreds. Differing from 
 the Germanized philologist, who was the type pre- 
 vailing in most universities before the war, in that 
 he had not waited for the war to become aware 
 of the many weaknesses and imperfections of 
 modern German culture, while on the other hand 
 he had lived for years in true and intimate contact 
 with the great spirits of German Romanticism, 
 he resisted with all his power the universal tendency 
 of the time to make of the contingent issues of the 
 war a criterion of intellectual truth and of scientific
 
 Works mid Days 249 
 
 conduct. At the same time, his temper and education 
 reacted violently against the false ideologies of 
 the war, the superstructure of verbal ideals with 
 which on all sides cunning statesmen and naive 
 philosophers attempted to veil the true nature of 
 the conflict. Against these, he reasserted his con- 
 ception of the political life and struggles of states 
 as manifestations of the economic, amoral or pre- 
 moral, activity, and of life itself as a perpetual 
 struggle, finding its reason and its rest in the struggle 
 itself. The theory of the state as justice appeared 
 to him merely as a theoretical error, the fortune of 
 which lay in the opportunity it afforded to give 
 a convenient mask of morality to particular interests, 
 either of individuals or of states. The intrinsic 
 morality of the war he conceived as resting on its 
 tragic reality, as reflected in a severely historical 
 thought, to which it appears as a moment of that 
 historical fate which crushes and destroys states as 
 well as individuals, to create from their ruins always 
 new forms of life. 
 
 It is needless to say that for a time at least Croce 
 shared with Bertrand Russell and with Romain 
 Rolland, two thinkers in many respects very distant 
 from him, and yet as impervious as he was to the 
 rhetoric of the war, the privilege of a vast unpopu- 
 larity. Looking back now on his writings which 
 were later collected in the volume Pagine sulla guerra^ 
 it is possible to discover among them many attitudes 
 which were justified and useful only as a reaction
 
 250 Philosophy as History 
 
 against the current fallacies of the time; and also to 
 realize that the man who speaks to us through 
 them is not always and only a pure philosopher, 
 but a man with a given complex of moral and po- 
 litical tastes and passions. But this is, in a way, 
 as it should be; in the same way, between Croce 
 the philosopher of aesthetics and Croce the critic 
 of poetry, there is a difference which is inherent in 
 the nature of the two different forms of intellectual 
 activity; the philosopher is a man of understanding, 
 the critic a man of tastes and passions. In both 
 cases, his ideal has always been to make the critic or 
 the moralist worthy of the philosopher, his particu- 
 lar comprehension of history adequate to his concept 
 of the universal. To say that the equation is never 
 perfect, is only another way of saying that every 
 particular historical problem continually raises new 
 problems of thought, and that Croce's thought finds 
 therefore in itself the motives of its own develop- 
 ment, the springs of its own life. Where passion 
 and reason ultimately coincide, the roots of the 
 development are taken away, and death takes the 
 place of life. 
 
 Yet, notwithstanding these limitations, I know 
 of no man whose thought on the war is on the whole 
 more acceptable to those among us who lived through 
 the war not as spectators, looking on it as on a vast 
 moral abstraction, but as humble actors, in the 
 midst of its human reality. A sense of collaboration 
 between one side and the other, of being, here as
 
 Works and Days 251 
 
 there, employed in a common task, whose meaning 
 was much deeper than any that had been offered 
 to us by the national rhetoricians, — a collaboration 
 which happened to take the aspect of a struggle, 
 and imposed duties antagonistic, but of the same 
 nature — was probably the most usual frame of mind 
 among the soldiers who could think; and it existed, 
 subconsciously, even among the unthinking ones, 
 provided that their duties were of a definite, con- 
 crete kind, touched them in the deepest chords of 
 their beings, involved the fundamental issues of 
 life and death. To the man who consciously faces 
 death, there is no comfort in wilful error; only this 
 realization of an end that transcends all particular 
 ideals, because it is the end of life itself, can be 
 worthy of that price. You cannot willingly die for 
 fourteen points any more than for one point, but 
 death which is loathsome in the drama of mere 
 circumstance, however adorned with brilliant rhet- 
 oric, is no longer death but an act of life in the 
 tragedy in which the hero is conscious of his fate. 
 There was no war, probably, that was ever more 
 full than the last one of what might be called the 
 material of tragedy; but what have the official 
 celebrators done with it, they who have not feared 
 to desecrate, in all our countries, one at least of the 
 concrete, individual tragedies, in order to make of 
 it an empty symbol, to transform an unknown hero 
 into abstract heroism? In some of Croce's pages, 
 there is a more concrete realization of the ideal
 
 252 Philosophy as History 
 
 tragedy of the war than in any poem or oration that 
 I have seen to this day. 
 
 The last years of the war found Croce at work on 
 some of the greatest poetical spirits of modern 
 Europe, Ariosto, Goethe, Corneille, Shakespeare, 
 bringing to the understanding of their work, to this 
 task of concrete history, the deep consciousness of the 
 nature of poetry, and of the relations of poetry 
 with life, acquired in twenty years of philosophical 
 meditations. Even his functions as Minister of Public 
 Education during the last two years did not dis- 
 tract him entirely from his studies, and this year 
 of the sixth centenary of Dante's death was cele- 
 brated by him with the publication of La Poesia di 
 Dante^ which will certainly remain as the most last- 
 ing monument raised to the memory of the poet on 
 this occasion. This troubled peace cannot make him 
 deviate from the path of his appointed labour any 
 more than the war could; in peace as in war, his duty 
 is his daily task, here and to-day, and his confidence 
 in the morality and usefulness of that work which is 
 his work is as little shaken by the prophets of despair 
 in peace, as it was by the messiahs of the promised 
 land who were so loud above the turmoil of war. He 
 is probably now noting with a smile that the same men 
 who talked of the war to end all wars, are now very 
 busy preventing our civilization from dying away; 
 that is, building a peace in the abstract, with pro- 
 grams and words, as they fought a war which was 
 not the war, but a phantasm of their imagination.
 
 II. THE THEORY OF HISTORY 
 
 Two meanings of the word history— History as contemporary history — 
 History and chronicle — The spirit as history — Philology, and philo- 
 logical history — Poetical and rhetorical history — Universal history — 
 The universality of history: history and philosophy — The unity of 
 thought — Philosophy as methodology — The positivity of history — 
 The humanity of history — Distinctions and divisions — The history 
 of nature. 
 
 There are two meanings to the word history, in 
 Enghsh as well as in other European languages; on 
 one hand it denotes the actual doing, the immedi- 
 acy of life, on the other, the thinking that seems to 
 follow the doing, the consciousness of life. In a 
 rough, approximate way, we speak of men who make 
 history, and of other men who think or write his- 
 tory — though we are all perfectly aware of the fact 
 that we cannot make history without first thinking 
 history, that the action, in other words, follows a 
 judgment of the situation, which is an elementary 
 form of historical thought, and is accompanied by 
 its own consciousness, which is its immediate history. 
 In this sense, the action cannot be materially severed 
 from its history: the distinction between the two is a 
 purely formal and ideal one. And again, the think- 
 ing of history, in the second meaning of the word, 
 consists in making .present to our spirit, in re-living, 
 
 253
 
 254 Philosophy as History 
 
 an action or group of actions, which thus become 
 as actual an experience as any practical doing, a 
 fragment of our own life, and, ultimately, the con- 
 sciousness of our own individual experience. Thus 
 the two meanings which stand out as sharply con- 
 trasting when we objectify and solidify them, as an 
 external, chronological series of happenings, and 
 as a formal discipline attempting to give, in in- 
 numerable books, a description and as it were a 
 verbal duplicate of that series, once we examine 
 them in the light of our consciousness, reveal them- 
 selves merely as different aspects or moments of 
 the same spiritual process. 
 
 Croce's latest writings on history may be puzzling 
 to the average reader because this ambiguity cannot 
 be overcome by him unless he is willing to penetrate 
 to the heart of Croce's doctrine, in which the word 
 history acquires a more pregnant and fundamental 
 meaning. In many of us there is a tendency to balk 
 at any attempt at filling old words with deeper and 
 more precise connotations; but philosophy is not 
 a matter of words. A new thought will in any case 
 alter the whole physiognomy of our vocabulary, 
 and to stand up for the old meanings is as much 
 as to refuse to think, or rather, to refuse to live. 
 For history as a formal discipline, for the actual 
 writing of history, Croce uses the word Historiog- 
 raphy; but in his Teoria e Storia della Storiografia 
 (Theory and History of the writing of History), his- 
 tory still means both the doing and the thinking,
 
 The Theory of History 255 
 
 life and the consciousness of life, though not in the 
 abstract distinction in which these meanings are 
 generally apprehended. In Croce the distinction 
 is also unity, and there is no doing which is not also 
 a thinking, no life which is not also the consciousness 
 of life, no consciousness which is not also the con- 
 sciousness of itself. The ambiguity, some traces of 
 which could still be seen in the Logica, entirely dis- 
 appears in this fourth volume of the system, at least 
 for the reader who has followed the whole develop- 
 ment of Croce's thought. 
 
 We call contemporary history the history that 
 is being made, rather loosely including in it a more 
 or less extended stretch of time up to the actual 
 present. But contemporary history rigorously ought 
 to be only history in the actual making, the im- 
 mediate present and the consciousness of the im- 
 mediate present. All history, however, is contem- 
 porary history in this rigorous and precise sense; it 
 is a condition of all history that it should live, be 
 present in the mind of the historian; all history 
 springs directly from present life, since only an 
 interest of our present life can induce us to inquire 
 into the past, which, by being made history, is no 
 longer a past but a present. If, Croce says, "con- 
 temporaneity is not the characteristic of one class of 
 histories (as it is held to be, and with good reasons, 
 in an empirical classification), but the intrinsic 
 character of all history, the relation between history 
 and life must be conceived of as a relation of unity:
 
 256 Philosophy as History 
 
 not certainly in the sense of an abstract identity, 
 but in that of a synthetic unity, which impHes both 
 the unity and the distinction of the terms. To 
 speak of a history, of which we do not possess the 
 documents, will then seem as absurd as to speak 
 of the existence of a certain thing, of which we should 
 at the same time affirm that one of the essential 
 conditions for its existence is lacking. A history 
 without relation with the document would be an 
 unverifiable history; and since the reality of history 
 lies in this verifiability, and the historical narrative 
 in which it realizes itself is an historical narrative 
 only in so far as it is the critical exposition of the 
 document, a history of that kind, without meaning 
 and without truth, would be inexistent as history. 
 How could ever a history of painting be composed 
 by a man who should not see and enjoy the works 
 of which he intends to describe critically the origin 
 and development? How, a history of philosophy, 
 without the works, or at least the fragments of the 
 works of the philosophers? How, the history of a 
 feeling or a custom, for instance, of Christian hu- 
 mility or of chivalresque honour, without the capac- 
 ity to re-live, or rather, without actually re-living 
 those particular states of mind? "On the other 
 hand, having established the indissoluble connection 
 of life and thought in history, the doubts that have 
 been advanced about the certainty and utility of 
 history suddenly and totally disappear, and it be- 
 comes almost impossible to understand them. How
 
 The Theory of History 257 
 
 could that ever be uncertain, which is a present pro- 
 duct of our spirit? How could a knowledge be use- 
 less, which solves a problem rising from the womb 
 of life?" ^ 
 
 If history is thus regarded not as an object but 
 as an activity, not as the irrevocable past but as 
 the living present, the difference between history 
 and chronicle, which is one of the puzzles of historical 
 thought, becomes an important and significant dis- 
 tinction. We are used to think that the original 
 form of historical writing is the chronicle, and 
 history a later and maturer development. Now 
 if history is the consciousness of a present, it fol- 
 lows that history is contemporary with the event; 
 that, therefore, the most meagre chronicle, in the 
 mind of its writer, moved by the actuality of the 
 facts which he records, is already a history in the 
 full sense of the word. And the records of the 
 past, whether appearing to us, from a literary 
 point of view, as mere chronicles or as true 
 histories, become history again whenever they are 
 apprehended by a new mind as an answer to a 
 present problem, partaking of the activity of the 
 mind that thinks them anew. The same records, 
 on the other hand, are a mere chronicle, an 
 empty narrative, a truly irrevocable past, when- 
 ever they are not re-lived by a living mind, 
 either because they do not correspond to any in- 
 terest of present life, or because the essential con- 
 
 1 Teoria e Storia, pp. 5-6.
 
 258 Philosophy as History 
 
 ditions for the recreation of that past, the documents 
 which enable us to revive within ourselves the 
 original experience, are irrevocably lost. The true 
 distinction between history and chronicle is not, 
 therefore, a literary or material one, but a distinc- 
 tion between forms of spiritual activity: history is 
 the living consciousness, and, therefore, an act of 
 thought or knowledge; chronicle is the dead record, 
 which we preserve by a mere act of will, because 
 we know that some day the dead record itself may 
 come back to life, transform itself again, under an 
 impulse rooted not in the past but in the present, 
 into a living thought. 
 
