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This book is the account of the life and activity of one who isliving and acting. Herodotus tells us the Greeks had a proverb whichforbade them to pronounce any man happy before he is dead. We maycertainly take his warning to this extent,—that we should refrainfrom attempting to fix a philosopher's thought so long as he continuesto think. Benedetto Croce has, it is true, presented his Philosophyof Mind in such "questionable shape," that it gives the student theimpression of finality, the feeling that a doctrine which throughoutthe history of philosophy has been struggling for expression has nowat last come to light. But this appearance of finality is due to acertain artistic power which Croce possesses in an eminent degree, thepower of reliving the past and making history interpret life. Beneathall 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 noliving philosopher has given so complete an appearance of finality tohis doctrine as Croce has done in hisPhilosophy of Mind it is reallythe reflection of a work of art which serves only to conceal the livingthought.

The publishers of this Introduction to the philosophy of BenedettoCroce by Dr. Raffaello Piccoli have courteously invited me to writethis foreword inasmuch as I was the first to introduce this philosophy,otherwise than by translations, to the attention of English students. Ido so very gladly. My own work was confined to the purely philosophicalwritings, my interest in them having been first aroused by the strikingaddress on Æsthetic delivered by Croce to the International Congress ofPhilosophy at Heidelberg in 1908. When I wrote my book, thePhilosophyof Mind consisted of three volumes, theEstetica, theLogica,and thePratica, but before I had completed my account I read inCroce's Journal Critica the announcement of the forthcoming publicationof the fourth volume on theTheory and History of the Writing ofHistory. Croce had, it seemed to me, closed his book onPracticewith the plain indication, not that he had solved every philosophicalproblem, nor that philosophy was not an external problem, but thathe had given an exhaustive account of the stages or degrees in theirorder as moments of the developing life of the mind, and that outsidethese degrees there were no others. The new work did not, indeed,either negative or qualify this conclusion, but it bore evidence of theceaseless activity of his mind. Are we then, because the philosophy ofCroce is still developing, to refrain from the attempt to interpretit on the ground that any meaning we may find in it is indefinite andinsecure? Certainly not, for a philosopher's thinking unfolds anddevelops 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, andthe 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 thephilosopher he writes about, and grew up in the intellectual atmospherewhich his philosophy was creating. To this great advantage he has addedanother, for first in Australia, and later in the Universities ofEngland and America he has acquired a perfect command of our languageand a thorough knowledge of our philosophy. He is specially qualified,therefore, to give a first-hand account of Croce's literary andphilosophical activity, and the kind of influence it has had in formingthe mind of Modern Italy.

The author has not confined himself to an exposition of the philosophyof Croce in its narrow and technical meaning, he has given us anaccount of the whole of his literary and historical activity. Hehas traced the origin of his philosophy in the circumstances of hisparentage, early life and education, and has followed biographicallythe formation of his philosophical theories and the direction of hisphilosophical interest. He has shown how his general trend of thought,his literary tastes and historical studies without any professionalspur, by the very nature and force of the problems with which theyconfronted him, led to philosophy as the dominant and culminatinginterest of life.

Philosophers and philosophies have had in our generation to undergo thetrial of a fiery furnace. The Great War and the passions aroused byit and the estrangement between nations nurtured in the same Westernculture have been a fierce test of principles. In regard to everygreat leader we ask first how he reacted to the conflicting emotionsof the international struggle. Dr. Piccoli has dealt with this latestand 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 come throughthe ordeal with enhanced reputation. This, at least, is the author'sjudgment—the judgment of one who himself fought and suffered severelyin the War.

The two great achievements of Croce are in the domain of æsthetical andethical theory. Dr. Piccoli shows us each doctrine in its historicalorigin and in its relation to contemporary philosophy. The first isa reaction against the intellectualism of Hegel. In its affirmationof intuition it is in rather striking agreement with the philosophyof Bergson, although as Croce's approach is from the side of artand literature, and not like Bergson's from the study of biologicalscience, it rather supplements than elucidates Bergson's theory.The second is a reaction against the school of Karl Marx and itsmaterialistic interpretation of history.

At the present time Croce is directing his criticism on the new line ofdevelopment which his own friends and colleagues are taking in regardto his own principles, in particular to the "actual idealism" of hiscolleague Professor Giovanni Gentile. To Croce this new doctrine spellsmysticism, and of mysticism in all its forms he is the open enemy. Onthis point we may, I think, detect an inclination on the part of Dr.Piccoli to disagree with Croce. It will be seen, therefore, that wehave in this book a very full and a very welcome account, brought rightup to date, of one who is, as far as contemporaries can judge, formingthe mind of the present age.

PREFACE

When, about a year ago, I undertook to write this little book for itspresent publishers, all that I had in my mind was a brief expositionof the solutions given by Croce to a number of philosophical problemsof vital interest to the students of what were once called the MoralSciences. I thought at the time that it would be possible to abstractsuch solutions and problems from the body of his Philosophy of Mind,which is a coherent and austere theory of knowledge of a kind that inthe modern decadence of philosophical studies and of general cultureis rapidly becoming unintelligible even to the most highly cultivated.I hoped that the specialized reader, for whom the larger aspects ofCroce's thought have no appeal, and therefore no meaning, would be ableto apply those particular solutions to the problems that confronted himin his particular branch of studies, by translating them into terms ofhis own naïve philosophy.

This plan had also a personal advantage, inasmuch as it did not compelme to a conscious revision of my own position in regard to thoselarger aspects of Croce's philosophy. But as soon as I began to thinkconsistently of this book, the history of my own[Pg iv] reactions to Croce'swork came back to me so vividly that I found it impossible to set itaside; and I discovered that this supposed advantage was a delusion,towards which I had probably been drawn by a very human, very naturaldesire of avoiding the most obvious difficulties of my task.

As a young man, in my student days in Italy, I was a fervid andenthusiastic follower of Croce's ideas: one of the many who used toswear, as we were wont to say,in verba Crucis. To the generationwho 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 twoprecipices of a pseudo-scientific materialism on one hand, and of amysticism on the other, which in all its many forms (traditionalism,modernism, pragmatism, intuitionism, æstheticism, super-humanism,futurism) could not be anything less than an abdication of thought forthe sake of the emotions. And it should not be wondered at, if Croce'sbooks, appearing at short intervals between 1900 and 1910, and buildingup what presented itself to us as a complete system of answers toall, or practically all, our most pressing spiritual questions, werereceived by us with deep gratitude but with very little constructivecriticism. They covered such an enormous space on the map of Europeanculture, that even for the most ambitious among us, they were veryoften the first introduction to entirely new fields of studies, and allwe could do was to follow our guide in his voyages of rediscovery:[Pg v] torepeat within ourselves the strenuous experience of which each of thosebooks was a report and a testimony.

Impatience with a master who was not of the kind we had been accustomedto, who could not be easily digested, surpassed and disposed of, buthad 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 immatureand capricious criticism, which was but a means for an arbitraryliberation. It was an amusing sight to see Croce assailed and, to thesatisfaction of his critics, destroyed, with weapons that nobody couldhave provided but Croce himself, and a dwarf victoriously brandishingagainst the giant a toothpick for a sword. But there is no epic ofthought without such comic interludes.

My own faith in Croce was not shaken until intercourse with one of thegreatest critical minds of our day, and the representative of a totallydifferent philosophical tradition, a mathematician and a philosopher,showed me the weakness of the foundations not of Croce's, but of my ownidealism. And a long residence in England, where I became intimatelyacquainted with certain logical habits utterly unlike our Latin ways ofthought, made me profoundly sceptical of the intellectual advantages ofwhatever dogmatism might have been in me. Yet I continued for a longtime to keep as it were in separate compartments those that had seemedto me to be[Pg vi] established truths in Croce's system, and speculations ofa quite different order on problems which were forced upon me by myown experience of life and by contact with a new moral and culturalenvironment.

All this was in the happy days of peace. The war from its verybeginning appeared to me, then living in one of the most purelyintellectual centres of Europe, at one of the oldest Universitiesof England, as the catastrophe of our whole intellectual life. Fromthe trials of the war I emerged with infinitely less faith in thevalue of our intellectual possessions than I ever had had before, andat the same time with the firm conviction that intelligence, moreintelligence, a deeper, purer, more active, charitable, courageous andpervasive intelligence, is our only hope for the future.

It was with such a disposition that I took up this work, and read whatCroce had been writing during the war. Three things, in the courseof this new acquaintance with him, and while I was meditating andlecturing on him during my American peregrinations, became very clearto me. The first, that his thought is not a system in the ordinarysense of the word, but a method; that therefore it is impossibleto sever parts of his philosophy from the main body, the truth ofparticular propositions being dependent upon an understanding of thewhole.

The second, that in the last few years the progress of his thought hasbeen so considerable that an[Pg vii] attempt at giving a general exposition ofhis philosophy without any regard to the successive stages of growth,at describing as a static structure what is a dynamic process, wouldinevitably lead to the construction of a fanciful system, of an imagetotally different from the original.

The third, that whatever our individual position may be in relation tohis ideas, his work before, during and after the war will remain as themost solemn contemporary monument of that intellectual civilizationof Europe, of which we have seen so many false idols, so many whitesepulchres, go under during these seven years of passion.

The conclusion to be drawn from these considerations 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 naïve philosophy of the specialist his own solutions of hisparticular problems, however childish they may appear from a higherstandpoint, are perfectly adequate, that ready-made, formal solutionsare no solutions at all, and the only truth is the one that we conquerby our own effort, under the impulse of our own need. And second,that, however conscious I was and am of my own limitations, I had totake a first step in the direction of constructive criticism by tryingto retrace the history, the ideal biography, of the philosophy ofCroce. With the exception of a little book written by Croce himself,there is very little help to be found[Pg viii] for a work of this kind in thevast literature that has grown in the last twenty years, in Europeand in America, around his work. And I firmly believe that thereis not one man in Europe or in America who is qualified to do thatwork of creative interpretation which ought to be at the same time ahistory and a criticism of Croce's philosophical activity: least ofall, the professional philosopher, who has dealt all his life withthe conceptual residuum of the problems of life, and has no directexperience 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 intothem so deeply and so thoroughly, that a complete valuation of his workwill never be possible to a single man, but willtake place, willhappen, in the history of the various disciplines, and in the generalhistory of thought, for years and years to come. For the present, andas long as he will be alive and thinking, the only creative interpreterof Croce is Croce himself.

This book does not therefore intend to substitute itself, not even asa summary and a short cut for lazy minds, to the works of Croce. Itis rather an introduction to those works, and at the same time theconfession of one individual experience of that philosophy. It isan historical sketch, and implicitly a criticism, since our way ofunderstanding a thought is our judgment of that thought (when not ajudgment that that thought passes on us); a sketch which[Pg ix] I think I canhonestly write because so much of that philosophy has been the dailyfood of my intellectual life, my own history, for years. Before thewar I should probably have been able to write it with less difficulty,with more complete adhesion; but the perspective of these few yearswill make it perhaps less passionate and more reflective. An explicitcriticism of the whole philosophy of Croce it is not, and it doesnot attempt to be: the reader may find traces of my doubts and of mypreoccupations in it, but I have humbly tried to give not more, and Ihope not less, than what he has a right to expect from the title.

I do not write this book for the professors of philosophy. Those amongthem who know Croce will not need it; and those who either have not asyet taken any notice of him, or from a casual acquaintance with one ofhis books have proceeded to damn most vigorously what they have hardlyunderstood, are certainly beyond my power. I write it for the young,from the heart of my own now fast receding youth, trying to raisebefore their eyes, in the words of Dante to Brunetto Latini,

la cara e buona immagine paterna
di voi, quando .... ad ora ad ora
m'insegnavate come l'uom s'eterna.

I trust that they will find in it what they need not less than we of anolder generation needed it, and what I know they are thirsting for: anexample of[Pg x] intellectual energy and of moral strength converging intoa life of unremitting devotion to the service of that truth which islight and love and joy,—our only light against the menace of darkness.

BENEDETTO CROCE

INTRODUCTION

Croce's family, and early education—His religion—Life in Rome inthe eighties—Labriola's influence—Meditations on ethics—Returnto Naples; life as a scholar—Travels; and the problem of history—Philosophus fit—The intellectual conditions of Italy after theRisorgimento—Contemporary European culture—American analogies—Two leaders of Italian thought—Francesco de Sanctis—GiosuèCarducci—Croce's approach to philosophy, and his method of work—Hisrelations to the philosophical practition—Vico and the philosophy ofthe Renaissance—Bruno and Campanella—The humanism of Vico—Naturalismand spiritualism—A philosophy of the human spirit.