 "These revivals have purely inward motives; 
 and no amount of narratives or documents can 
 produce them; on the contrary, it is the inner motive 
 that gathers and brings before itself documents and 
 narratives, which, without it, would remain dis- 
 persed and inert. And it will be for ever impossible 
 to understand the effectual process of historical 
 thought, unless one starts from the principle that 
 the spirit itself is history, and, in every one of its 
 moments, the maker of history and at the same time 
 the result of all foregoing history; so that the spirit 
 carries within itself the whole of its history, which 
 in fact coincides with the spirit itself. To forget 
 one aspect of history and to remember another is 
 nothing but the rhythm of the life of the spirit, 
 which works by determining and individualizing 
 itself, and by in-determining and dis-individualizing
 
 The Theory of History 259 
 
 the preceding determinations and individualizations, 
 in order to create new and richer ones. The spirit 
 would live over again, so to speak, its history, even 
 without those external objects which we call narra- 
 tives and documents; but those external objects 
 are instruments that it fashions for itself, and 
 preparatory acts that it accomplishes, in order to 
 effect that vital interior evocation, in whose process 
 they resolve themselves. And for this purpose the 
 spirit asserts and jealously preserves the 'memories 
 of the past.'" ^ 
 
 This practical function of the preservation of the 
 dead documents and records is the work of the 
 pure scholar, of the erudite, the archivist, the ar- 
 chaeologist, or what might be termed philology in 
 the strict sense of the word. And it is a legitimate 
 and useful function, provided that it does not 
 pretend to be other than it actually is, and to sub- 
 stitute itself for the true process of history, by 
 attempting to make history with the external objects 
 that have been confided to its care. Philological 
 histories are never anything but mere compilations, 
 learned chronicles, useful repertories; and as such, 
 blameless; but as histories they lack the living 
 spirit, the creative impulse, which alone can trans- 
 form the document into history. We have only to 
 turn our attention to the greatest part of our modern 
 histories of literature, whether written by a single 
 philologist or by a learned society, to realize that 
 
 ^ Teoria e Storia, pp. 15-16.
 
 26o Philosophy as History 
 
 that which is philology in them is not history, but 
 repertory; and the rest, which is history, is not 
 philology, but a vivid reaction, an act of present 
 life, by which some at least of the documents of the 
 past (since some philologists are men) have suddenly 
 become part of the actual experience of the writer, 
 answered his spiritual need, stirred that which is 
 still human in his soul. And if a further confirma- 
 tion of the philological error is needed, and of the 
 further errors in which it involves the philological 
 historian, it is sufficient to open those same literary 
 histories at the pages in which they attempt to ex- 
 plain the origins of the Renaissance. Because as 
 those writers make history from the sources, so 
 they imagine that life itself springs from material 
 sources; and the Renaissance finds its causes in the 
 discovery of monuments and documents of the 
 classical world, in the lives and travels of humanists, 
 in the munificence of popes and princes. It does not 
 seem to occur to them that monuments and manu- 
 scripts, which materially had existed in Europe 
 during all the so-called Dark and Middle Ages, 
 could not have been discovered unless, at a certain 
 moment in the development of European civiliza- 
 tion, the spirit of the Western nations had not 
 craved those particular helps to its own life, because 
 of motives and impulses generated by its own actual 
 experience; and that the mediaeval clericus was not 
 less of a traveller than the humanist, and that the 
 economic aspect of life can never be intelligibly
 
 The Theory of History 261 
 
 conceived as a cause of that life of which it is but 
 a moment. For the philological historian, the 
 Renaissance begins between the end of the four- 
 teenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century; 
 but the historian tout court knows that the funda- 
 mental impulses and motives by which we empiric- 
 ally characterize that period in the history of the 
 human spirit were already present in the Italy of 
 the thirteenth century, and slowly maturing in the 
 other European countries long before any of the 
 Italian humanists had come to them as the apostles 
 of a new creed. 
 
 If philological history is not history but pseudo- 
 history, so are also two other forms of so-called 
 historical thought, poetical history and rhetorical 
 history. The first substitutes for the value of history, 
 which is thought, a purely immediate and senti- 
 mental, or aesthetic value; it presents itself very 
 often as a reaction to philological history, but it 
 falls into the opposite error, which is that of putting 
 the imagination in the place of the document. 
 Rhetorical history is that which is animated by 
 practical ends (moralistic, nationalistic, or other), 
 and it really consists of two distinct elements, 
 history itself, and the particular end towards which 
 the recitation of history is directed, converging into a 
 single practical act. Both partake of life much more 
 intensely than philological history; but the life of 
 the one is poetry, that of the other is economic or 
 moral action. They are, therefore, legitimate as
 
 262 Philosophy as History 
 
 poetry and as action, and become errors only in so 
 far as they are presented as history. It is important 
 to make this distinction as clear as possible: the 
 actual interest which makes history is not for Croce 
 a sentimental or practical interest, but an interest 
 of thought. In the distinction of the various forms 
 of spiritual activity, history is not the sentimental 
 or practical moment, but the moment of ultimate 
 consciousness, the reflection and not either the in- 
 tuition or the action, the thought which is con- 
 sciousness of life and not life immediate; neither 
 art nor morality, in a word, but philosophy, if by 
 philosophy, we mean not a formal discipline, but all 
 knowledge sub specie universalis. The defenders of 
 rhetorical history have become more frequent during 
 and after the war than they were before it, it being 
 only too natural that in times of exceptional stress 
 truth should be made subservient to practical ends, 
 and the man of knowledge should be unwittingly 
 transmogrified into a man of action; and they insist 
 more than ever on the moral efficacy of history as its 
 proper educational value. But " if by history we mean 
 both that history which is thought, and those that 
 are poetry, philology or moral will, it is clear that 'his- 
 tory' will enter into the educational process not under 
 one only, but under all these forms; though as history 
 proper, under one only, which is not that of moral 
 education, exclusively and abstractly considered, but 
 of the education or development of thought." ^ 
 
 ^ Teoria e Storia, pp. 35-6.
 
 The Theory of History 263 
 
 The conception of history as contemporary his- 
 tory, or present thought, helps us to discard that 
 form of historical scepticism, or agnosticism, which 
 affirms that all we can know of history is but one 
 part, and a very small part, of the whole. If we 
 should imagine that infinite whole, in its infinite 
 detail, as present for one moment to our mind, all 
 we could do, would be instantly to proceed to forget 
 it, in order to concentrate our attention on that 
 detail only which answers to a problem and, there- 
 fore, constitutes a living and active history. That 
 whole is not something of which we can affirm the 
 existence at any given moment, but the eternal 
 phantasm of the thing in itself, the limiting concept 
 of the infinity of our doing and knowing: a natural- 
 istic construction similar to the external and ma- 
 terial reality of physical science. It is this naturalistic 
 process that gives birth to agnosticism, in history 
 as in science; that is, to the affirmation of the im- 
 possibility of knowing that which has no reality 
 outside our own thought, which has created, or 
 rather posited it, for its own purposes. A further 
 consequence is that we must renounce the knowledge 
 of universal history, not as a fact, because as such it 
 has never existed, but as a pretence under which, 
 in fact, we are given something quite different. The 
 pretence consists (and it will be well to recall Croce's 
 own words, written long before some recent at- 
 tempts, which in those words find their precise 
 valuation) in "reducing within a single frame all
 
 264 Philosophy as History 
 
 the facts of mankind, from its origins on earth to the 
 present day; or rather, since in this way history 
 would not be truly universal, from the origins of 
 things or from the Creation to the end of the world; 
 hence a tendency to fill the abysm of prehistory or 
 of the origins with theological or naturalistic novels, 
 and somehow to outline the future, either with 
 revelations or with prophecies, as in the Christian 
 universal history (which extended to the Anti- 
 Christ and to the universal judgment), or with 
 forecasts, as in the universal histories of positivism, 
 democraticism, and socialism. Such is the pretence; 
 but the fact turns out to be different from the in- 
 tention, and what we get is either a more or less 
 heterogeneous chronicle, or a poetical history ex- 
 pressing some aspiration of the heart, or even a 
 true history, which is not universal but particular, 
 though embracing the life of many nations and of 
 many epochs; and, more often, in the same literary 
 body we discern these divers elements, one by the 
 side of the other." ^ 
 
 Universal history is a Utopian ideal similar to those 
 of a universal language, or of universal art, or of a 
 law that should be valid for all times; the only useful 
 meaning of the word universal when applied to his- 
 tory is that of a recommendation to enlarge the 
 sphere of our historical interests, and to turn from 
 the knowledge of one time and one people to that of 
 the great facts and currents of history. But a denial 
 
 ^ Teoria e Storia, p. 46.
 
 The Theory of History 265 
 
 of the validity of universal history must not be under- 
 stood as withdrawing from history the knowledge of 
 the universal. The reader who has followed us 
 through the preceding chapters, and especially 
 through our analysis of the historical judgment, 
 knows how the concreteness and individuality of 
 history is determined by thought, and therefore 
 known as a universal. History is thought, and^ as 
 such, the thought of the universal in its concrete and 
 particular determinations. The object of history is 
 never this or that poet, but poetry; not this or that 
 nation or epoch, but culture, civilization, progress, 
 freedom, or a similar word which denotes the develop- 
 ment of the human spirit as a whole, and is therefore 
 a universal. It is of history, thus conceived, of con- 
 temporary history, as opposed to the naturalistic 
 moment (chronicle, or philological history), that 
 Croce asserts the identity with philosophy: history as 
 the knowledge of the eternal present being one with 
 the thought of the eternal present, which is philos- 
 ophy. History renounces the pretence of an objec- 
 tive universality in the same way as philosophy, im- 
 manent in and identical with history, abolishes the 
 idea of a universal philosophy: the two negations are 
 but one, since the closed system, the final truth, is 
 as much a cosmological novel as universal history is. 
 "This tendency was implicit in Hegel's philosophy, 
 but contrasted within it by old prejudices, and 
 wholly betrayed in the execution, so that even that 
 philosophy converted itself into a cosmological novel;
 
 266 Philosophy as History 
 
 we can therefore say that that which at the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century was a mere presentiment, 
 only at the beginning of the twentieth is transforming 
 itself into a firm consciousness, which defies the fears 
 of the timid, that in this way we endanger the knowl- 
 edge of the universal; maintaining that, on the con- 
 trary, in this way only this knowledge is obtained 
 truly and for ever, because in a dynamic mode. His- 
 tory becoming actual history, and philosophy be- 
 coming historical philosophy, have freed themselves, 
 one from the dread of not being able to know that 
 which is not known only because either it was or it 
 will be known, and the other, from the despair of 
 never attaining the final truth: that is, both have 
 freed themselves from the phantasm of the 'thing 
 in itself. '" ^ 
 
 This final affirmation of the unity of human 
 thought, this qualification of all thought as at the 
 same time historical and philosophical, is the last 
 answer given by Croce to the problem which had oc- 
 cupied him for the last twenty years, ever since his 
 first speculations on history as art. From the con- 
 sideration of the individual moment which is essen- 
 tial to history, he had slowly raised himself to the 
 contemplation of the pure universal, only to return 
 finally to the individual moment in which only the 
 universal realizes itself. And while this answer can 
 be regarded, on the whole, as the natural conclusion 
 of the idealistic movement in philosophy, yet it dif- 
 
 ' Teoria e Storia, pp. 51-2.
 
 The Theory of History 267 
 
 fers from Kant in its ultimate repudiation of the 
 noumenon, from Hegel, in that it makes it impossible 
 to build, side by side with a dynamic logic, a my- 
 thology of the Idea, a philosophy of history and of 
 nature, in which the transcendental element, elimi- 
 nated already from the logic, should find its ultimate 
 refuge. It is to be hoped that Croce's critics will not 
 level against him those same criticisms that are 
 generally employed against Kant or Hegel, because 
 they would be for the most part ineffectual against 
 a Kantian and Hegelian philosopher who has dis- 
 carded the whole of Kantian and Hegelian meta- 
 physics. From this standpoint, Croce is not only the 
 heir of the idealistic, but also of the positivistic or 
 realistic tradition, which he has constantly opposed, 
 not because of its antimetaphysical character, but 
 because in the external reality of the realist, in the 
 natural or historical philosophy of the positivist, he 
 is unable to see anything but naturalistic disguises of 
 the old metaphysical entities. A realist who should 
 not in principle refuse to become acquainted with 
 Croce's thought, but honestly attempt to understand 
 it, would probably find his own realism purified and 
 made more truly realistic by the experience. 
 
 A material distinction, as of formal disciplines, 
 between history and philosophy still survives in 
 Croce's theory, philosophy proper being considered 
 as the categoric or methodological moment of his- 
 tory — a distinction roughly corresponding to the one 
 he made in his logic between the individual judgment
 
 268 Philosophy as History 
 
 and the definition. But philosophy itself is pro- 
 foundly modified once we fully realize that its his- 
 torical character Implies the abandonment of certain 
 features which are constantly associated in our minds 
 with the idea of philosophy, because of its early 
 associations with mythology and the positive relig- 
 ions. To these belong the belief in the existence of a 
 fundamental problem of philosophy, which remains 
 the same throughout the history of human thought, 
 and of which the various philosophies are but suc- 
 cessive approximations to an answer; the consequent 
 stress laid on the unity of the system rather than on 
 the fine and clear distinctions; the research of an 
 ultimate truth; and finally, the prejudice by which 
 the philosopher is regarded as a Buddha or priest, 
 freed from human passions and human illusions, 
 resting in the pure contemplation of a truth, which, 
 by being torn from the soil of active life that has 
 borne it, cannot but wither away and become as 
 empty and unreal as the Buddha's own Nirvana 
 frankly professes to be. Metaphysics to Croce is 
 the last incarnation of theology; and the professor of 
 philosophy in our universities, with a culture formed 
 exclusively on the books of the great philosophers of 
 the past, unmoved by the passions and problems 
 of life, is but the heir of the mediaeval master of 
 theology. 'W strong advancement of philosophical 
 culture ought to tend towards this result: that all 
 the students of human things, jurists, economists, 
 moralists, men of letters, that is, all the students of
 
 The Theory of History 269 
 
 historical matters, should become conscious and 
 well-disciplined philosophers; and the philosopher in 
 general, the purus philosophuSy should no longer 
 find place among the professional specifications of 
 knowledge." ^ 
 
 We shall not follow our author in all his develop- 
 ments of the theory of history. It suffices to say that 
 these developments are obviously but new presenta- 
 tions, made here and there more precise and more 
 coherent, of the various problems already discussed 
 in the preceding volumes of the Filosojia dello 
 Spirito. We shall thus recognise in Croce's criticism 
 of the philosophy of history as a special discipline, dis- 
 tinct both from history as such and from a so-called 
 general philosophy, his polemic against transcen- 
 dence, either metaphysical or naturalistic; and in his 
 claim for the positivity of history, his theory of value, 
 by which the only real values are the positive ones, 
 coinciding with the fact, while negative values are 
 but expressions of feelings and desires. In the light 
 of this theory, since history is obviously concerned 
 with that which is, and not with that which is not, 
 the limits of historical judgment are clearly estab- 
 lished, in the way in which we saw them established 
 for literary criticism. As the literary critic is never 
 concerned with anything but with expression, or 
 art, or beauty, non-expression, non-art, non-beauty 
 being as such inexistent, and truly existent only as 
 manifestations of the logical or practical activity of 
 
 * Teoria e Storia, p. 145.
 
 270 Philosophy as History 
 
 man; so the historian at large will never meet nega- 
 tive values, but positive facts only, which assume the 
 aspect of ugliness, or error, or immorality, only in the 
 dialectic process of reality, in the creation of a higher 
 form of life. His affirmation of the positive fact is 
 sufficient judgment, and it becomes an implicit 
 moral judgment whenever the consciousness of the 
 historian is a moral consciousness, without any need 
 for him to usurp the function of the moralist or of the 
 judge in apportioning praise or blame on the objects 
 of his history. 
 
 Against the humanistic or pragmatic conception of 
 history, which finds the reasons and motives of his- 
 tory in the abstract individual, as against the op- 
 posite view, for which the true history is only that of 
 the collectivity, of the institutions, of the human 
 values, Croce reasserts his concept of the actuality of 
 the spirit, in regard to which the individual is as 
 much of an abstraction as the society or the value 
 which does not entirely realize itself in the fact. The 
 object of history is neither Pericles nor Politics, 
 neither Sophocles nor Tragedy, neither Plato nor 
 Philosophy; but the universal in the individual, that 
 is, Politics, Tragedy, Philosophy, as Pericles, Soph- 
 ocles, and Plato, or Pericles, Sophocles, and Plato as 
 particular moments of Politics, of Tragedy, and of 
 Philosophy. 
 
 As there are no special philosophical sciences, and 
 then a general philosophy, which should be outside 
 or above them, but whenever we think of reality
 
 The Theory of History 271 
 
 under one of its aspects or distinctions, we think of 
 the whole of reahty in one of its determinations, so 
 there are no special histories, the Hmits of which can 
 be definitely stated, and above them a general his- 
 tory, which would in a new form revive the myth of 
 universal history. We have seen how literary history, 
 for instance, tends inevitably to become the whole 
 spiritual history of a nation; and the same appHes to 
 all special histories, whether political or moral, or 
 philosophical. There are divisions of history, ac- 
 cording to the quality of the objects, to time and 
 space, but such divisions are mere empirical classifi- 
 cations, practical instruments or literary expedients; 
 and we can use as the foundation of such divisions 
 even the ideal distinctions of the fundamental forms 
 of spiritual activity. But when these distinctions are 
 understood as actual distinctions of the aspects of the 
 spiritual life, of which we make history, then all the 
 other aspects will inevitably be present in the partic- 
 ular distinction, once we truly apprehend it in the 
 fulness of its relations. In this sense, history is al- 
 ways special or particular, because it is only in the 
 special and particular that we can grasp the efl?"ectual 
 and concrete universality, the effectual and concrete 
 unity. 
 
 Finally, the difference between the history of man 
 and the history of nature is not a difference in the 
 object but in the method of history. The whole of 
 reality is spiritual reality, and nature apprehended in 
 its concreteness and actuality, if we are able to re-
 
 272 Philosophy as History 
 
 create it within ourselves, becomes actual, concrete, 
 contemporary history as much as any part of human 
 history. On the other hand, the application of 
 empirical and abstract concepts, the practical manip- 
 ulation of the data of human history, transforms the 
 history of man into mere natural history. This 
 difference in method we have already analyzed in 
 studying Croce's logic, and we shall only add here 
 that the reader of Croce may often be tempted to re- 
 gard Croce's conception of reality as limited to the 
 human spirit only, and therefore to give a meta- 
 physical interpretation to his exclusion of "nature." 
 The correct interpretation is a purely epistemological 
 one, and again and again Croce insists that in the 
 whole of reality, which is development or life, man 
 and nature are but empirical and abstract distinc- 
 tions. On the other hand, Croce's interests are cer- 
 tainly more human than natural, and not only in the 
 sense in which this is true of every man; in the more 
 precise sense also that the effort to recreate within 
 himself the consciousness of a blade of grass, which 
 he advises the historian of nature to perform, clearly 
 appeals to him so little, that he may even seem doubt- 
 ful of its success. The accent is continually laid, in 
 Croce's thought, on the history of man, and on the 
 thought of man; to many of us, our dealings with 
 nature (not the dead nature of Linnaeus, but the 
 living nature of Virgil and Shelley) would probably 
 suggest a shifting of the accent by which the spirit- 
 uality of nature, the continuity of the dynamic pro-
 
 The Theory of History 273 
 
 cess from nature to man would become more em- 
 phatically affirmed than it is in any of Croce's 
 writings. We are probably touching here on one of 
 the possible, and probable, lines of development of 
 Croce's philosophy; which, however, will not become 
 actual until the historical problems of the living 
 nature shall not urge Croce himself, or one of his 
 successors, as powerfully as the problems of human 
 history have moved him. At present, with very rare 
 exceptions, the students of the history of nature are 
 occupied in transforming their historical experience 
 into classes and types and laws; but a time may come 
 when from the naturalistic constructions we shall be 
 able more frequently to recreate the life of which 
 these are but the dead spoils, the accumulated ves- 
 tiges, by the same process by which history re- 
 kindles the old chronicles into new, contemporary 
 life. That such a development is implied in Croce's 
 own theory of history can hardly be questioned, 
 though, when realized, it will undoubtedly react on 
 more than one point of Croce's logic.
 
 III. CRITICISM AND HISTORY 
 
 Beyond the system — The universality of art — The discipline of art — 
 Poetry, prose and oratory — Classicism and impressionism — Prac- 
 tical personality and poetical personality — The monographic method 
 in criticism — The reform of aesthetic history — Criticism as philos- 
 ophy — Sensibility and intelligence. 
 
 The identification of history and philosophy, in 
 the form in which we have expounded it in the 
 preceding chapter, is the turning point of Croce's 
 thought; the system which in the first three volumes 
 of the Filosofia dello Spirito had still a somewhat 
 static and rigid appearance, is really set to movement, 
 animated as if by a new and intenser life, since its 
 implicit dynamism is made explicit in the fourth and 
 concluding volume. To Croce himself, the whole of 
 his work appears no longer as a system, but as "a 
 series of systematizations, " and his Filosofia dello 
 Spirito, as a series of "volumes on the problems 
 slowly gathering in his mind since the years of his 
 youth." No wonder, therefore, that his later work 
 should contain "thoughts that break the bars of the 
 so-called system, and give, to a close scrutiny, new 
 systems or new 'systematizations,' since always the 
 whole moves with every one of our steps. " No won- 
 der that he should feel that he will continue to 
 philosophize even if one day he shall abandon "phi- 
 
 274
 
 Criticism and History 275 
 
 losophy, " "as this is what the unity of philosophy 
 and history implies: that we philosophize whenever 
 we think, and of whatever object and in whatever 
 form we may think. " ^ And in fact, in these last few 
 years, Croce has given many a severe shock to the 
 faithful worshippers of his system, sometimes by ex- 
 tending his tolerance, or even his approval, to types 
 of speculation apparently remote from his own, but 
 in which he recognises, under a radically different 
 aspect, some of the Hving impulses, and spiritual 
 interests by which his own thought is moved; and 
 sometimes by developing new theories, through 
 which intellectual positions criticised by him at an 
 earlier stage of his work were reestablished as having 
 a new meaning and value, once they were approached 
 from a new and higher standpoint, partly reached by 
 means of that same critical process which had pre- 
 viously revealed them as errors. Croce's conception of 
 the function of error in the history of human thought, 
 while making him violently intolerant of actual 
 negative error, leads him to search painstakingly for 
 that element of truth which is the reality of every 
 error; and in this respect too, his philosophical career 
 is as it were roughly divided into two periods, one of 
 critical dissolution, and the other of critical recon- 
 struction, respectively corresponding to the building 
 up of the system, and to the successive liberation 
 from the shackles of the system itself. Croce's name 
 will certainly be remembered in the future, if on no 
 
 ^ Contributo, pp. 79-81.
 
 276 Philosophy as History 
 
 other account, as that of the only philosopher who 
 never became the slave of his dead thought. His 
 coherence is never of the letter, but of the spirit. 
 
 This last phase of Croce's thought offers greater 
 difficulties to the expositor than the preceding ones, 
 partly because it is still in the making, and therefore 
 lacks the necessary perspective, and partly because it 
 is embodied not only in purely philosophical essays, 
 but in every page of Croce's historical and critical 
 writings; so that very often it would be impossible to 
 give a clear account of it without ample and minute 
 reference to the underlying historical material. The 
 whole of Croce's thought could indeed be restated 
 through an exposition of Croce's historical views, and 
 it would be an alluring task to extract from his 
 writings a kind of outline of the history of mankind, 
 considered especially in its aesthetic and philosophi- 
 cal manifestations, and indirectly also in its moral 
 and economic activities; but it would take us much 
 beyond the limits which we have set to our labour. 
 We shall therefore confine ourselves to examining, 
 in this chapter, the latest developments of Croce's 
 aesthetics, especially in relation with the history of 
 art and poetry; and, in the following and concluding 
 one, to considering his theory of truth or of the func- 
 tion of thought, in relation to other types of contem- 
 porary thought. 
 