I. The Beginnings

Benedetto Croce was born in 1866, in a small town in the Italianprovince of Aquila, the only son of an old-fashioned, Catholic, andconservative Neapolitan family. His grandfather had been a highmagistrate, untouched by the new liberal currents in his devotion tothe old régime and to the Bourbon dynasty then reigning in Naples. Hisfather 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 from the intrigues of political life. His mother wasa woman of culture and taste, such as the old type of educationfor women, which is now as completely forgotten as if it had neverexisted, used to produce. Bertrando[Pg 4] Spaventa, the philosopher, andSilvio Spaventa, a statesman who had brought to his enthusiasm for thenational cause all the traditions of his Neapolitan conservatism, wereher brothers: both of them, however, estranged from Croce's familybecause of their political ideas.

The child grew in this greyish, subdued atmosphere, in which the onlytouches of colour were added by his own passion for books of historyand romance, and by the visits to the beautiful old churches to whichhe accompanied his mother. To the circumstances of his childhood, Croceattributes the relative delay in the development of his politicalfeelings and ideals, for a long time submerged by his interests inliterature and erudition. But because every fault brings with itselfsome compensation, he also owed to them his critical attitude towardspartisan political legends, his impatience towards the rhetoric ofliberalism, his vehement dislike of great emphatic words, and of anykind of pomp and ceremony, together with a power to appreciate what isuseful and effectual in the actions of men, wherever it may come from.

As a boy, he went to a Catholic "collegio" or boarding school, andin this too his experience differed from that of the majority of hiscontemporaries. The insistence on lay education imparted by the State,and the preference for the day school, which allows the family tosupplement the work of the school, in fact, to take care of the moraland social side of education, as distinct from the purely[Pg 5] intellectualone, are characteristics of the new Italian methods, obviously inkeeping with the general tendencies of the age. I remember that tomyself as a boy it was inexplicable why anybody should be sent to a"collegio" unless he were an orphan or an unmanageable scamp. But Croceseems to have enjoyed his experience, to which he was submitted merelyin accordance with the habits of his family; and even now he praisesthe 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, andof the necessity of adapting oneself to a variety of dispositions andtemperaments.

Classical secondary education in Italy roughly corresponds in itsscope, even to-day, to that which is imparted in Anglo-Saxon countriesby secondary schools and liberal colleges. It is supposed to end the"formative" phase of education, and to lead to the higher phase in theUniversities, which is, whether cultural or professional, of a highlyspecialized and "informative" kind. It is the direct outcome of thehumanistic tradition, and rather more so in the clerical schools, likethe one which Croce attended, than in the public ones. By the time hewas ready for the University, he must have had a good knowledge of theclassics, as a general background to a mainly literary and historicalculture, in which the elements of scientific knowledge, and a good dealof mathematics, had also their place.

The religion which played such an important part[Pg 6] in his family andschool life was probably little more than a habit with him: a setof answers to certain fundamental problems which, accepted on theauthority of parents and teachers, released his mind for the pursuitof his favourite studies. And yet, there is no doubt that we canfind traces of this religious education in all his work: a personalexperience of the catholic catechism and of catholic morality bringsa spirit in contact with some of the great ideas and of the greatrealities of life in a much more intimate and profound way than thepurely intellectual apprehensions of the same ideas and realities everwill. It creates habits of mind and moral tastes which will still berecognizable even after the individual mind to which they belong hasundergone the most radical changes. In a philosopher, in particular, itforms a kind of personal background to thought, similar to that whichmodern philosophy actually has in its own history: it reproduces in theyouth of one man that religious phase which corresponds to the youth ofa civilization, and is the source of the intellectual development of amore conscious age. At intervals during his adolescence, Croce's faithintensified itself into passing aspirations towards a life of devotion,until it quietly vanished, so to speak, from his consciousness, throughno great dramatic crisis, but merely in consequence of a courseof lessons on the philosophy of religion, which were intended tostrengthen it and make it more resistant to criticism, during the lastyears of his secondary[Pg 7] education. At about the same time, having comeunder the influence of both Carducci and De Sanctis, he began to write,and contributed his first articles to a literary weekly, theFanfulladella Domenica, which represented the most vigorous and advancedtendencies of the day.

In 1883, in the earthquake of Casamicciola, in the island of Ischianear Naples, Croce lost both his parents and his only sister, hehimself remaining buried for several hours under the ruins, and brokenin several parts of his body. The years immediately following werethe "saddest and darkest" of his life, and he spent them in Rome inthe house of his uncle Silvio Spaventa, which was one of the mostconspicuous political and intellectual centres of the capital ofthe new kingdom. Spaventa was one of the leaders of the Right, orConservative party, which had been thrown out of office by the Left, orLiberal party, a few years before; by him and by his friends the youngCroce was strengthened in his mistrust of the prevailing ideas andmethods, which he heard bitterly and sarcastically criticised by men ofgreat culture and of profound political honesty. While his temperamentand the shadow of his grief kept him away from the brilliant sociallife of the Romanjeunesse dorée his relations with the men of aparty which had little hope of ever coming back to power prevented himfrom taking any part in active political life, in sharp contrast withthe habits of the majority of Italian university students, to whom[Pg 8]politics are what the major sports are to Anglo-Saxon students. Hedivided his time between the University and the great Roman libraries,among which the one he loved best was the Casanatense, in those yearsstill served by Dominican monks, a typical old monastic library, itsbenches provided with old-fashioned inkhorns, sandboxes with goldensand, and goose-quills. Anyone seeing him there, buried among hisancient and curious books, and not suspecting the deep perpetualdissatisfaction and unhappiness which accompanied him in a work whichseemed to be but a work of love, would have prophesied for him the lifeof one of those ascetics of erudition, intoxicated by the romantic dustof the past, who still haunt the solemn halls and the dark corridors ofthe libraries of the old world.

But the great event of his University life, the one which awakenedhim from the torpor of mere erudition, and set before him a new goaland a higher hope, was the lessons on moral philosophy which he heardfrom Antonio Labriola. Croce himself has described this new, decisiveexperience: "Those lessons came unexpectedly to meet my harrowing needof rebuilding for myself in a rational form a faith in life, and inthe aims and duties of life; I had lost the guidance of a religiousdoctrine, and at the same time I was feeling the obscure danger ofmaterialistic theories, whether sensistic or associationistic, aboutwhich I had no illusions at all, as I clearly perceived in them thesubstantial negation of morality itself,[Pg 9] resolved into a more or lessdisguised egotism. Herbart's ethics taught by Labriola restored in mymind the majesty of the ideal, ofthat which has to be as opposedtothat which is, and mysterious in its opposition, but because ofthis same mysteriousness, absolute and uncompromising."[1] Labriola'sinfluence on Croce was not limited to the classroom; the professorand the student became friends, and Croce enjoyed the benefit of hiswonderful gifts as a conversationalist, on which even more than onhis academic activity, or on his published work, his fame rests. Heseems to have been an awakener of souls, an intellectual stimulant inthe fashion of the Greek philosophers, a breaker of new paths and aspiritual guide such as a younger generation had in the mathematicianVailati.

The mind of the young scholar is henceforth constantly occupied bymeditations on the concepts of pleasure and duty, of purity andimpurity, of actions prompted by the attraction of the pure, moralidea, and of actions which result in apparent moral effects throughpsychic associations, through habits, through the impulse of thepassions. It is easy to discover the dependence of such meditations onthe early religious education of Croce; they are the link, in fact,between his religion and his philosophy, since we find them, at amore mature and elaborate stage, reflected in the third volume of hisPhilosophy of[Pg 10] Mind, which, to the eyes of its author, has still analmost autobiographical aspect, entirely concealed from the reader byits didascalic form.

The plan of life that he sketched for himself about this time, was adistinctly disillusioned and pessimistic one: on one hand, he wouldpursue his erudite and literary work, partly because of his naturalinclination towards it, and partly because one has anyhow to dosomething in this world; and he would, on the other hand, fulfil hismoral duties to the best of his capacity, conceiving them to be aboveallduties of compassion. In later years he criticised this view as apurely selfish one, since "the true and high compassion is that whichone practices by setting the whole of one's self in harmony with theends of reality, and by compelling others too to move towards thoseends, and a kind heart makes itself truly and seriously kind onlythrough an ever broader and deeper understanding."[2]

After three years of residence in Rome, Croce returned to Naples, wherehe lived in the society of curious and learned old men, librariansand archivists, all absorbed in minute and painstaking historicalresearches. The moderate fortune which he had inherited from hisparents gave him the independence he needed for his quiet, laborioustastes, and allowed him gradually to collect in his own house a verylarge and precious library. To it he owed also the possibility oflearning without teaching, and therefore of[Pg 11] keeping his own workentirely free from any academic taint: of subordinating his studiesrather to the necessities of the development of his own personalitythan to those of professional specialization.

Practically all the production of the years between 1886 and 1892 isconcerned with one aspect or another of the history of Naples. Throughhis researches on the Neapolitan theatres, on Neapolitan life in theeighteenth century, and on the literature of the seventeenth century,he acquired an intimate and exhaustive knowledge of the minutestliterary, political, social and archæological details of that lifeof his own city, which was the immediate historical background ofhis own life. Towards the end of this period, this complex activitycrystallized itself into two rather ambitious enterprises: the editingof aBiblioteca letteraria napoletana, for the publication of textsand documents of Neapolitan literature; and of a periodical,NapoliNobilissima, which in the fifteen years of its existence collected anenormous amount of material for the history and archæology of Naples,and to which Croce himself contributed the essays of hisStorie eleggende napoletane.

We have here a Croce, who, though not a professor, was yet truly aspecialist: one of that great host of local and municipal historianswhich are to be met with in even the least important Italian towns.And undoubtedly this kind of activity offered him, as he willinglyacknowledges, not only an outlet for his youthful imagination, inthe reconstruction[Pg 12] of an adventurous and picturesque past, but aformal discipline of precision and thoroughness in scientific work.But it must be remembered that municipal or regional history in Italyhas in many cases the breadth and depth of national history in othercountries, because of the number and variety of divergent political,literary and artistic traditions which are present in the life of eachItalian city or state. And Naples, though she never had as preponderanta part in the formation of the national consciousness as either Romeor Florence, was a world in herself, with her own art and poetry, withher own philosophical and political tendencies, with her peculiarrelations to non-Italian states and cultures, such as France and Spain.Croce's Neapolitan researches, however specialized and barren theymay appear at first sight, were therefore well fitted to give him,in one particular instance, that direct and concrete experience ofhistorical 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 thoughtwhich were naturally connected with that particular experience, andthey thus helped him to penetrate the minds of his two great Neapolitanpredecessors, Vico and De Sanctis. And finally, especially throughhis interest in the cultural relations between Naples and Spain, theyenlarged his horizon from the problems of local to those of generalEuropean history.

He visited, always as a scholar, not only Spain, but France andEngland and Germany, constantly widening the range of his excursionsin libraries and archives. But the more he acquired of the knowledgeof individual facts, the deeper he felt the futility and vacuity oftheir purely material accumulation. There was no end, apparently, tothe labor of research and erudition, unless a guiding and limitingprinciple should be found: by the mere piling up of historicalinformation, however minute and exact, it would be forever impossibleto decipher the secret of the past. No amount of erudition would evermake history. It is no wonder that to a mind which already had beenpreoccupied with religious and moral problems, the problem of its ownwork should present itself with the same intensity and in the sameshape as a moral experience. He began to feel a satiety and distastefor that which he had once thought would be the labour of his wholelife, and a yearning for a more satisfying, moreintimate form ofactivity. He felt a vague attraction towards a new type of history,moral history, in relation to which all his previous researchesappeared as a kind of amorphous and unconscious preparation. He planneda book on the psychological and spiritual history of Italy from theRenaissance to our own times, and he undertook a series of studieson the relations between Spain and Italy, to be followed by similarwork in regard to the other nations of Europe, as necessary to a fullunderstanding of his main theme.

But his old methods and habits followed him in the new field: againit seemed to him that there would be no end to his merely preparatorywork, once he had undertaken it in what was practically still his oldspirit. In fact he had sensed a spiritual need which had announceditself by that peculiar feeling so closely resembling one of moraldissatisfaction, but he had not been able as yet to formulate the termsof his problem. It is probable that what kept him for quite a long timefrom doing so was partly the character of his literary education, andpartly a kind of intellectual humility, which made him distrust his ownpowers, on entering into a completely new form of mental activity.