 We have followed the evolution, or rather the 
 deepening, of Croce's concept of art as pure intuition, 
 into lyrical intuition, through which the move-
 
 Criticism and History 277 
 
 ment and life which might seem to have been denied 
 to the products of the aesthetic activity considered 
 as a mere form of knowledge, were recognised as 
 intrinsically belonging to them by reason of the 
 very nature of that cognitive activity, and of its 
 relations with the practical sphere of the spirit, 
 the states of mind, which can be abstracted as the 
 matter or content of the aesthetic form. Another 
 difficulty, however, still persisted in Croce's theory, 
 due to the sharp distinction between the aesthetic 
 and the logical activity, which reserved to the first 
 the field of individual, to the second that of universal 
 knowledge — constituting a double-grade relation, 
 in which the aesthetic was implied by the logic 
 activity, but not vice-versa. The corresponding 
 distinction of the two forms of the practical spirit, 
 the economic and the ethic, evolved by Croce 
 at a maturer stage of his speculation, establishes 
 not only a double-grade relation, but also a re- 
 ciprocal implication. Croce's essay on // carattere 
 di totalitd della espressione artistica (1917) is an 
 attempt at interpreting his first distinction in the 
 light of the second, thereby recognising the univer- 
 sal or cosmic character of art. That universality 
 which becomes explicit in the logical judgment is 
 implicit in the intuition, already identified with 
 the category of feeling, with the concrete states 
 of mind, on which it imposes its form: "Since, what 
 is a feeling or a state of mind? is it something that 
 can be detached from the universe and developed
 
 278 Philosophy as History 
 
 by itself? have the part and the whole, the indi- 
 vidual and the cosmos, the finite and the infinite, 
 any reality, one outside the other? One may be 
 inclined to grant that every severance and isolation 
 of the two terms of the relation could not be any- 
 thing but the work of abstraction, for which only 
 there is an abstract individuality and an abstract 
 finite, an abstract unity and an abstract infinite. 
 But the pure intuition, or artistic representation, 
 abhors abstraction; or rather it does not even 
 abhor it, since it knows it not, because of its 
 naive or auroral cognitive character. In it, the 
 individual lives by the life of the whole, and the 
 whole is in the life of the individual; and every 
 true artistic representation is itself and the uni- 
 verse, the universe in that individual form, and that 
 individual form as the universe. In every accent of a 
 poet, in every creature of his phantasy, there is the 
 whole of human destiny, all the hopes, the illusions, 
 the sorrows and the joys, all human greatness and 
 all human misery, the entire drama of reality, 
 which perpetually becomes and grows upon itself, 
 suffering and rejoicing." ^ 
 
 This recognition of the implicit universality of 
 the aesthetic expression does not abolish, as it might 
 seem to a superficial observer, the distinction be- 
 tween aesthetic and logical knowledge; it rather 
 makes it clearer and truer. An imperfect recogni- 
 tion may lead to an intellectualistic or mystic theory 
 
 ^ Nuovi Saggi, di Estetica, p. 1 26.
 
 Criticism and History 279 
 
 of art; and intellectualism and mysticism in aes- 
 thetics remain for Croce as typical forms of error, 
 whether they are directed towards a confusion 
 between intuition and judgment, or towards a 
 symbohcal or allegorical interpretation of art, or 
 towards a semi-religious theory of art as the revela- 
 tion of the Deus absconditus. But the truth that 
 those errors tried to express in their imperfect formu- 
 las, is finally understood by him to be that char- 
 acter of universality which belongs to every aspect 
 and to every fragment of the living reality. Feeling 
 itself, or a state of mind, partakes in its actuality 
 of that universal character, but when expressed in 
 art, it retains its universality only by losing its prac- 
 tical nature, and subjecting itself entirely to the form 
 which expresses it. Thus the aesthetic activity, 
 because bent on realizing its own universality, 
 which is the perfection of its form, imposes on the 
 artist a morality and a discipline which cannot be 
 identified with practical morality, with the discipline 
 of life. The sincerity of the artist is of another 
 order than that of the practical man, though (we 
 can never repeat it too often) aesthetic virtues being 
 incommensurable with moral values, his work as an 
 artist does not exempt him from his duties as a man. 
 This further determination of the concept of 
 expression is used by Croce to clarify a distinction 
 which had already been adumbrated in the Estetica; 
 the distinction between poetic, intellectual, and 
 practical expression, between the word in which
 
 28o Philosophy as History 
 
 the pure intuition embodies itself, the word which 
 is a sign or symbol of thought, and the word which 
 is an instrument for the awakening of the emotions, 
 a preparation for action. Thus the old categories 
 of poetry, prose, and oratory reappear, but no longer 
 as criteria of material classification, no longer to be 
 identified with classes or genres of expression. They 
 become synonyms, respectively, of the aesthetic, 
 the logical, and the practical activity; to be used 
 as instruments of literary and artistic criticism, if 
 the critic is willing to renounce all external helps 
 and material standards, and to penetrate into the 
 "individuality of the act, where only it is given to 
 him to discern the different spiritual dispositions, 
 and what is poetry from what is not poetry. Under 
 the semblance of prose, in a comedy or in a novel, 
 we may find a true and deeply felt lyric; as under 
 that of verse, in a tragedy or in a poem, nothing but 
 reflection and oratory."' It is easy to perceive 
 how this distinction will also react on Croce's theory 
 of language as intuition and expression, not by 
 altering its initial position, but by offering new 
 means for the empirical analysis of the facts of 
 language, the nature of which is obviously deter- 
 mined by the kind of impulse which man obeys 
 in the individual act of expression. By the em- 
 ployment of such a method, the history of language 
 as aesthetic expression can be qualified and illum- 
 ined through the consideration of the moments 
 
 ' Nuovi Saggi, p. 142. Also Conversazioni Critiche, I, pp. 58-63.
 
 Criticism and History 28 1 
 
 in which language ceases to be a pure act of aes- 
 thetic creation, and is subordinated, as a symbol or 
 instrument, to the purposes of the logical and 
 practical mind. 
 
 Similarly, in the history of poetry or of art, the 
 consideration of the logical and practical moments 
 in the expression will help to define and isolate 
 that which is purely aesthetic expression, that is, 
 poetry and art. Croce's expressionistic theory, 
 when thus understood, differs both from other 
 expressionistic theories and from the narrow in- 
 terpretations of Croce's own theory that have been 
 given by some of his followers and by all his ad- 
 versaries. It does not, in fact, attempt to give an 
 aesthetic justification of art as the mere passive 
 reception of the transient mood; it has no sympathy 
 for that impressionism which transforms the artist 
 into a reed shaken by all winds of circumstance, 
 legitimizing every intrusion of the practical per- 
 sonality in the aesthetic production. It reduces 
 this modern aesthetics of the immediate feeling 
 to an expression, not of the true spirit of what art 
 and poetry is being produced to-day, but of that 
 disease, or passivity, of the times, the first solemn 
 document of which can be traced in Rousseau's 
 Confessions. Against it, Croce appeals to the ex- 
 ample and the word of a Goethe or a Leopardi, 
 who diagnosed the disease in its inception, and 
 contrasted the classical naturalness and simplicity 
 of the ancients with the affectation and tumidity
 
 282 Philosophy as History 
 
 of the moderns. But the classicism which Croce 
 invokes is not a formal and literal ideal, limited to 
 certain models or standards: it is that complete 
 idealization, which the immediate practical data, 
 in all times and climates, will undergo at the hands 
 of the true poet and artist, whether he calls himself 
 a romanticist or a classicist, an idealist or a realist. 
 Closely related with this line of thought is Croce's 
 distinction of the practical from the poetical person- 
 ality of the artist, and of biography from aesthetic 
 criticism, as we find it in the essay q>{ Alcune massime 
 critiche, and in the first chapter of his study on 
 Shakespeare (191 9). The knowledge of the facts 
 of an artist's life is undoubtedly required for the 
 purposes of biographical or practical history; but 
 their relation with the aesthetic personality of the 
 artist is not, as it is generally assumed, a relation 
 of cause and effect. They may have an indirect 
 utility for the definition of the aesthetic personality, 
 and especially for the recognition of that which in 
 the works of art themselves is still purely practical, 
 not yet stamped with the seal of the aesthetic activity. 
 But in the apprehension of art, the critic must 
 prescind from the biographical elements, because 
 "the artist himself has prescinded from them in 
 the act of creation of his work of art, which is a 
 work of art inasmuch as it is the opposite of the 
 practical life, and is accomplished by the artist 
 raising himself above the practical plane, abandon- 
 ing the greatest part of his practical feelings, and
 
 Criticism and History 283 
 
 transfiguring those even that he seems to preserve, 
 because putting them into new relations. The artist, 
 as we say, 'transcends time,' that is, the 'practical 
 time,' and enters the 'ideal time,' where actions 
 do not follow actions, but the eternal lives in the 
 present. And he who pretends to explain the ideal 
 time by the practical time, the imaginative crea- 
 tion by the practical action, art by biography, 
 unwittingly denies art itself, and reduces it to a 
 practical business, of the same kind as eating and 
 making love, producing goods or fighting for a 
 political cause." ^ 
 
 This concept of the aesthetic personality, which 
 we find clearly defined in Croce's most recent 
 essays, was the guiding principle of all his literary 
 criticism, since the time when he started his series 
 of studies on modern Italian literature. He had 
 inherited it from De Sanctis, whose work, in so far 
 as it is aesthetic and not moral or political history, 
 can be regarded as a collection of powerful char- 
 acterizations of aesthetic personalities. But, in 
 his first attempts in literary criticism, Croce em- 
 ployed it tentatively in what then appeared to 
 him only as the preparatory stage of his work; 
 beyond the individual characterizations, and once 
 these had been sufficiently determined, he still 
 thought of the possibility of a general literary his- 
 tory, in which these should find their place as parts 
 of a more complex organism of critical thought. But 
 
 ^ Nuovi Saggi, p. 231.
 
 284 Philosophy as History 
 
 when he had completed his task, in a series of re- 
 markable essays, some of which will have fixed for 
 a long time to come the physiognomy of the most 
 notable Italian writers of the last half-century, he 
 perceived that he had practically exhausted the 
 aesthetic problems which the work of those writers 
 presented to his mind: a general literary history 
 of the period could have been nothing but a new 
 arrangement of the same ideas and valuations 
 contained in the individual essays. Thus the mon- 
 ographic method which he had originally adopted 
 for convenience' sake, justified itself in the practice 
 of his work, or rather proved to be the only legiti- 
 mate method of literary and general artistic his- 
 tory. All the vague abstractions with which modern 
 nationalistic or sociological histories of art and po- 
 etry are crammed, reveal themselves ultimately 
 as either generalizations of individual character- 
 istics, or concepts borrowed from the economic 
 and moral history of a nation or people, more or 
 less irrelevant to the purposes of aesthetic criticism. 
 The true unity in the consideration of the history of 
 art cannot be reached by the establishment of purely 
 external and material relations between work and 
 work, between artist and artist, but only by making 
 one's critical estimate of the individual work or 
 artist sufficiently vast and sufficiently deep. "Con- 
 temporaries, related or opposed to the individual 
 poet, his more or less partial and remote forerunners, 
 the moral and intellectual life of his time, and that
 
 Criticism and History 285 
 
 of the times which preceded and prepared it, these 
 and other things are all present (now expressed, now 
 unexpressed) in our spirit, when we reconstruct 
 the dialectic of a given artistic personality. Un- 
 doubtedly, in considering a given personality we 
 cannot, in the same act, consider another or many 
 others or all others, each for itself; and psycholo- 
 gists call this lack of ubiquity the 'narrowness of 
 the threshold of consciousness,' while they ought 
 to call it the highest energy of the human spirit, 
 which sinks itself in the object that in a given 
 moment interests it, and does not allow itself under 
 any condition to be diverted from it, because in 
 the individual it finds all that interests it, and, in 
 a word, the Whole." ^ 
 
 This is the purport of the essay on La Riforma 
 della Storia artistica e letteraria (1917), and this is 
 the method deliberately followed by Croce in his 
 recent essays on Ariosto, Goethe, Shakespeare, 
 Corneille and Dante, which ought to be studied 
 not only as characterizations of the various poets, 
 of the feeling or tonality which is peculiar to each 
 of them and constitutes their esthetic personality, 
 but also as sources for the methodology of literary 
 criticism. To his theory Croce brings a two-fold 
 corroboration, first, from the observation of the 
 fact that it coincides with a more and more wide- 
 spread tendency in both literary and artistic history 
 towards the monographic form, the individual essay, 
 
 ' Nuovi Saggi, p. 181.
 