The problem which he had to solve for himself was, indeed, not anhistorical, or philological, or archæological one, but a purelyphilosophical one: the problem of the nature of history and of science.We know with what religious awe Croce regarded the professionalphilosophers at the time; and certainly nothing could have been morepainful to the young and modest scholar than the thought of steppingbeyond the limits of his own specialty, and invading a ground sopowerfully occupied and defended. But Croce discovered through hisown experience that you cannot reject a problem, once it is forcedupon you by the facts of your own life, and thatphilosophus fitwith the same kind of necessity with whichpoeta nascitur. It isfrom this point that we can observe the transformation of the youngscholar into a[Pg 15] philosopher; his philosophical career will appear tous as a continued effort towards the solution of that first problem,and of all the problems which followed in its train. The last answerto it is in Croce's theory of the identity of history and philosophy;and the dependence of this theory on the first impulse from which thewhole of his philosophy arose is clearly visible in the desire whichhe has again and again expressed and partly fulfilled in his latestwritings, of going back from abstract and formal philosophy to thephilosophy of particular facts or history:storia pensata; "sincethis is the meaning of the identity of philosophy and history, that wephilosophize whenever we think, whatever may be the subject or form ofour thought."[3] The philosophy of Croce, which begins with the rawmaterial of history, presenting itself as a dense, impenetrable mass,ends in a new conception of history, which is permeated in all itsparts by the vivifying breath of thought.

I may add here, since it will be very hard to interrupt the historyof his intellectual development with biographical details, that thenew direction of his thought did not alter Croce's external mode oflife; that the discipline acquired in his early work remained the normof all his later activity; that he accepted public offices in hisown town, and later as a senator (which in Italy is a life-office)and as a Minister of Public Education in the last Giolitti[Pg 16] Cabinet,certainly more out of the consciousness of a moral obligation thanthrough his inclination or his ambition. His life on the whole has beenand is essentially that of the scholar and of the thinker: his work, apolitical work only in the wide meaning which Plato gives to the word.

II. Early Environment

Benedetto Croce was thirty-four years old in nineteen hundred: hiseducation (if it is possible to set a term to the education ofa philosopher) is therefore the work of the last quarter of thenineteenth century. A rapid examination of the intellectual conditionsof Italy during those years will help us to see that education in itstrue light, that is, as a reaction to, rather than a fruit of, theenvironment.

The Risorgimento, with its fifty years of wars and revolutionscoming close on the heels of the great Napoleonic upheaval, leftItaly materially and morally exhausted. After centuries of foreigndomination, of political and spiritual servitude, all the elementsof Italian culture had been gathered by the two generations of theRisorgimento into a new culture, which was much more an instrumentof combat, for the conquest of unity and independence, considered asthe necessary premises of national life, than the best soil for thespiritual growth of that life after the conquest. This new culture, inthe poets who had announced and formed it, Parini, Alfieri,[Pg 17] Foscolo,Leopardi, Manzoni, in its philosophers, Rosmini and Gioberti, and inits prophet and apostle, Mazzini, had forms and spirits, the value andmeaning of which by far transcended the importance of its immediatehistorical purpose; but through the difficulties and labors of thepractical effort, it reached the end of the period shorn of a good dealof what was deepest, most beautiful, nearest to the universal, in it.Italy in 1870 was very much like the sprinter who wins the race, butcollapses at the crossing of the line.

The culture of Italy had been for centuries oscillating betweenthe pursuit and discovery of certain universal values, which hadgradually become part of the common European culture (the Romanidea, the Christian idea, the main principles, æsthetic and moral,of the Renaissance), and the development of purely local, regionalcharacteristics. At the end of the Risorgimento, the links that hadkept Italian culture in constant contact with the rest of Europe werebroken, and on the other hand the local cultures found themselves,as it were, lost and submerged in the new political readjustment,threatened in their very existence by the new claim of loyalty advancedby a literary and abstract national ideal. The duties of Italianculture, clearer to us now than to the men who lived in the midst ofthose events, were then, on one side, to re-establish the connectionbetween Italian and European culture, and this time more by learningthan by teaching—and on the other[Pg 18] side to utilize the less particularelements of the regional cultures as a foundation for a real andconcrete 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 aroundherself and she is compelled to take notice of what had happened beyondher frontiers during the last two or three centuries. It is interestingto compare the characteristics of the other great nations of Europeas they appear to Italy during and after the Risorgimento. England,who had been a symbol of political liberty, a source of political andeconomic wisdom, reappears as a model of industrial development andat the same time as the proclaimer of a new creed to the world, thecreed of evolution, which after having infused a fresh spirit in thenatural sciences with Darwin, seems to promise a new interpretation ofhuman life, a new organization of science and of social thought, withSpencer. France, the mother of revolutions, the deliverer of the spiritof man from the shackles of divine and earthly tyranny, remains, ina vague and hazy fashion, through the many disappointments that herpolicies give to her Italian lovers during all this period, the samekind of inspiration that she has been ever since the Encyclopédie andthe Revolutions; but contributes to the new effort little more than herveristic fiction, in which art itself is reduced to a handmaid of thegoddess of the hour, biological and social science.

Germany had saturated with the romantic atmosphere of her poetry thepassionate struggle of the times, and she had captured a little bandof thoughtful patriots, among whom we find Croce's uncle, BertrandoSpaventa, with the fascination of her new metaphysics, in which theyfound the fulfilment of all the promises of Italian thought in theforegoing centuries; but after her victory over France, the same causethat makes French influence less vigorous, makes also German influenceless deep and less inspiring. A Germany who has like Faust sold herromantic and metaphysical soul, yields only a shadow of her greathistorical and philosophical culture of the eighteenth and of thefirst half of the nineteenth century, though a tremendously powerfulone, and such that for a long time it overawes the academic mind notof Italy only, but of the whole continent. A narrow and materialisticphilology, under the name of historical method, becomes the heir tothe humanistic tradition, and substitutes itself for every nativeimpulse, even in fields in which Italian thought had been master forcenturies, as in that of law: where it mercilessly destroys, of theideologies of the Risorgimento, not only that which was arbitrary andfanciful, and therefore destined to perish, but even that which throughthe subsequent course of history was to prove vital and sound. TheItalian school of international law, the new conception of the Law ofNations, for instance, which was the fruit of the Italian juridicaltradition during the[Pg 20] experiences of the Risorgimento, and which isthe more or less consciously accepted foundation of all the doctrinesof international relations striving for realization in our times, inno country and in no schools was so resolutely repudiated as in theItalian universities. And it could not have been otherwise, since thenew philology was as static and deterministic a doctrine, only morelogically and rigorously so, as the evolutionary positivism which wehad learnt from England.

The faults of Italian culture during this period are therefore thefaults 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 differentfrom those which had caused her own exhaustion, the other nations ofEurope were also spiritually exhausted. And yet it cannot be said thatfrom these very faults Italy did not draw some useful lessons. Theso-called historical method, which completely disregarded the greatforces of history, and made of the least significant historical datumaDing an sich in which the mind of the scholar seemed to find itsultimate object, proved in the end to be a salutary discipline asagainst the facile and enthusiastic generalizations of the historiansof the Risorgimento. Positivism, however barbarous and uncouth initself, was a powerful weapon for the destruction of the last remnantsof a more or less mythological metaphysics, and in that sense itafforded an example[Pg 21] of intellectual honesty; and at the same time itawakened the consciousness of the continuity of natural and spirituallife, announcing, though in a hasty and imperfect synthesis, whatevery philosophy of the future will have to be. And about the middleof the period which we are now considering, the only real contributionof Germany to European thought in the second half of the centurybecame known in Italy with the advent of Marxism, in which we founda new conception of history, in so far adequate to the true spiritand conditions of the times, as it afforded to blind social forces,striving for political expression, an interpretation of their needs anda rationalized programme of action.

The analogies between this general cultural atmosphere, and the presentconditions of the intellectual world in America, are, provided wedo not stress them too hard, so striking that I cannot refrain fromcalling the attention of the reader to them. I believe this will helphim to apply a good many of Croce's criticisms and ideas to tendenciesand problems with which he is thoroughly familiar. The most recentforms of American philosophy, pragmatism, instrumentalism, realism,are indigenous elaborations of that same English positivism andempiricism which was dominant in Italy a generation ago: the relationsbetween science and philosophy are seen in the same light in Americato-day as in Italy before the beginning of this century. And the twomost significant and far-reaching directions of research,[Pg 22] socialpsychology and psychoanalysis, branching out into every ramificationof social and moral and æsthetic thought, are based on assumptions,and lead to results, very similar to those of the Spencerian sociologyand of the Lombrosian theory of insanity and genius. Even in fictionAmerica is to-day trying her hand at verism, and in poetry, apartfrom a few marked exceptions, she is experimenting in the same spiritin which we began to follow, about the end of the period, the mostrecent fashions of Paris in verslibrism and decadentism. In academiccircles German philology has maintained its sway for a much longertime than in Europe, and the war has brought about more an emotionalthan an intellectual consciousness of the need of a vaster and deeperunderstanding of history. Finally, certain aspirations towards ancientand totally different systems of moral and æsthetic standards, embracedwith an enthusiasm that is akin to an act of faith—the hope todiscover a refuge and a consolation from the chaos of modernity in arestoration of classical or mediæval ideals—are American varietiesof an attitude of mind which found its satisfaction in Italy inpatterns which we drew after the models of Ruskinism and of Frenchtraditionalism.

On the whole, Italian culture was suffering from the effects of thesame delusion which accounts for the straits in which American cultureis to-day: that European culture could be assimilated through itsrepresentatives at one particular moment only, and[Pg 23] as if it were atthe surface of time, rather than by the only legitimate and fruitfulmethod, which is that of delving beneath that surface for the trulyfundamental contributions that each nation has made to the commonmind. Not one of the nations of Europe was then, or is now, at one ofthose turning points in the history of culture in which principles ofuniversal value are elaborated within the limits of a single nationalgroup. The only possible exception was that of Russia, sending out toan age-worn Europe a fresh message of human pity and Christian love ina succession of epic masterpieces; but the quality of the message wassuch as to affect the heart much more than the intellect, to produce anew and deeper feeling rather than a sounder knowledge.

Two great individual figures, however, dominate the whole period, andamong so many contrasting currents of thought and feeling, among thefluctuating fashions of the times, connect the new generations withthe traditional elements of Italian culture. That breadth of vision,that sense of the perspective of history, which was totally lacking inthe prevailing cosmopolitan thought, was a conspicuous characteristicof the work of a great critic, Francesco de Sanctis, and of a greatpoet, Giosuè Carducci. And what made the secret of the strength ofthe one as well as of the other, was their fidelity to the regionaltraditions from which they were issued, coupled with a power to investthem with a much broader significance than they had ever possessed.With De Sanctis,[Pg 24] the speculative trend of the Southern Italian mind,with Carducci the humanism of Florence and Tuscany, for the first timein history become real elements of a greater national consciousness.Neither the one nor the other was, moreover, without a knowledge of,and a taste for, foreign cultures; but what they gained from thesewere elements of more permanent value than the ones which attractedthe attention of the crowds, and they both succeeded in grafting thoseforeign elements on their native dispositions in such a way and withso little violence that they seemed to belong rightfully to them. Thisis true of what De Sanctis learnt from the idealistic philosophersof Germany, and particularly from Hegel, as well as of what Carducciacquired from the great poets and historians of the two previousgenerations in France, in England, and in Germany. Nor should we marvelat this, since by going deep enough or high enough into any of theEuropean cultures, it is always possible to find a level that is commonto all of them.

Francesco de Sanctis was not a philosopher in the strict meaningof the word; yet, among all the European critics of the nineteenthcentury, he is the only one from whose works it is possible to derivea consistent line of æsthetical thought. His education had been partlyphilosophical, of old Italian and modern German philosophy; and partlygrammatical and rhetorical, in those literary doctrines of the oldschool which embodied a secular experience, and in comparison[Pg 25] withwhich the modernscience of literature is ineffably shallow andpuerile. It was through a philosophical elaboration of those doctrines,and through a criticism of the intellectualistic æsthetics of Hegeland his followers, for whom art was the sensuous clothing of theconcept, that De Sanctis, guided by an unerring taste and by a uniquepower for discerning the essential and vital element in poetry, cameto his conception of form as not ana priori, a thing by itself anddifferent from the content, but something that is generated by thecontent itself when active in the mind of the artist. This is theprinciple which he had constantly in mind in approaching the concreteworks of poetry, and which enabled him to analyze and reproduce theterms of the spiritual experiences of which they are an expression.Thus hisEssays and hisHistory of Italian Literature, thoughin a sense the purest and most genuine kind of literary criticism,are at the same time a complete spiritual history of a people, as itreveals itself in its literary manifestations, such as no other countrypossesses. The immediate influence of his work was not as great as itought to have been: the generation of philologists who immediatelyfollowed him was unable to see in him more than a brilliant exponent ofwhat was then contemptuously called æsthetic criticism, and could neverforgive him for his apparent lack of method, due to the circumstancesof his life as an exile and a politician. It was only unwittingly, andthrough the[Pg 26] intermediary of a German disciple of De Sanctis, Gaspary,who wrote a standard handbook of Italian literature, that they came toaccept the greatest part of his interpretations, and followed the maindirections of his thought in their own researches.