 286 Philosophy as History 
 
 as the most effectual type of criticism; and second, 
 from the analogy with other forms of history. All 
 history, and not esthetic history only, is essentially 
 monographic; all history is the history of a given 
 event or of a given custom or of a given doctrine, 
 and all history reaches the universal only in and 
 through the individual. The only obstacles to a 
 general acceptation of this view are, on one side, 
 a persistent inability to distinguish art from the 
 practical and moral life and from philosophy, and 
 on the other, a lack of scientific sense, through which 
 science is regarded not as critical research, but as a 
 material gathering of facts. Prospectuses, handbooks, 
 dictionaries and encyclopedias are not the ideal of his- 
 tory: they are instruments of which we shall always 
 make use as practical helps for the critical research; 
 but what is living and real thought in them is but an 
 echo of the actual thinking of individual problems. 
 
 All aesthetic criticism, and therefore all aesthetic 
 history, is this thinking of logical problems, rooted 
 in the concrete ground of the works of art, which are 
 in their turn solutions of aesthetic problems. For 
 this the dynamic conception of the human spirit 
 imports that every one of its acts is a creation, or 
 a doitigy in the particular form in which the spirit 
 realizes itself; art, a creation, in respect to which 
 all spiritual antecedents assume the aspect of a given 
 aesthetic problem; history or philosophy, a creation 
 on the substance of reality presenting itself as a 
 logical problem; and the whole sphere of the theo-
 
 Criticism and History 287 
 
 retical spirit, "a theoretical doings which is the per- 
 petual antecedent and the perpetual consequent 
 of the practical doing." ^ The mere recreation of 
 the aesthetic impression given by a work of art is 
 not yet criticism; the critic as a mere artifex additus 
 artifici is not yet a critic, but still an artist. Criti- 
 cism, like all other history, is not feeling or intuition, 
 but intelligence and thought. Every history of 
 criticism will therefore ultimately coincide with 
 the history of aesthetic theories, with the philosophy 
 of art. 
 
 We thus reach again, by a new path, the identifi- 
 cation of history with philosophy; to which, in this 
 particular case, the most common objection is that 
 what is required in a critic is much more an exquisite 
 aesthetic sensibility than an elaborate concept of 
 what art is as a category of the human mind. But 
 the objection rests on a misunderstanding of the 
 proper function of criticism. What sensibility can 
 give is but the immediate apprehension or taste 
 of the work of art, critically dumb in itself; on the 
 other hand, it is impossible to conceive of a true 
 intelligence of art, "without the conjoined capacity 
 to understand the individual works of art, because 
 philosophy does not develop in the abstract, but 
 is stimulated by the acts of life and imagination, 
 rises for the purpose of comprehending them, and 
 understands them by understanding itself." ^ The 
 
 ^ L'arte come Creazione (1918), in Nuavi Saggi, p. 160. 
 
 2 La Critica Leiteraria come Filosofia (1918), in Nuovi Saggi, p. 217.
 
 288 Philosophy as History 
 
 mere aesthetic sensibility makes but a new artist; 
 what makes the critic is his philosophy. Here also, 
 however, as during the whole course of our inquiry, 
 we must not identify philosophy with the official 
 history of philosophical disciplines, which offers a 
 large number of theories of aesthetics only remotely 
 related to the concrete works of art, to the concrete 
 processes of aesthetic creation, but with the whole 
 history of human thought, with the working out 
 of particular problems successively presented to 
 the intelligence of man by the actual developments 
 of poetry and art. The aesthetic judgment, like 
 every other judgment, is a synthesis of the individual 
 intuition, or subject, and of the universal category, 
 or predicate; and this is but another way of stating 
 the identity of aesthetic criticism, as of all forms 
 of history, with philosophy. The critic must be 
 endowed with a power to give new life, within his 
 own mind, to the intuitions of the artist, but this 
 is for him but the soil in which his thought must 
 spread its roots; it is true that without that power, 
 no criticism is possible, but it is equally true that 
 no philosophy of art can grow on any but that same 
 soil. The ultimate test of the validity of aesthetic 
 thought is in its capacity to expand our sphere of 
 aesthetic apprehension; and pure aesthetics is but 
 the methodological moment of aesthetic history or 
 criticism.
 
 IV. VERITAS FILIA TEMPORIS 
 
 Quid est Veritas? — Platonism, or transcendental idealism — Naturalism, or 
 transcendental realism — The idea of progress — Progress and truth: 
 evolutionism — Pragmatism — Croce's new pragmatism — The im- 
 manence of value — The actuality of Truth — Truth as history: the 
 function of error and of evil — The foundations of Croce's thought. 
 
 There is one problem in the history of human 
 thought, which, however conscious we might be 
 of the multiplicity and historical contingency of 
 philosophical problems, yet can appear to us as the 
 ultimate or central one, if only because it is an 
 abstract interrogation describing the attitude of 
 the philosopher, and to which every concrete logical 
 research, every act of thought, can be reduced. 
 It is Pilate's question: ^uid est Veritas? What is 
 truth? 
 
 The question itself has no definite meaning, until 
 it receives from the individual thinker a definite 
 content, which is history or experience, and the 
 infinite variety of the answers it has received is 
 due to the infinite variability of that content. But 
 at all times man has been urged by a passionate 
 desire to lift his own individual answer from the 
 flux of life, to put it as it were over and against that 
 experience from which it had emerged, not as the 
 truth of his particular problem, but as an abstractly
 
 290 Philosophy as History 
 
 universal truth. It is by violently breaking the 
 process of thought, and hypostatizing in essence 
 the subject of his thought, abstracted from its ob- 
 ject, or the object from its subject, and both from 
 the creative activity which produces truth, that man 
 has created, both in philosophy proper and in the 
 minds of the multitude, a double transcendence, 
 of pure ideas, on one side, of brute matter on the 
 other, from which the two most common meanings 
 of the word truth are derived. 
 
 The Platonic idealist, for whom the actual proc- 
 esses of life and thought are but shadows and 
 remembrances of the Eternal Ideas in the hyper- 
 uranian space, can be assumed here as the symbol 
 of the transcendental idealist, for whom truth is 
 adequation to an ideal model existing outside the 
 mind. The most disparate types of philosophers 
 belong to this herd, and among them many that 
 commonly go under the name of realists, since the 
 idealist who has fixed and objectified his ideas can- 
 not help considering them as real essences, and deal- 
 ing with them accordingly. The Aristotelian realist, 
 the theologian, Hegel himself when postulating an 
 original Logos, of which Spirit and Nature are the 
 temporal explication, all can be gathered together 
 in the goodly company of Platonists; and Platonists 
 are to-day both the literal followers of German 
 idealism, and the less barbarous among contem- 
 porary realists, who are in the habit of attributing 
 an independent, absolute existence to logical or
 
 Veritas Filia Temporis 291 
 
 mathematical abstractions. But neither the ones 
 nor the others seem to be in very close contact with 
 the spirit of the age: what they mean by truth is 
 not what is generally meant by truth to-day, except 
 among those who still cling to the myths in which 
 that form of transcendence expressed itself in past 
 ages. The sturdiest, though hardly recognizable, 
 survivals of Platonism are relics of formalistic logic, 
 still very frequent in contemporary culture, and a 
 belief in what might be called average truth, me- 
 chanically extracted from an external and material 
 consensus of opinions. But with this conception 
 of truth, we touch the border line between idealistic 
 and naturalistic transcendentalism. 
 
 The most common attitude of contemporary 
 thought (and the one that is therefore usually 
 designated as common sense, and as such opposed 
 to philosophy) is a naively naturalistic one. But 
 it would be a mistake to regard it as a simple and 
 spontaneous attitude, and to identify it, for instance, 
 with the naive intuition of the artist, with a first 
 grade of knowledge as yet untroubled by logical 
 problems. The artist's vision is more distant from 
 naturalism than the philosopher's concept, since 
 common sense, however unreflected and illogical, 
 is in itself a philosophy, and, though it may sound 
 paradoxical, a transcendental one. The artist con- 
 stantly identifies himself with his object; in his 
 consciousness, the distinction between subject and 
 object has not yet arisen. But the naive naturalism
 
 292 Philosophy as History 
 
 of which we are now speaking is posterior to the 
 logical judgment, in which that distinction first 
 appears; and is obtained by keeping separate the 
 two terms of the judgment, each of which exists 
 only in relation to the other, and by transforming 
 that relation into a quality of the object. The unity 
 thus disrupted is artificially reconstituted by abolish- 
 ing the subject, that is, by treating the subject itself 
 as merely an object among many objects, or as a 
 mere abstract intersection of objects. It is with 
 this form of naturalism that realism generally 
 coincides, and its abstracting process is the one that 
 has been recently systematized by the New Realists. 
 The justification of the naturalistic conception of 
 truth, as truth of description, and the motive of 
 its present popularity, is that it rests on a method 
 of knowledge which is indispensable to the natural 
 and mathematical sciences, and that the sciences 
 have come to usurp, in modern times, for reasons 
 which are obvious to every one, the place of science. 
 It is not the less true, however, that wherever that 
 method is applied, it reduces the living reality of 
 life and thought to a heap of dead, immovable 
 abstractions. There is no real danger in this as 
 long as the abstractions are taken for what they are, 
 and used as instruments for the purposes of our 
 doing and understanding; but when they are con- 
 sidered as a complete equivalent of the living reality, 
 then we become their prisoners, and are shut out 
 by them from all possibility of true understanding.
 
 Veritas Filia Temporis 293 
 
 It is especially from the misuses of this method 
 in the historical and moral sciences, from the de- 
 generations of sociology, psychology, and philology, 
 that we must be constantly on guard; lest in the 
 very sciences of the human spirit we should miss 
 that which is their true object, the human activity 
 which creates the world of history and the values 
 of life. 
 
 Modern thought, at the end of the Renaissance, 
 begins with an attempt at eliminating that static 
 conception of truth, in which both Platonism and 
 naturalism find the roots of their transcendence. 
 This is the origin of the idea of Progress, first es- 
 tablished by Bruno, by Bacon, by Pascal, by Vico, 
 in the form of a correlation between truth and time. 
 Mediaeval thought had been shackled for centuries 
 by the authority of the ancients; the new thinkers 
 invoked the authority of antiquity, of old age, and, 
 therefore, of wisdom, not for the distant ages, in 
 which the world could be said to be still young and 
 inexperienced, but for their own times, in which it 
 was possible to add a perpetually new experience 
 and thought to that which had been bequeathed 
 by the thinkers of Greece and Rome. The conse- 
 quence of this attitude was the discovery of the 
 immanence of truth in life, the liberation from the 
 principle of authority (which had been the character- 
 istic mediaeval form of transcendence), and a vigorous 
 impulse towards the recognition of the dynamic 
 nature of reality, of what an American philosopher
 
 294 Philosophy as History 
 
 called the continuity of the ideal with the real. The 
 thought that was contained in germ in those early 
 polemics, vaguely and mythically in Bruno, and 
 much more consciously in Vico, is substantially 
 that of Croce's identification of philosophy with 
 history. 
 
 We do not expect of a new philosophy that it 
 should suddenly, as a revelation or illumination, 
 give us a key to all the problems of reality, and 
 resolve, once and forever, the so-called mystery 
 of the universe. If such a thing should ever happen, 
 it would mean the end of life, which cannot be con- 
 ceived, in its ultimate essence, otherwise than as a 
 perpetual positing and solution of problems. It 
 must not be forgotten that a philosophy is the 
 work of one man, and, therefore, contains only 
 the answers to the problems that are real to him. 
 But if we stop to consider the whole course of thought 
 in the last two centuries, we shall realize that the 
 idea of Progress, in many different and even in con- 
 trasting forms, is the one around which all our 
 life, theoretical and practical, has centred in modern 
 times. And of that idea, Croce's philosophy Is the 
 most powerful and coherent expression that has 
 ever appeared. It is only by considering the whole 
 of reality as activity, and the values of reality as 
 coinciding with the forms of that activity, that 
 Progress acquires a definite meaning: a progress 
 which should be a constant approximation towards 
 a preexistent ideal, or a material process external
 
 Veritas Filia Temporis 295 
 
 to ourselves, would be a purely Illusory one. In 
 one case, our whole life would tend towards making 
 a duplicate of that which already is — a work, there- 
 fore, without intrinsic worth, and without a real 
 end; in the other, there would be no work at all, no 
 activity, no life. 
 