Giosuè Carducci was a disciple of Parini and Alfieri, of Foscoloand Leopardi, and in a sense of all that lineage of Italian poets,beginning with Dante and Petrarch, for whom poetry was not less anarduous discipline for the attainment of a certain standard of formalbeauty, set down once and forever by the poets of the classicaltradition, than a moral and political function in the life of thenation. As his predecessors had been, he was not only a poet, butalso a student and historian of literature, of literature as theonly field in which that life had truly realized itself. But thoughhis contributions to the study of Italian literature were many andimportant, and the knowledge and taste which were the instruments ofhis art made of him an exquisite critic of poetry, yet what even inhis historical and critical prose attracts us most is his lyricalimagination, his poetry. And his poetry, on the other hand, is mainlythe poetry of the history and of the historical and poetical landscapeof Italy,—of an Italy which was to him not merely one among thenations of Europe, but the heir of Greece and of Rome, the cradle ofwestern civilization; not a land and a community limited in spaceand in time, or not that only, but an ideal of beauty, of freedom,of right, of a full and[Pg 27] harmonious life, which was Italian, as ithad been Greek and Roman, because it was universally human. In hisearly works, the contrast between this ideal and the actual conditionsof Italy in his times found expression in a strain of invectiveand satire, from which the poet lifted but rarely his soul to thecontemplation of the great deeds and thoughts of the past; of a pastwhich in some cases was very recent, as some of the men of the FrenchRevolution and of the Risorgimento were among his favourite heroes.But later, and especially in hisOdi Barbare, for which he adapted anew technique from the metres of ancient Greece, while he added manypersonal notes to his lyre, his historical inspiration became higherand deeper and purer, and Italy had in his poetry that which she hadlacked in all the course of her literature, a trueepos, though in alyrical form, of her secular life, from the fabulous kings and priestsof Etruria to that most legendary of all her heroes, Garibaldi.

The influence of Carducci, not a purely literary, but a moral andpolitical one, on the generation to which Croce belongs, can hardly beoverestimated; and Croce himself calls his own generationcarduccianaAnd the two other great poets that Italy has produced after him,D'Annunzio and Pascoli, were both disciples of Carducci at thebeginning of their careers. But the formation of their personalities,so widely divergent in their later developments, is contemporaneouswith what we have called the education[Pg 28] of Croce, and therefore outsidethe scope of this rapid review of the circumstances under which thateducation took place. The growth of the erotic-heroic poetry ofD'Annunzio and that of the idyllic-humanitarian poetry of Pascoli areno longer among those circumstances but rather products of the sameenvironment.

III. The Origins of His Thought

There are philosophers for whom it is possible, and relatively easy,to trace the roots of their speculations and of their systems in thethought of one or a few predecessors. The research of what we mightcall their sources, or more precisely of the terms in which certainproblems were handed down to them through the particular philosophicaltradition to which they belong, would probably not lead us very far inspace or very deep in time: it might be useful in such cases to prefacethe history of their thought by a brief summary of these immediateantecedents. But in the case of Benedetto Croce, such a summary oughtto extend, in relation to the problems in which he is or has beeninterested, to the whole range of the history of human thought. This isdue partly to his peculiar approach to the problems of philosophy, andpartly to his method of work.

Philosophy is to him neither a special science nor a specializedtechnique: not a discipline which requires a scholastic training, andwhich you can definitely acquire after a given number of years ofstudy,[Pg 29] but just what it was in the beginning: that love of wisdomwhich prompts every man to the exercise of his thinking powers. Theproblems of philosophy cannot be enumerated and defined, but that whichhappens to you, or your own doings, in your life, in your conduct, inyour work, in your study, is the perpetually renewed material for yourmeditation. Problems are not given to you from outside, as puzzles atwhich you might try your skill or duties imposed by a pedagogue: theyare your experience, and your philosophy is your conscious logicalreaction to them.

This unprofessional and broadly human view of philosophy was not,however, an obvious and spontaneous attitude of Croce's spirit, but alaborious conquest. In the years of his erudite and unphilosophicalyouth, at his first coming in contact with philosophy in the strictand technical meaning of the word, with philosophical treatises anddissertations, his attitude was one of profound respect for theprofessors of philosophy, "as I was persuaded," (he tells us in hisautobiographical notes), "that they, as specialists, should possessthat abstruse science, of whose sacred curtain I had hardly lifted afew folds, and I did not know that in a few years I should with wonderand irritation discover that most of them did not possess anything, noteven that very little which I, merely by my good will to understand,had succeeded in acquiring."[4] The fact is that these[Pg 30] professors andspecialists could hardly be termed philosophers at all, while Croce hadalready in himself that obscure and tormenting desire for intellectualclarity, which is the beginning of philosophy.

But in this initial ignorance, in his coming as if unaware to thegates of the temple, we shall find the reasons of Croce's method ofwork. When a given problem presents itself to him, not as a subject oflearned controversy, but as a spiritual necessity, he becomes suddenlyconscious of the duty of following the history of that particularproblem through centuries of thought. The first impulse may come froma mere attempt at understanding the terms under which the problempresents itself to him: a clarification of words. His mental habitsare, in fact, those of the conscientious and painstaking philologist,and he brings the method and discipline of the severest erudition intothe field of logic. There is no problem for him that is purely logical,in an abstract and formal sense; still less, purely psychological. Themere occasion for his speculation is sometimes offered, as we shallsee, by contemporary discussions, but he feels from the very beginningthat these discussions are merely concerned with the surface of things,are taking place on a plane of thought, mechanical 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 ofhis final identification of philosophy with history, he practicallyidentifies each problem with[Pg 31] its own history, by retracing, generallyin an inversely chronological order, the original meanings of termsand theories of which contemporary culture gave him only a pale anddistorted reflection.

But this intimate and vital contact with the past never leads himto that attitude of reaction, which our forefathers typified in thelaudator temporis acti, and which even to-day is so abundantlyexemplified by the scholar who, having laboriously climbed theheights of the thought of one man or of one epoch, feels himselfin the possession of final truth, and smiles contemptuously on thechildishness of the moderns. He is as much on his guard againstthe 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 blinddiscipleship, but of critical collaboration. The favourite process ofhis own thought might be defined as one of historical integration.

By emphasizing one aspect or another of Croce's philosophy, it ispossible, however, to connect him more particularly with one or anotherphilosopher. The name that is most frequently pronounced in thisconnection is that of Hegel, probably because Hegel stands, in the mindof the positivist and of the pragmatist, for a certain type of thought,much more ancient than Hegel himself and practically coextensive withthe history of philosophy, rather than for what Hegelianism actuallyis. The facile critic of Croce, who condemns and rejects him as aHegelian, would probably find it very hard to define the actual[Pg 32]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 expressionof a critical judgment. Croce himself has defined his attitude towardsHegel, and generally towards the philosophers of the past, in theconclusion of his examination of Hegel's thought: "I am, and I believeone has to be, Hegelian; but in the same sense in which any man whoto-day has a philosophical mind and culture, is and feels himself, atthe 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 thatno thinker, and no historical movement of thought, can have passedwithout fruit, without leaving behind an element of truth, which is aneither conscious or unconscious part of living and modern thought. AHegelian, in the meaning of a servile and bigoted follower, professingto accept every word of the master, or of a religious sectarian, whoconsiders dissension as a sin, no sane person wants to be, and no moreI. Hegel has discovered, as others have done, one phase of truth; andthis phase one has to recognize and defend: this is all. If this shallnot take place now, it matters little. 'The Idea is not in haste,' asHegel 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 availedourselves of his direct help, looking back on the history of thoughtwe shall have to proclaim[Pg 33] him, with many an expression of wonder, aforerunner."[5]

This last hypothesis describes what actually happened in the case ofanother among the ancestors of Croce's Philosophy of Mind. For twocenturies either unknown or misunderstood, Vico came into his own onlya few years ago, and mainly through the efforts of Croce himself. InVico, that is in Italy at the beginning of the eighteenth century,practically all the germs of the idealistic philosophy, and of thehistorical and critical culture of the nineteenth century, were alreadypresent, as a natural development of the philosophical and humanisticRenaissance. And it is through what, in Vichian style, we may call thediscovery of the true Vico, that Croce inserts himself in the centraltradition of Italian, and European, culture, and is saved from thedangers inherent in his catholic attitude towards the philosophers ofthe past, that of a material, mosaic-like eclecticism on one side, andthat of a metaphysical syncretism, such as led Hegel to the dialecticconstructions of his Philosophy of History, on the other.

The philosophy of the Renaissance, in which the fundamental impulsesthat are the soul of that movement find their clear and distinctexpression, had produced a new naturalism and a new spiritualismwith Giordano Bruno and Tomaso Campanella: that is, two widelydivergent views of reality, which however had sprung from a commonsource, the opposition[Pg 34] to that scholastic synthesis in which allthe transcendental elements of Greek and Roman philosophy had beengathered to the support of mediæval theology, in direct relation withthe mediæval description of the cosmos. There has probably never beenmade in the world, either before or after the Middle Ages, such aresolute and comprehensive attempt at an intellectual understandingof the moral and material universe, as the one that is the work ofmediæval philosophy: but that attempt had been made possible, and hadbrought definite results, only through the acceptation of the limitsof revealed truth, which, however freely accepted, proved in the endto be much more compelling than to the modern scientist are the freelyaccepted limits of external reality. Revealed truth could not be a mereobject of thought, as it carried within itself, under the mythologicaldisguise, its own metaphysics and its own ethics: a new principle, infact, a more absolute and intimate spirituality than had been knownto either the Greeks or the Romans, which attracted to itself all thekindred elements in ancient thought, and determined the essentialcharacteristics of mediæval speculation.

The discovery and establishment of this spiritual principle, as auniversal reality which transcends nature and the spirit of man,and which to this natural and human world is as a law dictated fromoutside and from above, is the message of the Middle Ages, not inpure philosophy only, but in religion and ethics, in science and inthe life of society. The Renaissance[Pg 35] is the beginning of our modernworld, inasmuch as it is, through the infinite variety of its artistic,social, religious, scientific manifestations, an effort to see thatsame spiritual principle no longer as a transcending reality, but asthe active, immanent, all-pervading soul of immediate reality, bothnatural and human. The Ptolemaic cosmography, which is the visible formof mediæval thought, a system of the finite universe, of which theEarth is the centre, and which leaves an infinite space for the seatof the only real, transcending existences, beyond the compass of theheavenly spheres, and as if it were outside itself, loses its hold onthe imagination, and therefore on the conscience of men, long beforeCopernicus and Galileo read in the skies a new system of an infiniteuniverse, within which, or nowhere, the divine principle must live andwork.

The impulse towards the identification of the spirit with nature, onone side, and with man on the other, had been at work in Italian lifeand thought all through the Renaissance; but it is only at the end ofthat miraculous spring of Western civilization, between the close ofthe sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, that itexpresses itself in the philosophies of Bruno and Campanella. Brunopresents himself as an expounder and defender of Copernican astronomy,and Campanella writes the apology of Galileo. And to each of them thescientific discoveries are much more than mere helps and suggestionsfor metaphysical speculation; they are the revelation,[Pg 36] in one field ofhuman thought, of a new logic which has to be recognized, in one formor another, as the fundamental principle of modern civilization.

Both in Bruno and Campanella, inert remnants of the ancient andmediæval logic are still part of the structure in which their newintuitions try to express themselves; but such remnants are to be metwith even in much later philosophers, and constantly reappear, asblind spots in the active process of thought, in the whole historyof European philosophy down to our days. What is significant of eachthinker, what marks him as the legitimate interpreter of the deepestspiritual life of his times, is not his system as a whole, but theparticular new intuition on which in each case the system is founded:in Bruno, the conception of an infinite universe, and of the infinitelife of God in the universe; in Campanella, the affirmation of thevalue of human experience and human consciousness, to which God ispresentper tactum intrinsecum, intrinsically, and in which knowingand being coincide.

The two main directions of modern thought, or rather of all humanthought, are thus represented in the naturalism of Bruno and in thespiritualism of Campanella, at the conclusion of the Renaissance,respectively prefiguring the pantheism of Spinoza and the rationalismof Descartes, that is, the two systems through which similarconceptions became active and effective in all subsequent developmentsof European philosophy. And it is useful to recall[Pg 37] their names asan introduction to the exposition of the ideas of a modern Italianphilosopher, because we are to-day only too prone to identify certainforms of common European thought, originating from Greece and fromItaly, with what was only their last expression in the great idealisticmovement in Germany in the nineteenth century; where Bruno and Spinozareappear in Schelling, and Campanella and Descartes, through theintermediary of the English thinkers of the eighteenth century, in Kantand Hegel.

I am not trying to establish an Italian pedigree for the kind ofphilosophy to which Croce belongs: nowhere are national distinctions sofutile as in the history of thought. But the Italy of the Renaissanceshares with India and with Greece the purely material privilege ofhaving given birth to a vision of the world and its problems, which isnational only in the sense that it was elaborated for a certain time atleast by minds belonging to a single nation. The value of that vision,however, does not reside in any tribal or national characteristic, butin those elements of universality, which made of the Italian cultureof the Renaissance, and of its inherent logic, the basis of all modernEuropean culture. What can still be recognized as peculiarly Italian,or French, or English, or German in the thought of modern philosophers,is not that phase of truth, which may be present in it, but the elementof prejudice, of crowd-mindedness, of spiritual inertia, which even thegreatest among them have in common with their weaker brothers.

In Bruno and Campanella we find an interest in certain problems ofthought, which we may call either religious or, more technically,ontological: the problems of the relations of being and knowing. InVico, who is infinitely nearer to Croce in intellectual temper, thecentre of interest is shifted. Vico is apparently satisfied withCatholicism as a religion; and he spends all his efforts in creatinga philosophy out of the purely humanistic and historical side ofRenaissance culture. And yet, long before Kant'sProlegomena, heforesees the necessity of the new metaphysics being the metaphysics,as he says, of human ideas, and his theory of knowledge is founded ona principle which bears an external resemblance to certain aspects ofpragmatism, but is in reality of a quite different, and much deeper,character: that of the interchangeability of thefactum with theverum, of that which we make with that which we know. It was acommonplace of the schools that perfect science is to be found in Godonly who is the author of all things: Vico transfers this logicalformula from God to man, and applies it, in the first stage of histhought, to mathematics, which appears to him as of man's ownmaking,in a narrow and abstract sense, and later to the whole world of historyand human thought and action, which, in a much truer and broader sense,ismade by man.

Vico was brought to this second and final form of his theory ofknowledge by his studies on the history of law, of religion, oflanguage and poetry: his philosophy[Pg 39] is essentially a philosophy ofthe moral sciences, of philology in its widest meaning. And the wholeof his speculation, in his Scienza Nuova takes the shape of an enquiryinto the origins and development of human society: not essentially ofa sociology, an empirical and inductive science of man (though thisaspect is undoubtedly also present in his mind), but rather, through"the unity of the human spirit that informs and gives life to thisworld of nations," of an ideal and eternal history of mankind, aphilosophy of the human mind.

A contemporary and an antagonist of Descartes, Vico is one of the lastamong European philosophers to embrace practically the whole rangeof contemporary culture. But while Descartes lays the foundationsof his theory of knowledge on the certainty of mathematical method,mistrusting the imperfection and vagueness of any other form ofscience, Vico is enabled by his intimate contact with rhetoricand history, with thatphilology which had been the soul of theintellectual life of the Renaissance, and which through the eruditionof his century was preparing the historical consciousness of thefollowing one, to anticipate the general principles of idealisticphilosophy and, on the theories of art, of language, of law, ofreligion, as well as on a large number of particular historicalproblems, the general development of subsequent European thought.

At a later stage in our exposition, we shall examine in greater detailthe indebtedness of Croce to Vico,[Pg 40] especially as regards the theoryof art and language; but the similarities of circumstance and oftemperament between the two philosophers are already apparent. BothVico and Croce came to philosophy through erudition and philology; andin Croce as well as in Vico, the fundamental philosophic attitude,their theory of knowledge, their idealism (what in the case of Crocehas been called his Hegelism), is the intrinsic and necessary logic ofthe same humanistic tradition, the natural outcome of the centeringof their intellectual interests on the history of the human spiritrather than on the mathematical or natural sciences. It is only afterDescartes and Vico, and through the independent progress of scientificthought in the last two centuries (during the Renaissance, science isconstantly in contact with philology, and there is no scientist whois not also a humanist)—that the two divergent attitudes of mindwhich we have seen exemplified in Bruno and Campanella, naturalism andspiritualism, are finally divorced from each other, and respectivelylinked with the scientific or with the historical aspect of modernEuropean culture. Rationalism, intellectualism, positivism, pragmatism,on one side, are the more and more rarefied logics of science, inits progressive estrangement from the humanities; and because ofthe increasing prestige of scientific thought, we see them makingconstant inroads even in the fields of the historical and philologicaldisciplines. Idealism, on the other side, represents in its manyforms the[Pg 41] central tradition of European culture, and is heir to thereligious thought of the Middle Ages as well as to the humanism ofthe Renaissance; but in many of its exponents, and to my mind, evenin some aspects of Croce's philosophy, it suffers from that samecondition of things which is the cause of the poverty and narrownessof the so-called scientific philosophies: from that inability tograsp both nature and the spirit of man, the world of science andthe world of history, which is a characteristic of our times. Therecurrence of the realistic position, after every great affirmationof idealistic philosophy, is certainly not the mere recurrence oferror, the obstinate permanence of human folly after the pronouncementsof wisdom, but rather the restatement of a logical exigency whichcannot be entirely satisfied and disposed of by any of the idealisticsolutions of the problem of reality. Idealism and realism in modernphilosophy are two distinct and divergent elaborations of differentfields of modern culture: that unity of the intellectual vision, whichis perfect, within its accepted limitations, in mediæval philosophy,and which is never entirely lost sight of in the thought of theRenaissance, is the goal towards which both realism and idealismcontinually tend, but which will not be reached by either, until thedisiecta membra of our intellectual consciousness will be broughttogether through a higher synthesis than the one from which they fellapart at the end of the Renaissance.

We are now in a position to understand why it would be vain to lookin the work of Croce for either an organized synthesis of scientificthought, understood as a means through which the mind of man grasps thereality of nature, or a system of metaphysics attempting to explainthe facts of our human life by reference to an order of superhuman andsupernatural realities. These are two types of philosophy, a criticismof which is implicit in every step of Croce's philosophical career,as well as in the quality of his philosophical ancestry. But in theirplace we shall find a series of meditations on the problems of thehuman spirit in its actual historical development; on the distinctionsand inter-relations of the various forms of spiritual activity, notas they appear, in a purely abstract and external consideration, tothe eye of the psychologist, but as they reveal themselves in theintimacy of those spiritual and historical processes, in which mancreates at the same time his own being and his own truth. As we havestated already, the philosophy of Croce is essentially a philosophy ofthe humanistic tradition, of that Italian and European tradition theconsciousness of which seems to be fast disappearing even among thosewho consider themselves as its exponents and defenders; and which inhis thought not only justifies and understands itself, but brings thatjustification and that understanding to a greater depth, to a morecomprehensive clarity, than it ever reached during the many centuriesof its existence.

PART FIRST

FROM PHILOLOGY TO PHILOSOPHY

(1893-1899)

I. HISTORY AS ART

Croce's first philosophical essay—Is history an art or a science?—Theessence of art—History as the representation of reality, andtherefore, art—The distinction between art and science—A tentativedefinition of history.

Croce's first philosophical essay is a short memoir,La Storia ridottasotto il concetto generale dell' Arte, which he read to the AccademiaPontaniana of Naples in March, 1893. In his autobiographical notes,Croce tells us that this memoir was sketched by him one evening inFebruary or March of the same year, "after a whole day of intensemeditation."[1] But the reader cannot help feeling that those fewpages are very far from being an improvisation; and this, not onlybecause of the ease with which the author finds his way among theliterature of his subject, but especially because one realizes thatonly a discipline so constant and so severe as to become a kind ofsecond nature could give him that sure grasp of the essentials of hisproblem, which he shows from the very beginning of his speculation.The majority of historians and philologists, when they turn theirattention to what Croce calls the logic of their discipline, are apt totrust themselves exclusively to their[Pg 46] immediate experience of theirwork, and to disregard the very obvious fact that an inquiry into thegeneral principles of a certain branch of knowledge is, and cannotbe anything but, philosophy: they are therefore either unwilling orunable to follow the implications of that logic on to their ultimateconsequences, as this operation would inevitably lead them away fromtheir own safe and solid ground into a discussion of unfamiliarconcepts and ideas. They seem to perceive but dimly that the problemsof that logic have been intimately connected with the whole developmentof philosophical thought from the Sophists to our day; and thereforeeven when they go back to philosophical authorities in their treatmentof these problems, when they quote Plato or Aristotle, or Leibnitz orHegel, they are content with mere fragments, arbitrarily understood,unconnected with the general body of thought from which they derivetheir meaning. The result is, at best, a futile rediscovery of truthsand truisms which have their place in the history of thought, but aremeaningless in their modern context. An examination of the greatestpart of the methodological literature of the last fifty years, both inEurope and in America, would easily bear out this contention: that itis hard to find a more shallow and imcompetent philosophy than that ofthe average historian and critic.

What saved Croce from the academic weakness[Pg 47] which seems to becongenital to this kind of lucubrations was, besides the native temperof his mind, an instinctive realization of the true philosophicalimport of the problems involved. The question, whether History is anart or a science, had been a favourite one with the generation to whichCroce's masters belonged; and it was really threatening to become anendless, insoluble one, since no attempt was ever made to solve itby the only method which could give positive results, that is, byan accurate definition of the concepts of both art and science. Themost common answer to it, and the one that most clearly proved theconfused state of mind of those who formulated it, was that historywas at the same time a science and an art. The traditional humanisticview, which considered history as one of the arts, and to which theinclusion of Clio in the college of the Muses bears witness, found butlittle favour in a time which was entirely under the domination of thepseudo-scientific philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and could thereforehardly admit of any form of knowledge which was not scientificknowledge. The third solution, history as a science, was in factthe most usually accepted one, being but one aspect of that generaltendency of the age, superficial and uncritical, through which allforms of knowledge were striving hard to assimilate themselves to themathematical and natural sciences. This tendency which was presentin all fields of philology, manifested itself[Pg 48] in history either inthe attempt to transform history into sociology, and to substitute asystem of institutional schemes or of so-called general laws for theactual historical processes, or in the raising of the usual canons andcriteria of historical method, that is, of a collection of maxims andprecepts for the proper handling of sources, documents, and monuments,to the dignity of a supposititious science. It is characteristic ofCroce, that he did not directly attack the English and French andItalian sociologism which was so popular in his day: to a mind whichhad received its first logical training at the hands of a Thomisticschoolmaster, and had been introduced to modern philosophy throughLabriola's Herbartism, the logic of the average sociologist was soabhorrent in its barbarity, that it did not even afford him a startingpoint for his own criticism. The fallacy of sociologism is made evidentin the course of the discussion, but rather by implication than througha direct animadversion. He chose his own adversary among the exponentsof the other form of the same error, among the German critics, whoseideas were more clearly defined and logically more consistent.

Their main position can be stated in a few words: history is a scienceand not an art, because its aim is not to give æsthetic pleasure, butknowledge. The premises of this formula are a hedonistic conception ofart, and the identification of all forms of knowledge with science:that is, a too narrow definition[Pg 49] of art, and a too broad definition ofscience. Croce's demonstration takes the form of a rigorous syllogism:he defines the concept of art and the concept of science, the twodefinitions forming so to speak the two horns of a dilemma; history isshown by its own definition to be included in the definition of art,and the only remaining question is that of the distinction, within thesame concept, between art in the strict sense and history.

The most important part of this demonstration is that which concernsart. Croce's object was to discover the nature of history, but his realachievement in his first essay was that of stating the æsthetic problemin its true terms. His opinions about history and about science weredestined to undergo many changes in the further development of histhought; but his whole theory of æsthetics is already virtually presentin these few pages about art and the Beautiful.

"Art is anactivity aiming at the production of the Beautiful."[2]A purely psychological doctrine of æsthetics, which considers not artas an activity, but the objects of art as a collection of stimuli, adoctrine of æsthetic appreciation rather than of æsthetic creation, ofthe land that has flourished in Germany and in England during the lasttwenty years, especially in the field of the graphic and plastic arts,will therefore be incapable of even grasping that which is the specificsubject of æsthetics. But Croce does not[Pg 50] lose his time in attackingthe psychologists. The error of their ways has its philosophicalexpression in Sensualism and in Formalism, which he summarily dismissestogether with Rationalism or Abstract Idealism: the Beautiful aspleasure, the Beautiful as a system of formal relations, the Beautifulas abstractly one with the Good and the True. The fourth solution ofthe problem of the Beautiful, which he accepts, is that of the ConcreteIdealism of Hegel and Hartmann: the Beautiful asexpression, as thesensuous manifestation of the ideal. But Croce was guided by his Latinmoderation (and probably also helped by his, at the time, insufficientunderstanding of German Idealism) to give to this formula not theintellectualistic interpretation which rightly belongs to it, but thevery simple meaning of an adequate and efficacious representation ofreality. The difference between this conception of Art—as an activityaiming at the representation of reality—and the one that we shall findin Croce's later elaborations of his æsthetic theory, does not lie inthe conception itself, but in its context of general thought. Here heis still working under the common-sense assumption of a double reality,of being and of thought, and this explains why he still speaks of formand content, and why he still admits of a category of Beauty of natureside by side with artistic Beauty. Later, the relation between formand content will transform itself into that of the æsthetic activitywith the other forms of spiritual activity; but even such a momentouschange[Pg 51] in the foundations of his theory does but slightly impair thesubstantial truth of the words in which he first expressed it: "Anobject is either beautiful or ugly according to the category throughwhich we perceive it. Art is a category of apperception, and in art,the whole of natural and human reality—which is either beautiful orugly according to its various aspects—becomes beautiful because it isperceived as reality in general, which we want to see fully expressed.Every character, or action, or object, 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 lessperfection. Caliban is a monster in reality, but no longer a monsteras an artistic creation."[3] As to natural Beauty, Croce observesthat it is not inanimate, as Hegel and his followers would have it,but animated by the spirit of the beholder, and its contemplation istherefore a kind of artistic creation:[4] but this observation, inwhich the later doctrine is present in germ, is set forth timidly ina note, and remains for the moment sterile and as if incapable ableof yielding its obvious logical results. If it were admitted thathistory is a representation of reality, its inclusion in the conceptof art would be obvious. But the adverse contention is that history isa scientific study of reality, or to use Bernheim's definition, thescience of the development of men in their activity as social beings.Croce's answer[Pg 52] is that history is not a science, because history isconstantly concerned with the exposition of particular facts, and notwith the formation of concepts, which is the proper sphere of science.There may be a science or philosophy of history, investigating thephilosophical problems connected with the facts of history, but sucha science or philosophy, which cannot be distinguished as a separateorganism from the philosophy of reality as a whole, is not history.History does not elaborate concepts, but reproduces reality in itsconcreteness: it is therefore not science but art.