 But nothing seems more difficult to our mind 
 than to keep together the two ideas of progress and 
 of truth. The natural sciences have made a gallant 
 attempt at assimilating the idea of progress, and at 
 transforming themselves, ultimately, into history. 
 But the static concepts of naturalism resist that 
 assimilation, and scientific evolutionism offers but 
 the mechanical outline, the external processes of 
 progress, the evolved and not the evolving reality; 
 that is, it keeps its truth at the expense of its prog- 
 ress. This same evolutionism, when applied to the 
 human sciences, is obviously unable to grasp the ac- 
 tuality of spiritual growth and life, and it only re- 
 produces, in aggravated form, the evils inherent in all 
 naturalistic interpretations of the spirit. Bergson's 
 philosophy is a new evolutionism, which succeeds 
 much better than the old one in retaining the idea of 
 progress, and is, therefore, a further step towards the 
 transformation of science into history; but what it 
 gains in this respect, it loses in relation to its prin- 
 ciple of truth, which is mythically represented as the 
 lowest form of consciousness, or rather as that which 
 is below consciousness itself. 
 
 What is vital in Bergson is his criticism of the
 
 296 Philosophy as History 
 
 scientific, or naturalistic, intellect; but the intellect 
 of man has other functions besides those of dis- 
 secting and classifying. From a similar beginning, 
 that is, from the economic theory of science, derives 
 another attempt at conciliating progress and truth, 
 pragmatism. In pragmatism also, the critical 
 element is more or less sound, but the constructive 
 one is weak and arbitrary. Pragmatism does not 
 reject the truth of science, because of its practical 
 character; on the contrary, having recognized that 
 the foundation of scientific truth is economic, it 
 proceeds to deduce all truth from the will, and to 
 verify it in action. The result of this deduction is a 
 closer connection between truth and life than has 
 been ever reached by any system of philosophy; 
 but a merely apparent one, since truth itself is thus 
 submerged and annulled in the immediacy of prac- 
 tical and passional life. The solution of the problem 
 of truth is obtained only by putting truth out of the 
 question at the beginning of the inquiry; as it is 
 clear that for a rigid pragmatist, there is but one 
 truth left, and that is the truth of his theory, which, 
 however, cannot be verified by the theory itself, 
 since its usefulness is, to say the least, very doubtful. 
 By some of his adversaries Croce himself has 
 been classed as a pragmatist. It is no wonder that 
 certain distinctions should escape the attention of 
 men who live to-day as exiles from distant centuries, 
 and whose critical sight is, therefore, not clearer 
 then that of an owl fluttering in the noonday sun.
 
 Veritas Filia Temporis igy 
 
 But the only relation that I can think of between 
 Croce and the pragmatists is that he advocates an 
 economic theory not of truth, but of error; that he 
 finds in the passions and practical interests of men 
 the root of intellectual error. The problem of the 
 positive relations between life and thought has 
 been treated by him, as we know, in a very different 
 spirit from that of the pragmatists; and in the 
 circle of the human spirit, the ideal precedence is 
 given by him, not to the practical but to the theoret- 
 ical. On the other hand, in the actual process of 
 time, all forms of human activity are reciprocally 
 conditioned, and under this respect Croce's thought 
 can be called, and has been called by himself, a 
 new pragmatism, but "of a kind of which prag- 
 matists have never thought, or at least which they 
 have never been able to discern from the others, 
 and to bring out in full relief. If life conditions 
 thought, we have in this fact the clearly established 
 demonstration of the always historically conditioned 
 form of every thought: and not of art only, which 
 is always the art of a time, of a soul, of a moment, 
 but of philosophy also, which can solve but the 
 problems that life proposes. Every philosophy 
 reflects, and cannot help reflecting, the preoccupa- 
 tions, as they are called, of a determined historical 
 moment; not, however, in the quality of its solu- 
 tions (because in this case it would be a bad philos- 
 ophy, a partisan or passional philosophy), but in the 
 quality of its problems. And because the problem
 
 298 Philosophy as History 
 
 is historical, and the solution eternal, philosophy- 
 is at the same time contingent and eternal, mortal 
 and immortal, temporary and extratemporary." ^ 
 Croce's conception of truth is his philosophy, 
 and it is not my intention to summarize here what 
 this book presents in what is already so rapid a 
 survey. I wish only to point again at those doc- 
 trines of his, through which progress and truth are 
 reconciled, without any sacrifice of the one to the 
 other. Truth is for Croce a universal value or 
 category of consciousness: its absoluteness rests 
 on its character of universality, but, as a universal 
 has no real being outside its concrete actuality, 
 truth is nowhere if not in the individual judgment, 
 that is, in the mind that creates it. It is strange 
 that this mode of its manifestation should be con- 
 sidered to impair the quality of truth, while a 
 similar objection would hardly be raised to-day in 
 regard to other forms of spiritual activity. That 
 the Beautiful is the value of the concrete, historical 
 productions of the eesthetic spirit, or the Good that 
 of the concrete, historically determined moral 
 activity, these are concepts common to all con- 
 temporary thought, though no one, perhaps, has 
 as yet expressed them as clearly as Croce. To the 
 artist or to the saint, reality appears at a given 
 moment as an aesthetic or an ethical problem; the 
 terms of the problem are always particular, con- 
 tingent, historical; yet when the artist or the saint 
 
 ^ Filosofia della Pratica, p. 208.
 
 Veritas Filia Temporis 299 
 
 impresses on that reality the seal of his own deepest 
 personality, when he creatively reacts to it, then 
 the Beautiful and the Good realize themselves, as 
 universal values, in the individual work of art or 
 of mercy. Our belief in the absoluteness of the 
 aesthetic or of the moral value is not weakened but 
 strengthened by our inability to fix them in for- 
 mulas or codes or standards; we see them perpetually 
 transcending the reality in which they express 
 themselves, by the same process by which that 
 reality, which is all growth and life, transcends it- 
 self in the infinite course of its realization. We 
 cannot think of any number of works of art or of 
 mercy as exhausting the categories of the Beautiful 
 or of the Good. The identification of these values 
 with the infinite series of their individual expres- 
 sions fills the soul with a sense of reverence and 
 responsibility towards life, that cannot be equalled 
 by any faith in static, immovable ideals, by which 
 a term, however high and remote, is set to the 
 living spirit, no longer recognised as the creator of 
 its own aesthetic and moral world. To the mind 
 that has grasped this relation of the universal to 
 the Individual, of the eternal to the present (and 
 the artist or the saint grasps it In his own unphilo- 
 sophical way, to which his work or his action is 
 witness), the whole of reality, human and natural, 
 appears as linked by a bond of spiritual solidarity, 
 moving towards the same end, engaged In the 
 same sacred task.
 
 300 Philosophy as History 
 
 Truth is the value of the logical activity, and there- 
 fore it coincides with the positive history of human 
 thought. Its actuality is an infinite progress or 
 development, but not in the sense that the value 
 itself may be subject to increase or change from cen- 
 tury to century. At no particular point in that 
 history is it possible to point to a conversion from 
 error to truth, to a total illumination or revelation. 
 Every single affirmation of truth, from the simplest 
 and humblest to the most elaborate and complex, 
 takes possession of the whole of reality, in the ful- 
 ness of its relations; since it is manifestly impossible 
 to affirm the truth of one individual subject, without 
 implicitly determining its position in the universe. 
 Truth, as all other values, has no extension; it is 
 incommensurable either with space or with time, 
 it is not augmented by accumulation. Degrees in 
 truth, and a more and a less, are inconceivable; but 
 each act that affirms it contains its whole, since 
 truth itself does not live except in the spirit that 
 perpetually creates and recreates it. Truth belongs 
 to the thinking mind, that is, to reality as a logical 
 consciousness, as life belongs to the living body. It 
 belongs to us, individually, in relation to that uni- 
 versal consciousness, in the mode and measure of 
 our partaking of it: which means that however 
 much of it we may conquer, however constant, 
 laborious, honest, intense our efforts towards truth 
 may be, yet our duty towards it will always remain 
 infinite, inexhaustible. The conquered truth is dead
 
 Veritas Filia Temporis 301 
 
 in the mind that rests in it, that ceases its effort, 
 as life gives place to death in the body that no longer 
 functions. 
 
 In a wider sense, truth belongs to every form of 
 spiritual activity. Beauty, utility, goodness are the 
 truths of the artistic, the practical, the moral mind. 
 And in the actual life of the spirit, each of these 
 values represents all the others in the particular act 
 in which it realizes itself. This is what Croce means 
 by his circular conception of the spirit. And this 
 is why what is said of one value seems to apply 
 without any change to the others; why, as we said 
 elsewhere, all universals are but one universal. 
 Whether we call this one Progress or Development, 
 Spirit or Reality, Mind or Nature, we know that our 
 thought is grasping Life itself, not in its abstract 
 identity, but in its infinite actuality, that is, each 
 time, this life, this beauty, this action, this truth. 
 What we aim at is not an ecstatic absorption into 
 the undifferentiated unity, but the finding within 
 ourselves of a centre of consciousness, capable of 
 introducing order and reason into the variegated 
 spectacle of the natural and human world, not from 
 outside and from above, but from its very heart. 
 The truth that we seek is therefore never external 
 to ourselves, but our own activity, our own life, our 
 own history. 
 
 This concept of truth as activity and as history, 
 this activistic and energetic philosophy, truly positive 
 in that the course of history appears to it as a sue-
 
 302 Philosophy as History 
 
 cession of only positive acts and positive values, is 
 not however a blind and fatuous optimism. 1/ it 
 is true that nowhere positive error or positive evil 
 can interrupt the process of life, that death itself 
 does not end but fulfil it, yet from the relations and 
 implications of the various forms of activity arises 
 a real dialectic of good and evil, of truth and error, 
 which is the spring and motive of life. What to the 
 purely utilitarian conscience is the good of now and 
 of to-day, the same conscience, awakened to a greater 
 light, repudiates as evil. The imaginative vision 
 of the poet, in which truth expresses itself, sensuous 
 and finite, and yet pregnant of its infinity, dissolves 
 like mist in the sun in the clearness of the logical 
 concept, and is then restored in its right by the his- 
 torical and critical consciousness to which that 
 truth is poetry. The myths and superstitions of 
 the old religions, dead in the letter, are revived in 
 the thought itself that seems to destroy them. His- 
 tory is but this perpetual cycle of death and resur- 
 rection, in which what is concrete distinction in the 
 act transforms itself into opposition in the process, 
 producing the terms of a new problem and becoming 
 the source of the new creation. Thus the whole 
 method of Croce's philosophy reveals itself as di- 
 rected towards a realistic conception of life, and the 
 distinctions within theconcept are not abstract forms, 
 but the very structure of reality. 
 
 The professional philosopher moves always and 
 only in the rarefied atmosphere of the pure concept.
 
 Veritas Filia Temporis 303 
 
 Croce came to philosophy from art and from eco- 
 nomics, and he never lost contact with the elementary- 
 forms of knowledge and of action. What might be 
 termed as his fundamental discoveries are his defini- 
 tions of the aesthetic and of the economic principle. 
 On this basis the whole of his thought rests. Without 
 a conception of a truth which is sufficient unto itself, 
 and yet is not logical truth, and of a good which has 
 its own justification, and yet is not moral good, he 
 would have been compelled to maintain by the side 
 of the concepts of truth and of goodness, error and 
 evil as positive realities, or to include the whole of 
 reality within what would have been truth and good- 
 ness in a purely verbal sense. In both cases, he 
 would have been unable to make his philosophy im- 
 mediately adherent to all grades of active conscious- 
 ness, from the lowest to the highest, and thereby to 
 history. Of these discoveries the one that until 
 now has attracted the greatest attention is that of 
 the pure intuition, and of art and language as ex- 
 pression. But the establishment of the economic 
 principle, that is of the world of nature, of feeling, 
 of passion, as a positive grade of the spiritual process, 
 will probably be counted as Croce's greatest achieve- 
 ment, by those who shall be able to look back on his 
 work with an ampler perspective. It is through it 
 that his philosophy of the spirit, and in this philoso- 
 phy, the consciousness of our day, has taken pos- 
 session of that other world, of that persistent tran- 
 scendance, which we call nature. In this direction
 
 304 Philosophy as History 
 
 lieSj undoubtedly, the future course of the thought of 
 an age, to which, in this afterglow of a great confla- 
 gration, all problems seem to gather into the one of 
 the subjection to its better and higher self, the utili- 
 zation for its purer purposes, of its own cumbersome 
 economic body, of its nature and of its passions.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 Croce's Complete Works form a collection of twenty- 
 eight volumes, in four distinct series, published by Laterza 
 e Figli, of Bari, who are also the publishers of La Critica, 
 and of the following collections initiated or directed by 
 Croce: Scrittori d' Italia, Scrittori Stranieri, Classici delta 
 Filosofia Moderna. 
 
 We give here a full list of the Opere di Benedetto Croce, 
 adding to the title of each volume the year of die last avail- 
 able edition, the years of their composition having already 
 been indicated in the text: 
 
 Filosofia dello Spirito ("Philosophy of the Spirit"): 
 
 Vol. I, Estetica, 19 12. (Translated under the title of "^Esthetic") 
 Vol. II, Logica, 1917. (Translated under the title of "Logic") 
 Vol. Ill, Filosofia delta Pratica, 1915. (Translated under the 
 title of "The Philosophy of the Practical: Economics and 
 Ethics.") 
 Vol. IV, Teoria e Storia delta Storiografia, 1920. (Translated under 
 the title of "Theory and History of Historiography" in England, 
 and under the title of "History: Its Theory and Practice" in the 
 United States.) 
 Saggi filosofici ("Philosophical Essays"): 
 
 Vol. I, Problemi di Estetica, 1910. ("Problems of ^Esthetics.") 
 Vol. II, La Filosofia di Giambattista Vico, 191 1. (Translated under 
 
 the title of "The Philosophy of Vico.") 
 Vol. Ill, Saggio sullo Hegel, 1913. ("Essay on Hegel," followed by 
 essays on the history of philosophy; the essay on Hegel translated 
 under the title of "What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Phi- 
 losophy of Hegel.") 
 Vol. IV, Materialismo Storico ed economia marxistica, 1918. (Trans- 
 
 305
 
 3o6 Bibliographical Note 
 
 lated under the title of "Historical Materialism and Marxian 
 Economics.") 
 
 Vol. V, Nuovi Saggi di Estetica, 1920. ("New Essays on Esthetics"; 
 contains the Breviario di Estetica, translated under the title of 
 "The Essence of -Esthetics.") 
 
 Vol. VI, Frannnenti di Etica, 1922. ("Fragments of Ethics.") 
 Scritti di Storia letteraria e politica. ("Writings on Literary and Political 
 
 History"): 
 
 Vol. I, Saggi sulla Letteratura italiana del Seicento, 191 1. ("Essays 
 on Italian Literature in the Seventeenth Century.") 
 
 Vol. II, La Rivoluzione napoletana del 1799, 19 12. ("The Neapoli- 
 tan Revolution of 1799.") 
 
 Vols. III-VI, La Letteratura della nuova Italia, 1914-15. "(The 
 Literature of the New Italy.") 
 
 Vol. VII, / Teatri di Napoli, 1916. ("The Theatres of Naples.") 
 
 Vol. VIII, La Spagna nella Vita italiana durante la Rinascenza, 
 1917. ("Spain in Italian Life during the Renaissance.") 
 
 Vols. IX-X, Conversazioni critiche, 1918. ("Critical Conversa- 
 tions.") 
 
 Vol. XI, Storie e leggende napoletane, 1919. "(Historical Tales and 
 Legends of Naples.") 
 
 Vol. XII, Goethe, 1919. 
 
 Vol. XIII, Una Famiglia di Patrioti, 1919. ("A Family of Patriots"; 
 includes essays on Francesco de Sanctis.) 
 
 Vol. XIV, Ariosto, Shakespeare e Corneille, 1920. (Translated under 
 the title of "Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille.") 
 
 Vols. XV-XVI, Storia della Storiografia italiana, 1920. ("The 
 History of Italian Historiography.") 
 
 Vo\. XVll, La Poesia di Dante, 1921. ("The Poetry of Dante.") 
 Scritti varii. ("Miscellaneous Writings"): 
 
 Vol. I, Primi Saggi, 19 19. ("Early Essays.") 
 The following volumes are not included in the Laterza edition of Croce's 
 works: 
 
 Cultura e lita morale, Bari, 1914. ("Culture and Moral Life.") 
 
 Aneddoti e profili settecenteschi, Palermo, 1914. ("Anecdotes and 
 Profiles of the Eighteenth Century.") 
 
 Contributo alia critica di me stesso, Naples, 1918. ("Contribution to 
 a Criticism of Myself "; one hundred copies printed for private dis- 
 tribution.)
 
 Bibliographical Note 307 
 
 Curiositd storiche, Naples, 1920. ("Historical Curiosities.") 
 Paguie Sparse, edited by G. Casteliano, Naples, 1919-1920. (" Scat- 
 tered Pages," consisting of Pagine di letteratura e di cultura, 2 
 vols.; Pagine sulla guerra; and Memorie, scritti biografici e appunii 
 storici.) 
 
 A complete bibliography, cataloguing the whole of Croce's 
 multifarious activity, is outside the scope of this note. 
 The nearest approach to it can be found in G. Castellano's 
 Introduzione alle opere di B. Croce, Bari, 1920, which con- 
 tains, besides, a full list of translations in eight languages, 
 a bibliography of the Italian and foreign critical literature 
 on Croce, and a very useful series of abstracts of discus- 
 sions and judgments on Croce's work. 
 
 Besides articles and essays in American and English 
 magazines and reviews, the following works of Croce have 
 been translated into English: the four volumes of the 
 Filosofia dello Spirito, the essay on Hegel, the Essence of 
 ^Esthetics, and the essays on Ariosto, Shakespeare, and 
 Corneille, by Douglas Ainslie; the essay on Vico, by R. G. 
 Collingwood, and the essays on Historical Materialism, 
 by C. M. Meredith. But the English or American student 
 of Croce ought to rely as little as possible on translations; 
 the reading of the Italian text will be found comparatively 
 easy, on the basis of a good acquaintance with Latin or 
 with French. The labour entailed by the surmounting of 
 the first difiiculties will be largely repaid by the advantages 
 gained in coming into direct contact with Croce's thought, 
 and by the acquisition of at least a reading knowledge of 
 Italian. 
 
 For the vast critical literature on Croce, scattered 
 through the literary and philosophical reviews of Europe 
 and of America during the last twenty years, we are com- 
 pelled again to refer the reader to Castellano's book. We
 
 3o8 Bibliographical Note 
 
 shall only mark out Croce's own autobiographical notes, 
 the Contributo listed above, which, however, having been 
 printed for private circulation only, is not generally acces- 
 sible except in the French translation printed in the Revue 
 de Metaphysique et de Morale, XXVI, pp. 1-40. The fol- 
 lowing are the only books which give a general view of 
 Croce's thought: G. Prezzolini, Benedetto Croce, Naples, 
 1909; E. Chiocchetti, La filosofia di B. Croce, Florence, 
 1915; H. Wildon Carr, The Philosophy of B. Croce, London, 
 1917. The first is an able, but very cursory sketch; the 
 second examines Croce's philosophy from the standpoint of 
 neoscholasticism; the third is an ample summary written 
 by a distinguished writer well acquainted with the various 
 currents of modern thought. Each of them ought to be 
 read with a critical and discriminating eye. 
 
 In the English-speaking world, Croce's fame rests 
 emphatically on his aesthetics, and its applications to 
 literary criticism. His influence on English and American 
 critical thought has already gone much deeper than a mere 
 list of writings on his theories would show; especially in 
 England, his ideas are, so to speak, in the air, and appear 
 in many writers who have no direct knowledge of his work. 
 The best exposition of this phase of his philosophy is to be 
 found in E. F. Carritt's book, The Theory of Beauty, 1914, 
 chap. XIV. The writings of A. B. Walkley, and of J. E. 
 Spingarn, contain the most vigorous prosecution of his 
 thought as applied, respectively, to English and to Ameri- 
 can scholarship and criticism. 
 
 For the general history of Italian thought, to which 
 many a reference is made in the course of this book, the 
 best helps, besides Croce's essay on Vico, and B. Spaventa, 
 La filosofia italiana, recently reprinted, Bari, 1909, are the 
 historical works of Giovanni Gentile, and especially
 
 Bibliographical Note 309 
 
 his Storia della filosofia italiana, Milano, n. d. Gentile is 
 one of the most profound and earnest modern European 
 thinkers, and it is desirable that his theoretical works, 
 similar in tendency to, but widely divergent in temper from 
 those of Croce, should become better known to the Anglo- 
 Saxon world. Two of his books, La Riforma dell' Edu- 
 cazione and Teoria generale dello Spirito, are soon to appear 
 in English. Croce's judgment on Gentile's Actual Ideal- 
 ism is expressed in Una discussione tra filosofi amici, in 
 Conversazioni Critiche, II, pp. 67-95. But a complete 
 understanding of the vital relations between the two 
 thinkers can be gathered only through an adequate knowl- 
 edge of both Croce's and Gentile's work.
 
 INDEX 
 
 A priori synthesis, 157, 199 
 
 Absolute, 156 
 
 Abstractions, 292 
 
 Accademia Pontaniana, 45 
 
 Action, thought versus, 188; 
 volition identified with, 194 
 
 Activity, aesthetic and practical, 
 relations, 126; theoretical and 
 practical, 117 
 
 i?^sthetic criticism, 135, 136 
 
 i^-Csthetic personality, 282 
 
 ^iisthetic principle, 303 
 
 /Esthetic production, 124 
 
 /l*]esthetic standards, 137, 138 
 
 iilsthetic value, 128 
 
 /Esthetics, ICX3; Croce's theory, 
 49; (jerman, 63, 65; hedo- 
 nistic theories, 127; importance 
 in Croce's thought, 63; theo- 
 ries and doctrines, 118; Vice's 
 influence on Croce, 53-54 
 
 Agnosticism, 263 
 
 American philosophy and culture, 
 21 
 
 Aristotle, 215 
 
 Art, as expression, 108; concept, 
 49, 116; history as an art, 47; 
 literary and rhetorical criti- 
 cism of, 137; morality and, 
 121, 126, 279; object, 123, 127; 
 science and, 53; technique and, 
 130; universality,, 277 
 
 Artist's personality, 282 
 
 Arts, particular, 132 
 
 Asceticism, 213 
 
 Avenarius, 144 
 
 Beauty, 49; as an end in itself, 
 123; natural, 51, 127; objec- 
 tive, 127 
 
 Becoming, 151, 206 
 
 Bergson, Henri, 171, 295; on free 
 will, 198; resemblance to Croce, 
 200 
 
 Biography, 59, 61, 282 
 
 Bruno, Giordano, 33, 35, 151, 
 185, 293, 294 
 
 Byron, 140 
 
 Campanella, Tomaso, 33, 35 
 
 Capitalist society, 77, 81 
 
 Carducci, Giosue, 23, 26 
 
 Chronicle, 257 
 
 Classicism, 281 
 
 Classification, 156 
 
 Comte, Auguste, 179 
 
 Concept, loi, 105; as a unity of 
 distinctions, 149; expression 
 and, 154; identity of pure con- 
 cept with individual judgment, 
 156; language and, iii; logi- 
 cal, 145, 146; pure concept, 
 141, 146, 160; two forms, 155; 
 universal, particular and sin- 
 gular, 150 
 
 Conceptual fictions, 146 
 
 Consciousness, 190, 206 
 
 Contemporaneity, 255 
 
 Content and form, 108, 109 
 
 Copernicus, 35 
 
 Creation, 286, 288 
 
 Critic, 287, 288 
 
 Critica, La, 95, 247 
 
 Criticism, aesthetic, theory, 135; 
 history and, 274; monographic 
 method, 283; technique and, 
 130; see also Literary criticism 
 