Sociology, on the other hand, which renounces the concreteness ofhistory in the quest for the general laws of human development,is neither art nor science. When compared with the concepts orlaws of science, the laws of sociology appear as vague and emptygeneralizations, and sometimes as mere pseudo-scientific enunciationsof contemporary social and political ideologies. The sociology whichCroce had in mind in his criticism was, in substance, because of thefallacy of its logical premises, either inferior science or poorphilosophy; but because of the uncertainty of his own idea of therelations between science and philosophy, it was easier for him toreject it than to define it. His reaction was the instinctive one ofa sound logical organism against a mental hybrid. He was certain thatsociology, whatever else it might have been, was not history.

This part of Croce's argument is undoubtedly the[Pg 53] weakest. Hisconception of science was inadequate, and his discussion of therelations of history with science suffered from this inadequacy: theproblem which he had attacked could not be solved at this stage ofhis speculation. While his æsthetics was contained in germ in hisconception of art, his logic was not even adumbrated in his conceptionof science. In fact, the only real function of the latter was to markthe limits of the former: "In the presence of an object, human mind canperform but two operations of knowledge. It can ask itself: what isit?, and it can represent to itself that object in its concreteness.It can wish to understand it, or merely to contemplate it. It cansubmit it to a scientific elaboration, or to what we are wont to callan 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."[5]

This distinction is the old Platonic one betweenlogos andmythos;a distinction that appears in one form or another in practicallyevery system of philosophy, but the true import of which has neverbeen completely grasped before Vico. From Vico Croce quotes in thisconnection the following passage: "Metaphysics abstracts the mind fromthe senses, the poetical faculty must submerge the whole mind in thesenses; metaphysics lifts itself above the universal, the poeticalfaculty must plunge itself in the[Pg 54] particulars."[6] This quotationshows how decisive was Vico's influence in the determination of themain theses of Croce's æsthetics: of which we already find here thethree fundamental ones, that is, the recognition of art, or theæsthetic activity, as one of the fundamental forms of knowledge; thedistinction of the æsthetic activity from, and its opposition to, thelogical activity; and, finally, the exclusion of any other form ofknowledge besides the æsthetic and the logical, which exhausts thewhole of man's theoretical activity.

The rest of this particular discussion is not as fruitful or asinteresting. Having included history in the concept of art, Croceproceeds to draw a distinction between art in the strict sense, whichis a representation of imaginary or merely possible reality, andhistory, which represents that portion of reality which has actuallyhappened. His final definition of history is: "That kind of artisticproduction the object of which is to represent that which has reallyhappened."[7] The value of this definition is what we might call avalue of reaction against the pseudo-scientific sociology of his day:it consists in the emphasis laid on the concreteness and individualityof 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 inhistory—a conceptual element totally different from[Pg 55] the conceptsof the sciences, which were all that he could then see outside theæsthetic activity in human knowledge. In a preface to a reprint of hisearly philosophical essays, written twenty-five years later, Croceexplained the conditions which prevented him from perceiving the newproblem at once, in a page of admirable self-criticism: "Why did I notperceive 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 violentlyrejected the weight of sensism and sociologism, and I could breathe.And in my culture at that time the impulses towards that other needwere lacking; because neither my scholastic logic nor Labriola'sHerbartism opened my mind to a distinction between the concepts of thesciences and the speculative concept; and De Sanctis, entirely givento the criticism of poetry, gave little attention to logical problems.The authority of my first masters of philosophy induced me, in regardto the problems which I had not experienced in myself, to contentmyself with temporary formulas and solutions, which attracted methrough some aspects of truth, and to be satisfied with an imaginationof the Ideal above the real, and of the world of Concepts above theworld of representations. By this separation, by this collocation inthe Empyrean, it seemed to me that I could better attest my reverencefor concepts and ideals, which positivists and evolutionists weredragging in the mud, or lowering to the status of superstitions andhallucinations. Now,[Pg 56] running again through my pages, it is notpossible for me to think those transcendental doctrines again, notbecause I thought them in the past, and what is past is past, but, onthe contrary, because I did not truly think them even then, but onlyreceived them or imagined them, so that what I can think now is onlythe way in which, then, I was brought to imagine them, and to believethat I thought them."[8]

II. ON LITERARY CRITICISM

The problem of literary criticism—The three phases: exposition,valuation, history—Æsthetic judgment and history of art: the exigencyof a new Æsthetics—The place of Æsthetics in Croce's thought—Moraland logical preoccupations—Croce and Spaventa.

At the end of the following year (1894), Croce interrupted again thesteady flow of his erudite production with the publication of a littlebook,La Critica Letteraria: questioni teoriche, which was theoutcome of a discussion he had had during the summer with a friend, aprofessor of philosophy. As the net result of his first philosophicaleffort had been the conquest of a clearer conception of art, it wasnatural that he should proceed to investigate the relations betweenhistory and the subject-matter of history in that field in which hefelt he had already been able to find some light. The general problemof the nature of history, of which he had seen but one aspect, was setaside for the moment, giving way to a close examination of the methodsof historical thought in the study of literature.

Only a few of the conclusions of this particular research were destinedto have any kind of permanency in Croce's theories; but it is usefulto recall them, not only as a step in the development of his thought,but as representing a marked progress in that conception[Pg 58] of literarycriticism which is still predominant wherever the influence of thatthought has not yet been felt. Croce submitted that conception to aprocess similar to what a French critic calls a disassociation ofideas, trying to establish which can be said to be the essentialoperations of literary criticism, and the relations between these andthe various kinds of possible works on literary material. Given thismethod, which is that of abstract classification, and having approachedhis problem through criticism itself instead of starting from the otherend and deducing the concept of criticism from the concept of artand literature, he was bound to reach a number of abstract concepts,apparently irreducible to each other, and the fundamental unity ofwhich he could only later affirm through the general progress of histheory of æsthetics.

Literary criticism, which until fifty or sixty years ago, stood onlyfor the judgment and valuation of literary works, to-day usuallyincludes, beside the æsthetic valuation, the study of the historicaldevelopment, the edition and comment of the text, the biography ofthe author, the exposition of the work itself, the æsthetic theoryof literature, and so on; in fact, every kind of conceivable workon literature. The danger of this extension of meaning lies in thefacility with which we are led to believe that many things, when calledwith one name, are really one thing: we think of literary criticism asof the synthesis of all the above-mentioned operations—a[Pg 59] synthesiswhich, as Croce observes, when it exists cannot be due to anybody butthe printer. Or, again, we may consider that one or another of thoseoperations is the true aim of literary criticism—and to that one wesubordinate all the others, as merely subservient to the particularaim we have in sight. This is the origin of the variousschools ofcriticism—æsthetic, historical, psychological—each of which believesitself to be in possession of the only legitimate method. But if wesubordinate the history of a work to its æsthetic valuation, we denythe independence and intrinsic importance of history; if we subordinatethe æsthetic valuation to the historical consideration, we make ofthe former a useless accessory of the latter; if we subordinate thebiography of the author to the historical explanation of the work,we destroy the importance of biography, which, though useful in acertain sense to the explanation of the work, is in itself "nothingbut the history of the development of a moral personality."[1] Infact, the unity of literary criticism lies not in its aim, but inits subject-matter: what we mean by literary criticism is "a seriesof particular operations having independent aims, without any otherconnection than that of the material employed in each of them."[2]Croce does not deny the possibility of using the results of one ofthese operations for the purposes of another, but this does not changethe nature of either: "the spirit of man is not divided into smallcompartments: all our[Pg 60] experience helps us in whatever work we aredoing. To understand Petrarch's poetry, it is useful either to be orto have been in love; but it doesn't follow that to make love and tounderstand that poetry are one and the same thing."[3]

The study of the principles of literature does not belong to literarycriticism, but to Æsthetics; or, to use Vico's distinction, not toPhilology but to Philosophy. Textual criticism, and interpretativecomment, are preliminaries of literary criticism, which begins onlywith the contemplation or æsthetic enjoyment of literature: that is,with that operation of reading which is made possible through theestablishment of a correct text, and by the help, when needed, of aconvenient commentary. In literary criticism proper Croce distinguishesthree successive phases, or moments, answering respectively to thequestions: What have I read? What is the value of that which I haveread? Which is the genesis and fortune of this particular work? Thefirst is the exposition or description—which in itself is a workof art of which another work of art is the subject; the second, thevaluation or æsthetic judgment; the third, the history of the workunder consideration. Outside these three moments or phases, Croce doesnot admit of any other independent critical operation: the researchof 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[Pg 61] strict sense of the word can in turn be used as ahelp to each of the three main operations, but when it is exclusivelyconcerned with the general history of a language, it is no longer aliterary discipline; bibliography is a mere external element of thehistory of the work; the study of the content is a literary study onlyif it is pursued in relation with either the exposition, valuationor history of the work, that is, when the work itself is viewed asliterature, and not as a document for the purposes of another scienceor discipline; the biography of the author is an element of the genesisof the work, and therefore of its history, but its main interest ismoral and not literary.

It is easy to see that, however fruitful as a reaction to theprevailing confusion, this abstract partition was still veryartificial; but it was impossible for Croce to go beyond it, withthe help of the mechanical and unhistoric logic which was his onlyinstrument at that time. He still divided a fact from its genesis,and the fact and genesis from the judgment, and therefore it wasimpossible for him to see that the internal history of a workis itstrue exposition or characterization, and that such characterizationis one with the valuation. In regard to the valuation itself, heconsidered it to be purely subjective and relative, as he was unableto accept either Kant's theory of the objectivity of taste, because ofits intellectualism, or the psychologists' childish delusion of thepossibility of drawing a normal or standard taste from the averageof the æsthetic likings and[Pg 62] judgments of different communities anddifferent ages; and on the other hand he was still very far fromdiscovering that identity of the æsthetic judgment with the æstheticactivity, which was to be the foundation of his later doctrine.

The discussion that follows, on the relations between the æstheticjudgment and the history of a work of art, obviously suffers from theimpossibility of drawing useful consequences from a distinction ofpurely abstract concepts; from the fact that that which was Croce'sonly real discovery at the time, his conception of art, had not yetbeen thought out by him in the fulness of its relations with the otheractivities of the human spirit. As regards history, this little book isa step forward because it is a valid criticism of a confused and naïvestate of mind, in which these abstract concepts could help to introducesome sort of order and method; but, on the whole, though it clarifiesthe terms of the general problem, it does not bring it appreciablynearer to a solution.