 Criticism of life, 139 
 
 Croce, Benedetto, activities in 
 1900-1910, 91; aesthetic theory, 
 49; approach to philosophy 
 and method of work, 28; bibli- 
 
 311
 
 312 
 
 Index 
 
 ography of works, 305; birth 
 and early life, 3; first philo- 
 sophical essay, 45; fundamental 
 discoveries, 303; intellectual 
 activity from 1910 onward, 
 247; later life, 15-16; mental 
 characteristic, 87; pragmatism, 
 296; spiritual distinction, 68; 
 travels, 13; war attitude, 248 
 Culture, American, 21; contem- 
 porary European, 18; Italian, 
 
 ^ 17 
 
 Cusanus, 151 
 
 D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 9, 27; 
 
 Croce's difference from, 68 
 Dante, ix, 26, 122, 139, 232 
 De Sanctis, Francesco, 23; 
 
 Croce's debt to, 64, 283 
 Descartes, 36, 39 
 Dualism, 179, 183, 195, 244 
 Duty and pleasure, 210, 213 
 
 Economic activity, 207 
 Economic moment, 211, 214 
 Economic principle, 303 
 Economic society, 225 
 Economic theory of science, 167 
 Economics, 72, 100; ethics and, 
 
 212; history and, 71; Marxism 
 
 and general economic science, 
 
 77; philosophy of and science 
 
 of, 215 
 Education, ideal, 205; secondary, 
 
 in Italy, 5 
 Einfuhlu7ig, 128 
 F^mpathy, 128 
 Empiricism, 178 
 Engels, Friedrich, 71, 73 
 England, contemporary culture, 
 
 18 
 Error, 297; forms, 175, 178, 184; 
 
 function, 302; theory, 173; value 
 
 and function of, 185 
 Eternity, 209, 265, 283 
 Ethical activity, 208 
 Ethical principle, 218, 221 
 Ethics, 100; economics and, 212; 
 
 meditations on, 9 
 
 Evil, function, 302; good and, 
 200; sanction, 203; unreality, 
 202 
 
 Evolution, 206 
 
 Evolutionism, 295 
 
 Expression, 128; concept and, 
 154; identification with intu- 
 ition, 106; language as, no; 
 meaning of the word, 107 
 
 Faith, 174, 177 
 
 Filosofia dello Spirito, 94, 243, 
 246; resume of the system, 
 
 243 
 Form and content, 108-109 
 France, contemporary culture, 18 
 Freedom and art, 126 
 Freedom of the will, 198 
 
 Galileo, 35 
 
 Gaspary, Adolf, 26 
 
 Genius, 108; taste and, 135 
 
 Genres, theories of, 133 
 
 Gentile, Giovanni, 69, 96, 166, 
 308-309 
 
 Germany, contemporary culture, 
 19; philosophic errors, iSo 
 
 Hedonism and art, 127 
 
 Heeel, ^24, 25,^ 74, 142, 143; 
 Croce's criticism of, 152; 
 Croce's relation to, 31; dia- 
 lectic process in Hegel and in 
 Croce, 151, 180; monograph 
 on, 95; on philosophy and his- 
 torv, 166 
 
 Het;elianism, 67, 69, 70 
 
 Herbart, J. F., 9 
 
 Historical method, 20 
 
 Histoncism, 182 
 
 Historiography, 254 
 
 History, an art or a science? 47; 
 chronicle and, 237; contem- 
 porary, 255; criticism and, 
 139, 274; Croce's tentative 
 definition, 54; Croce's theory, 
 growth, 161; divisions, 165; 
 economics and, 71; humanity, 
 270; identity with philosophy,
 
 Index 
 
 313 
 
 163, 265, 287; monographic 
 method, 286; object, 270; of 
 man and of nature, 271; phil- 
 ological, 259; philosophy of, 
 180; poetical, 261; positivity, 
 269; problem of, 13; return 
 to, and elaboration of the theo- 
 ry, 247; rhetorical, 261; science 
 and, 168; special histories, 271; 
 spirit as history, 258; theory 
 of, 253; thought and, 262, 
 265; two meanings of the word, 
 253; universal, 264, 265 
 
 Idealism, 41; transcendental, 290 
 
 Ideals, function, 202 
 
 Imm.anentism, loo-ioi, 152 
 
 Immortality, 206 
 
 Impressionism, 281 
 
 Individual, society and, 226; 
 universal and, 222 
 
 Individual judgment, 155 
 
 Individuality, 204 
 
 Industrial revolution, 76 
 
 Inquisition, 177 
 
 Inspiration, 123, 132 
 
 Intellect, 148 
 
 Intention, action and, 162; voli- 
 tion and, 194 
 
 Intuition, loi; Croce's use of 
 the word, 112; identification 
 with expression, 106; kinds, 
 107; lyrical character, 114 
 
 Intuitive consciousness, 102 
 
 Intuitive knowledge, limits, 104, 
 105 
 
 Judgment, assthetic, 136; indi- 
 vidual, 155; kinds, 155, 156; 
 practical, 196 
 
 Jus naturale, 232 
 
 Kant, 37, 61, 142, 143, 182; eth- 
 ics, 83 
 
 Knowledge, forms, lor, 159; will 
 and, 193 
 
 Labriola, Antonio, influence on 
 Croce, 8; on Marxism and 
 materialism, 71 
 
 Language, law and, 237; origin 
 and nature, no, 280; technique 
 of, 134 
 
 Law, definition, 228; language 
 and, 237; mutability of laws, 
 231; philosophy of, 227, 236; 
 social and individual, 229; use 
 of laws, 233 
 
 Law of nature, 232 
 
 Legalism, 234 
 
 Liberty and necessity, 199 
 
 Literary criticism, definition, 58; 
 problem of, 57; three phases, 
 60 
 
 Literary critics and art, 137 
 
 Literary genre, 133 
 
 Logic, 67, 81, 100, 106, 244; func- 
 tion in Croce's system, 141 
 
 Logical concept, 145-146 
 
 Mach, E., 144 
 
 Machiavelli, 83, 215, 
 
 Marxism, 21; Croce's interest, 
 71; influence on Croce, 215; 
 morality and, 82 
 
 Materialism, historical, 71; crit- 
 icism and interpretation, 75 
 
 Mathematical thought, 171, 217 
 
 Mathematicism, 179 
 
 Mechanists, 170 
 
 Metaphysics, 157, 26S 
 
 Methodology, philosophy as, 268 
 
 Moral concepts, 66 
 
 Moral standards, 202 
 
 Moralism, abstract, 211 
 
 Morality, 20B, 223; art and, 121, 
 126; Marxism and, 82; utility 
 and, 212 
 
 Mvsticism, 183 
 
 Myth, 182 
 
 Mythologism, 182 
 
 National prejudices, 176 
 Nationality, 232 
 Natural laws, 230 
 Natural rights, 232 
 Natural sciences, 167 
 Naturalism, 33, 40, 291
 
 314 
 
 Index 
 
 Naturalistic method, 169-170 
 Nature, 169, 206; beauty in, 127; 
 
 history of, 271; law of, 232; 
 
 philosophy of, 180; spirit and, 
 
 181 
 Necessity and liberty, 199 
 
 Objectivity, 164 
 Opposites, 152 
 Oratory, 280 
 
 Pareto, V., 84 
 
 Pascoli, Giovanni, 27 
 
 Passions, 203, 297 
 
 Personality, 204; aesthetic, 282 
 
 Philology, 19, 60-61, 259 
 
 Philosophy, as the pure concept, 
 160; Croce's approach to, 28; 
 Croce's first essay, 45; devel- 
 opment, 186; history and, 14; 
 identity with history, 163, 165, 
 265, 287; method, 92; pseudo- 
 scientific, 167; religion and, 
 182; systematic character, 161 
 
 Philosophy of mind, 93; growth 
 of the system, 87 
 
 Philosophism, 180 
 
 Plato, 151, 182 
 
 Platonism, 290 
 
 Pleasure, art and, 127; duty and, 
 210, 213 
 
 Poetry, 26, loi, 280; identity 
 with language, iii 
 
 Poets, great, 252, 285 
 
 Political science, 227 
 
 Politics, 176, 214 
 
 Positivism, 20, 6S, 144, 179 
 
 Practical activity, 148; aesthetic 
 activity and, 126; affirmation 
 of, 188; distinctions, 207; forms, 
 189; philosophy of, 196; scep- 
 ticisms about, 189, 190 
 
 Practical judgment, 196 
 
 Practical principles, 230 
 
 Pragmatism, 296 
 
 Prouress, 293; truth and, 295 
 
 Prose, 280 
 
 Pseudo-concepts, 146 
 
 Pseudo-scientific thought, 179 
 Psychology, 172 
 Punishment, 235 
 Puritan, 235 
 
 Realism, 41, 292 
 
 Reality, 157, 164, 169, 186, 293; 
 
 dualistic, 179 
 Reason, 148, 192 
 Relativity, theory of, 179 
 Religion, 192; Croce's, 5-6; 
 
 myth and, 182; philosophy 
 
 and, 182-183; philosophy 
 
 identified with, 224 
 Religious principles, 219 
 Renaissance, 34-35, 260, 293; 
 
 philosophy of, 33 
 Rhetoric, 134 
 
 Rhetorical categories, 133, 138 
 Rolland, Romain, 249 
 Rousseau, J. J., 232, 281 
 Russell, Bertrand, 249 
 
 Scepticism, 183 
 
 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 182 
 
 Science, Croce's theory, 172; dis- 
 tinction from art, i^,; economic, 
 215; economic theory of, 167; 
 history and, 168; history as a 
 science, 47; sciences and, 292; 
 superstition and, 180 
 
 Scholarship, 10, 13 
 
 Schools of criticism, 59 
 
 Socialism, 72, J^, 79, 82 
 
 Society, economic, 225; philo- 
 sophical concept, 226-227 
 
 Sociologism, 48 
 
 Sociology, 52, 79, 172, 227 
 
 Sorel, Georges, 84 
 
 Spaventa, Bertrando, 3-4, 19; 
 Croce's relations with, 68 
 
 SpavL-nta, Silvio, 4, 7 
 
 Spencer, 47, 179 
 
 Spinoza, 36, 185 
 
 Spirit, 246, 247, 295, 301; as his- 
 tory, 258 
 
 Spiritual activity, 118, 189, 301; 
 four forms, loo
 
 Index 
 
 315 
 
 Spiritualism, 33, 40, 68 
 Standard, 202; aesthetic, 137 
 Syndicalism, 84 
 Synthesis, a priori, iz,y, 199 
 
 Tactile values, 128 
 
 Taste and genius, 135 
 
 Technique, art and, 130; criti- 
 cism and, 130; ordinary idea 
 and consequent errors, 131 
 
 Textual criticism, 60 
 
 Thought, 157, 164, 174; action 
 versus, 188; history and, 262, 
 265; non-thought and, 173; 
 truth and, 174; unity, 87, 266 
 
 Tolerance, 177 
 
 Transcendentalism, 290 
 
 Translation, 125 
 
 Truth, actuality of, 300; as activ- 
 ity and history, 301; conver- 
 sion to, 184-185; Croce's con- 
 ception, 298; progress and, 295; 
 progress in, 186; thought and, 
 174; what is truth? 289 
 
 Typical, the, 122 
 
 Unity, 246; of distinctions 149; 
 of thought, 87, 266 
 
 Universal, 221, 230, 243, 266, 301 
 Universal history, 264 
 Universal language, 237-238 
 Universal laws, 219 
 Universality, 150 
 Utilitarianism, 209, 218, 220, 235 
 
 Value, 128, 196, 298; practical, 
 200 
 
 Vico, Giovanni Battista, 33, 293, 
 294; Croce's relation to, 40; his 
 humanism, 38; influence on 
 Croce's esthetics, 53-54; meta- 
 physics, 75; monograph on, 95; 
 on error, 177; on poetry, loi 
 
 Vitalists, 170 
 
 Volition, 193; action identified 
 with, 194; intention coinci- 
 dent with, 194; passions and, 
 203 ; see also Will 
 
 War, Croce's attitude toward, 
 248 
 
 Will, 117, 126, 148, 188, 296; free- 
 dom of, 198; its past in errors, 
 175; knowledge and, 193; strug- 
 gle of, 203; practical activity; 
 see also Volition
 
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