Croce was, however, more or less consciously aware of this deficiency.In a longexcursus on De Sanctis, whose work he upheld as a modelof perfect literary criticism, he insisted on the importance of asound theory of art, such as De Sanctis undoubtedly possessed, as anessential part of the mental equipment of a literary critic; and thechief reproach that he addressed to his contemporaries in the field ofliterary studies in Italy, was that of neglecting those theoreticalproblems to which very little attention[Pg 63] had been paid in our countryafter the work of Vico. He pointed to the great development of æstheticstudies in Germany during the nineteenth century, and affirmed thenecessity of "dismissing every spirit of impatience and false pride,and of submitting oneself to the hard labour of extracting the essenceof the abundant literature created by the philosophic activity ofthe Germans around those problems."[4] His final words contained atthe same time an appeal and a programme of work: "There is a gooddeal to be expected from a work especially directed towards thesetwo points: to banish a series of concepts which have introducedthemselves in æsthetics, and which are entirely foreign to it, andwith their presence maintain an invincible confusion; and to free theconcept of art and of the Beautiful from the limits within which it hasbeen circumscribed by linguistic habits, acknowledging the intimateconnection between the so-called æsthetic and artistic facts and otherfacts of the life of the spirit."[5] That his attitude towards thelater German æsthetics was, from the very beginning, a critical one, isclearly shown by what immediately follows: "Working in this direction,I believe that we shall find ourselves, with a new consciousness andwith a wealth of observations gathered in the course of a century,to the point from which modern Æsthetics started, to the school ofLeibnitz and Wolff, and to Baumgarten's conception,"[6]—that is, toBaumgarten'sMeditations of[Pg 64] 1735, which the wordÆsthetica appearsfor the first time as the name of an independent philosophical caldiscipline, contrasted to Logic in the same sense in which the Greeksused to contrastaisthēta tonoēta, the facts of sensuous knowledgeto the facts of mental knowledge. Which means that Croce believed thescience of Æsthetics to be still in its infancy, and to require a greatcreative effort which was well worth making, both for the sake of thegeneral philosophical problems involved, and for the effects that adeeper view of those problems could not but have on the practical workof the literary critic and of the historian.

Through these first discussions, which at the time appeared to himmore as acts of personal liberation than as the beginning of aphilosophical career, Croce had really discovered his vocation. FromDe Sanctis he had learnt that "art is neither the work of reflectionand logic, nor the product of craft, but a pure and spontaneousformafantastica":[7] through his own experience of dry erudition, andthrough 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 hadnot been either willing or capable of doing: "of creating a philosophywhere he had given nothing but critical essays and delineations ofliterary history, and a new criticism, a new historiography, as aconsequence[Pg 65] of the philosophic deepening and systematization of histhought."[8]

But from Croce's published work at this time it would be easy togather the fallacious impression that his interest was an exclusivelyliterary one: that he proceeded to create a philosophy of literatureand art, and that only through the necessities of the system he wasled to the consideration of logical, economic and ethical facts.If that were true, with the exception of his theory of æsthetics,practically the whole of his philosophy would be opened to thereproach that he levelled against the greatest part of the Germanæsthetic theories of the nineteenth century: "of not being derivedfrom spontaneous and direct researches, but rather from the need offilling a compartment in a philosophical system."[9] A good many amongCroce's critics have been the victims of such a misconception of theactual genesis of his thought; and have discounted the importance ofany but his æsthetic theories, considering all the rest as a kind ofphilosophical by-product, with the result that they have not beenable properly to understand even that part of his work in which theywere interested. The typical example is given by those moralisticcritics of his æsthetics, who would have been spared many mistakes andinanities, if they had thought Croce's ethics and logic worth a littleconsideration. They would then have realized that their criticisms hadbeen anticipated and criticized[Pg 66] long before they had been uttered. Butperhaps it is asking too much of the average student of literature,once he has made the effort to think about the problems of art, thathe should also try to turn the light of his reason on the obscurepromptings of his moral consciousness; a suggestion which in many caseswould be violently rejected as the height of immorality.

We shall soon see from which source Croce derived his interest ineconomic problems and in the history of the practical activities ofman. Of the permanence of those moral preoccupations which had beenhis constant companions since his adolescence, we find the traces inhis autobiographical notes. In De Sanctis, whoseHistory of ItalianLiterature is as much a moral as an æsthetic history of the Italianpeople, he had the model of "a sound and simple morality, austerewithout exaggerations, and high without fanaticisms."[10] But the samedifficulties which prevented him from fully understanding De Sanctis'æsthetic principles, and from using them as a vivifying element in hisliterary work, made him also for a long time accept an inferior moralconception, that of Herbart's realism, "in which the moral ideal wasenergetically asserted, but as a thing of another world, as havingman under itself as brute matter, on which its stamp, more or lessmarked, might or might not be impressed." That is, he saw the moralideal in relation to the actual life[Pg 67] of man, in a position similarto that which concepts and ideals had for him in relation to realityas a whole: his moral abstractism and rigorism was the counterpart ofhis logic. "But that rigorism and abstractism was the way that I hadnecessarily to follow in order to understand the moral concreteness,and to lift it to the plane of a philosophical theory." "And thatrigorism, 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 theerrors of that now naturalistic, now mystic, Hegelianism, which througha hasty and often mythological dialectic, obliterated or weakened thedistinctions which are the life of the dialectic process."[11] WhatCroce lacked, in ethics as well as in æsthetics, was a new logic ortheory of knowledge, which would allow him to grasp the concept orthe ideal, that is the universal, in the concrete spiritual activity,that is in the particular and individual. Meanwhile, his own dealingwith abstract concepts, with purely formal universals, was to be, inrelation to the further developments of his logic, what his earlyliterary work, of a purely erudite character, had been in relationto his meditations on art and history: that personal experience, ofdifficulties and errors, without which no truth can ever be reached.

On the whole, Croce's position at that time was, as he himself definedit many years later, a[Pg 68] Platonic-Scholastic-Herbartian one; one that,in the moral held, had at least the advantage of being "invulnerableto the subtle menace of sensualism and decadentism,"[12] in theEuropean life and thought of the nineties, the acme of spiritualdistinction—an illusory reaction to and escape from the prevailingpositivism and determinism, of which in reality they were but thinlydisguised variations. Croce "never lost, even for an instant, the powerof discerning sensual refinement from spiritual finesse, erotic flightsfrom moral elevation, false heroism from sheer duty."[13] Here lies thefundamental difference, "of spiritual race," between him and his mostillustrious contemporary, Gabriele d'Annunzio, with whom he has morethan once been coupled by superficial critics. The character of theirrespective influence on the younger Italian generations, of D'Annunziobetween 1890 and 1900, and of Croce between 1900 and 1910, is more thansufficient evidence on this point.

It is something of a surprise to find that he had learnt practicallynothing from his uncle Bertrando Spaventa, who had been the mostpowerful representative of the Hegelian tradition in Italy. The centralproblem of Spaventa's speculation had been that of the relationsbetween knowing and being, of transcendence and immanence; and althoughit was only through a solution of this problem that Croce could hopefor progress in any of his particular philosophical researches, yethe could take no interest[Pg 69] in it when its discussion was earned onindependently of those problems of art, of moral life, of law andhistory, towards which his attention was naturally drawn. Crocehimself explains this lack of interest as due to his "unconsciousimmanentism": "as I met with no difficulty in conceiving the relationbetween thinking and being; if I had any difficulty, it was rather inconceiving a being severed from thought, or a thought severed frombeing."[14] But in this case he is probably seeing himself in thelight of his later experience: that difficulty did exist, and is thefundamental difficulty of his early speculation. Only, he could notsolve it by Spaventa's methods, which were those of a rigorous andformal logician, of a philosopher with a theological background, butonly through the elaboration of the materials of his own particularmoral and intellectual experience. At a later stage, and when he hadalready independently arrived at a position much more similar tothat of Spaventa, than he would ever have thought possible for him,the influence, if not of Spaventa himself, at least of that attitudetowards philosophy which had been his, came back to him through hisfriend Giovanni Gentile, whose mental temperament was much more akinto that of the old Neapolitan thinker, than Croce's ever was. Croce'sidealism (or Hegelianism) was at this time limited to what he hadunconsciously absorbed through De Sanctis' conception of art; but histheory of knowledge, not yet[Pg 70] logically unfolded, was still oscillatingbetween intellectualism and naturalism. He was decidedly anti-Hegelian,on the other hand, in his theory of history and in his generalconception of the world.

III. HISTORY AND ECONOMICS

A new interest: Marxism—Historical materialism—Criticism andinterpretation: a new historical canon—Marxian economics as anapplication of the hypothetic method—The concepts of science and theeconomic principle—Science and practice—Marxism and morality.

In April, 1895, his old professor at the University of Rome, AntonioLabriola, sent to Croce an essay on theCommunist Manifesto, in whichhe submitted to a critical examination the materialistic conception ofhistory elaborated during the fifty preceding years by Karl Marx andFriedrich Engels. Labriola had been probably the first professor in aEuropean University to take Historical Materialism as a subjectfor his academic lectures, his first course on Marxism having beendelivered in 1889. But Croce, who had given all his thoughts first tohis literary work, and then to his meditations on art and criticism,had not been as yet able to perceive the bearing of the new problemsdiscussed by his master on that problem of the nature of history whichhad been the subject of his first philosophical essay, and was to bethe centre of his later speculations. Labriola's little book came tohim at a moment when he had reached an impasse in the course of hisresearch, and it opened to him an entirely new field of investigations,it afforded him an escape towards[Pg 72] studies and meditations, atfirst apparently unrelated to his former ones, but the results ofwhich were destined to react vigorously on them. He plunged withyouthful enthusiasm into the literature not of Marxism and historicalmaterialism only, but of Economics in general. In the five followingyears, while he continued with unremitting energy his literary labours,now more clearly directed towards an understanding of the historicalproblems of Æsthetics, and a clarification of the concepts of aphilosophical science of Æsthetics, he published a series of criticalessays onMaterialismo storico ed economia marxistica, intended atthe same time as a defence and a rectification of Marx's doctrines.

We shall consider this phase of Croce's work from two distinct pointsof view—as a new individual experience, and as a stage in thedevelopment of his philosophy. For the first of them, we shall againleave the word to Croce himself: "That intercourse with the literatureof Marxism, and the eagerness with which for some time I followed thesocialistic press of Germany and Italy, stirred my whole being, andfor 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 havingfallen in love for the first time when no longer young, should observein himself the mysterious process of the new passion. At that fireI burnt also my abstract moralism, and I learnt that the course ofhistory has a right to drag and to crush the individual.[Pg 73] As I had notbeen disposed in my family circle to any fanaticism, and not even to aliking for the current and conventional liberalism of Italian politics... it seemed to me to breathe faith and hope in the vision of therebirth of mankind redeemed by labour and in labour."[1] This politicalenthusiasm did not last very long: it disappeared when that whichwas Croce's true nature, not practical but essentially theoretical,reasserted itself, by reducing this new experience into new conceptualforms; but without it, the whole of his philosophy of the practicalactivity would forever have been like a theory of vision in the mind ofa 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 ownlife; to these, a new element was added now, not as a mere object ofthought, but as a passionate and concrete experience.

The interpretation of the doctrine of historical materialism presenteda number of difficulties deriving partly from the form in which thedoctrine itself had originally appeared—not as a coherent theory,but as a series of pronouncements and observations scattered in avariety of writings, composed at a distance of years, and the aim ofwhich was rather political and polemical than scientific; and partlyfrom its association with remnants of old metaphysics, both in itsoriginators and in their followers. In Marx and Engels, as well aspractically in the[Pg 74] whole literature of Marxism, the emphasis beinglaid on the substantive rather than on the adjective, historicalmaterialism implied the adhesion to that metaphysical materialism whichwas one of the children of Hegelian metaphysics. What had been theIdea for Hegel, was the Economy of the new metaphysicians: the onlyreality, working beneath the surface of human consciousness, as anunder-structure beneath a merely apparent and illusory superstructure.Given this conception, it is easy to understand why historicalmaterialism appealed so strongly to positivists and evolutionists,who concealed a similar kind of metaphysics under their proclaimedcontempt for philosophy. The old philosophies of history had attemptedto reduce the sequence of history to a scheme of concepts, startingwith God, or Providence, or the Hegelian Idea: the new unconsciousmetaphysicians substituted for the old concepts that of Economy,or of Matter, or of Development and Evolution, from which all theparticular historical determinations could be deduced with not lesscertainty than from the old metaphysical entities. And from theirpredecessors they also borrowed those teleological tendencies whichare implicit in all metaphysics, attributing a will and an end totheir new God, be it called Progress or Matter, and trying to deducethe future course of history from the dialectic of the past. Hence thegrowth of a vast literature inquiring into the development of abstractsociological[Pg 75] schemes or of economic forms reduced to characteristicsof economic epochs, forcing the concrete materials of history intorigid conceptual frames; hence the naïve faith in the deduction ofsocial predeterminations, of which the most striking was the assertednecessity of the advent of socialism as the only logical outcome ofcapitalist society.

Croce, pursuing the analysis initiated by Labriola, began bydissociating what seemed to him to be the vital element in historicalmaterialism, from any intrusion of either Hegelian or positivisticmetaphysics. His criticism of historical materialism as a philosophyof history and, generally, of the possibility of constructingany philosophy of history, is the first resolute step towards ananti-metaphysical conception of philosophy. Whether by metaphysicsis meant the knowledge of another world of real essences, of thingsin themselves, beyond the objects of our immediate experience,or the creation of abstract concepts duplicating and falsifyingthe complex world of life, the whole trend of Croce's thoughtwill henceforward oppose any claim on the part of these spuriousphilosophies, mythological or pseudo-scientific, to furnish an adequateinterpretation of reality. Vico's metaphysics of human ideas, whichis no metaphysics at all, because it does not postulate the existenceof any reality beyond that of the spirit of man, will more and morebecome the model of Croce's own philosophy. That immanentism whichhe considers as one of the spontaneous attitudes[Pg 76] of his mind slowlyextricates itself from the ruins of his own transcendental logic,and shows itself impervious to the allurements of both Platonism andPositivism, of the ancient and the new myth.

Purged of its unessential philosophical associations, historicalmaterialism (or, more precisely, the economic interpretation ofhistory) appeared to Croce as nothing more than a new canon orcriterion of historical interpretation, fixing the attention of thehistorian on a mass of new data, the importance of which had not beenrecognized before. It was neither a new philosophy nor a new method:it could not be legitimately employed to draw conclusions on therelations between economic facts and the other facts of history, norto reduce history itself to the operation of a few abstract laws. Itwas a tendency of historical thought, coinciding with the manifestationof certain objective conditions of society (the industrial revolution)and their reflexes in political thought, by which the economic elementin social facts acquired a stronger relief than it had ever had in theconsciousness of man. And it seemed to point, both for the historianand for the philosopher, towards the existence of a fundamentalprinciple or form of human activity—economic activity, about thenature of which, and its relation with æsthetic, logic, and moralactivity, very little had been thought and written, besides what iscontained in the introductions to all classical manuals of politicaleconomy. While still insisting[Pg 77] that history is art, that is, therepresentation of individual happenings, Croce was thus implicitlybrought to admit of the importance of philosophy, that is, of the studyof the fundamental forms or categories of human activity, for thehistorian. His conception of history was undergoing a transformation ina direction similar to that towards which his conception of philosophywas moving.

When he passed from the consideration of the general theory to theexamination of more technical aspects of Marx's doctrines, the firstdifficulty which presented itself to him was that of the relationsbetween Marxian economics and pure economics, or general economicscience. The society whose economic life Marx had studied inDasKapital, was neither human society in general, nor any particularhistorical society, but a purely ideal and formal society deduced froma proposition assumed outside the fields of pure economics: that ofthe equivalence of value and labour. Starting from this postulate,Marx had proceeded to inquire into those processes of differentiationbetween the assumed standard and the actual prices of commodities in acapitalist society, by which labour itself acquires a price and becomesa commodity. It was a method of scientific analysis consisting inregarding a phenomenon not as it actually exists, but as it would beif one of its factors were altered, and in comparing the hypotheticalwith the real phenomenon, conceiving of the first as diverging fromthe second[Pg 78] which is postulated as fundamental, or the second asdiverging from the first, which is postulated in the same manner.It is only when the whole of Marxian economics is considered as theapplication of such a method, that the concepts of labour-value and ofsurplus-value acquire a definite and precise meaning: the descriptionof economic society as a pure working society (producing no goods whichcannot be increased by labour) must then be interpreted as a conceptof difference, or an instrument of elliptical comparison, as againstthe descriptions of actual economic society given by pure economics.Its positive value, not as an abstract hypothesis, but as a meansof knowledge, depends on the fact that such a society does actuallycoincide with certain aspects of historical capitalist society; thatthe equivalence of labour and value is not a purely imaginary fact, buta fact among other facts, empirically opposed, limited, and distortedby other facts. Having assumed this equivalence as a test for the studyof the social problem of labour, Marx's object was to show the specialway in which this problem is solved in a capitalist society. And thiswas the real justification for his employment of the hypotheticalmethod.

It is clear that Croce was infinitely more interested in what Marxhad actually accomplished, than in what he had intended to do. InMarx's own mind, the analysis of the conditions of capitalist societyled inevitably to the conclusion that a passage from[Pg 79] capitalism tosocialism was predetermined by the structure of capitalist societyitself. It is well known that the prevision assumed what claimed to bea strictly scientific character in the formulation of the law of thefall in the rate of profits: the gradual decrease of surplus-valuesaccompanying the increase in technical improvements, and automaticallyre-establishing the equivalence of labour and value. Croce offereda very convincing criticism of this law on Marx's own grounds, byshowing that it rested on a confusion between technical and economicfacts, thus affording a remarkable example of Marx's uncertainty of hisown method. It was clear that in this particular case Marx had beencarried away by his desire to reduce the metaphysical implications ofhis economic sociology to the status of an historical law. And Croce'scriticism was evidently intended both to deprive Marx's historicaldeterminism of one of its most powerful instruments, and to confirmhis own view of the method which gave validity and importance to sucheconomic speculations as Marx's were.

Marxian economics stood thus interpreted as comparative sociologicaleconomics, and by the definition Croce also defined the scope ofsociological science, and the nature of the logical processes whichit could legitimately employ. It was a considerable advance in thestudy of scientific concepts, as distinct from purely speculativeconcepts. But he still believed at the time, misled by the economists'discussions on[Pg 80] the nature of the economic principle, that pureeconomics and the philosophy of economics practically coincided; andas he had maintained the legitimacy of Marx's method against thecriticisms of the pure, or scientific, economists, he defended pureeconomics against Marx and his school, as the general science of theeconomic datum. But he was soon to understand that his own pointof view and that of the pure economists were widely divergent, andthat the methods of pure economics are in fact scientific and notphilosophical. In later years, when he came to regard the science ofeconomics as an empirical and mathematical science, Marxian economicsappeared 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 theparallel of non-Euclidean and classical geometry. Although he didnot reach this final position at the time, there is no doubt thathis experience of the actual scientific processes of economics freedhim from his allegiance to Herbartian logic, in which science andphilosophy were still formally undifferentiated, and led him graduallyto the distinction between the scientific and the speculative concept,of which the relation established between Marxian and pure economics isa tentative prefiguration.

But the most essential gain of his economic studies was in thedirection of the affirmation of the merely practical, or economic,principle, as one of the[Pg 81] irreducible forms of human activity, raisingthe concept of the Useful to the same level (logically speaking) atwhich those of the Beautiful, the True, and the Good had been kept bythe whole European philosophical tradition since Plato. He was hereactually elaborating not a scientific, but a speculative concept,though his approach to it was always by means of the discussionof particular problems, the solution of which implied a definiteview of the relations between the economic principle on one side,and respectively on the other side, the intellectual and the moralprinciple.

As regards the possibility of inferring practical programmes fromscientific principles, he objected that neither the desirable northe practicable are science. Science may be a legitimate means ofsimplifying problems, making it possible to distinguish in them whatcan be scientifically ascertained from what can only be partiallyknown; in the case of the Marxian law of the fall in the rate ofprofits, for instance, if such a law were proved to be scientificallycorrect, it could be said, under certain conditions that the endof capitalist society was a scientific certainty, though it wouldremain doubtful what would follow it. But logic is not life, and theappraisement of social programmes is a matter of empirical observationsand of practical convictions. The unconquerable indetermination ofsocial facts brings forth that element of dating in the actions ofpractical men, which is to will what inspiration is to expression,insight to intellect, in the poet and in the scientist.

Socialism could not be called a scientific programme, except in alimited and metaphorical sense, which was not a criticism of socialismitself, but of the bad logic of certain Socialists: the Marxianprogramme as such, Croce recognized as one of the noblest and boldest,and also one of those which obtain the greatest support from theobjective conditions of existing society. Having already denied thedependence of intellectual truth on economic fact, by criticisingthe metaphysics of historical materialism, he thus asserted now theautonomy of the economic from the logical principle.

On the other hand, he destroyed the legend of the intrinsic immoralityof Marxism, which was due to Marx's repeated assertions that the socialquestion is not a moral question, and to his sharp criticisms of classideals and hypocrisies. He pointed to the moral interest which hadguided Marx's political activity, and which could even be said to haveprompted the choice of the fundamental hypotheses of his economics.What Marx had called the impotence of morality was the futile attemptat apportioning praise or blame for the natural conditions of thesocial order. It is only when such conditions are no longer conceivedas necessary for the social order in general, but only for a stagein its history, and when new conditions appear that make it possibleto destroy them, that moral condemnation is justified and effective:to use another of Marx's phrases, morality condemns what history hasalready[Pg 83] condemned. This is as much as saying that the only realmoral problems, as all other problems of human life, are those thatpresent themselves under given historical circumstances, at a giventime; concrete, not abstract; and that moral judgments apply not tofacts or conditions, but to actions. The passage from such a concrete,or historical, view of morality, to a doctrine of moral relativityis a very easy one, but Marx's own views on this point, which henever deliberately expounded, are irrelevant to the substance of hisdoctrine. For his own part, Croce reasserted the value of Kantianethics, and the absoluteness of the moral ideal, as an ideal whichis not above and outside the spirit of man, but rather one of itsintrinsic forms or categories. And Marx's conclusions in regard to thefunction of morality in the social movement, and to the method for theeducation of the proletariat, though clashing with current prejudices,contain no contradiction of general ethical principles. But Marx'sinterest was not essentially an ethical one: the moralistic criticismsof Marx were similar to the puritanic criticisms of Machiavelli, andresolved themselves into a charge that neither the one nor the otherhad treated problems totally different from those which they hadactually attempted to clarify. While vindicating the importance ofMachiavelli in the history of the study of the economic activity ofman, Croce called Marx himself the Machiavelli of the labour movement,implicitly suggesting a similarity of both object and[Pg 84] method betweenIl Principe andDas Kapital, which is singularly illuminating.

The last essays of the book onMaterialismo Storico are two lettersto Professor Pareto "On the Economic Principle," written in 1900; butwith these we reach a time when Croce's thought was already organizingitself in the system of the philosophy of mind. In them we find asketch of the system in the form in which it appeared in the firstedition of theEstetica: that is, we already decidedly enter into thematurer phase of Croce's thought. We must here pause on the threshold,and looking back on the years of Croce's special interest in economicproblems, sum up the new elements that the study of these problems addsto his intellectual physiognomy: a more deliberately anti-metaphysicalattitude, a growing consciousness of the complexity of history and ofthe concreteness of moral life, a realization of the function of theeconomic activity, a progress in the analysis of scientific concepts,and therefore in the foundations of his logic—but, most important ofall, a continued practice of philosophical thought under the shape ofhistorical methodology. Apart from their interest as documents of thegrowth of his philosophy, Croce's studies have also a place in thehistory of social and economic thought, side by side with those ofLabriola and of Georges Sorel, as a significant episode in that Latincrisis of Marxism, the ultimate outcome of which are the theories ofFrench 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 ofphilosophy—A philosophy of mind—TheFilosofia della Spirito and theCritica—Other activities.

The salient feature of Croce's mind, fully displaying itself in thematurity of his work, is a power to follow different lines of thoughtand research, without either confusing the issues or losing sight ofthe deep underlying connections. For the average scholar, an incursioninto alien ground will generally mark the abandonment of his formerinterests; or, in the best hypothesis, the creation of a new mentalpersonality coexisting with the original one, but neither reacting onit nor being influenced by it. The reason is obvious: the substanceof each personality is a cross-section of the body of one discipline,which in its actual history, in its methods, associations and sphereof interest, touches the other one at very few points only, if at anyat all. The establishment of new relations between the two requiresa new personal elaboration, a complete individual mastery of thematerials and methods of each discipline. We are hardly aware of theindependence gained by even very closely related fields of researchthrough the specialists treatment of the last century: how each ofthem has developed, so to speak, a language[Pg 88] of its own, which has itsfoundation in the peculiar, and inevitable, terminology, but extendsfar beyond it into the logical structure of the specialist mind. Wehave more or less consciously built up a world (that is, an implicitconception of the world, a naïve philosophy) for the economist, onefor the biologist, one for the mathematician, one for the student ofliterature, and so on. The scholar with the dual personality livesalternatively in separate and self-contained worlds; but to melt thetwo images into a single one, is far beyond his power. In other cases,he will relate all the experiences legitimately belonging to onespecial world, to another one, probably to the one with which he wasfirst acquainted; but then we have those awkward hybrids, the economicsof the literary man, or the literature of the biologist, or the biologyof the economist; and the confusion is so apparent that it generallyreflects itself in the very quality of the terminology employed.

It was against this kind of confusion, against the transference of theconcepts of one science into another, which was the favourite deviceof positivism, that Croce continually reacted in his criticism ofcontemporary thought. He instinctively knew the value of distinctions,and also the value of unity; but he would never pay for unity at theexpense of the fine, precise, necessary distinctions. This explainswhy for a certain number of years he may have appeared as a manoccupied in the pursuit of two quite different and unconnected lines ofresearch:[Pg 89] his literary friends used to look on his economic studieswith wonder and distrust, as on a strange whim and a total waste oftime, while the economists more or less resented the intrusion of theoutsider. But it explains also why, when he finally attempted to giveshape to the conclusions he had reached in regard to one particulargroup of problems, his grasp of the essential unity and his power tobuild an inclusive and unspecialized conception of reality, were madevisible at once. There was no special problem of thought which could betreated apart from an either implicit or explicit view of the whole ofreality: there was no solution of any particular problem which wouldnot affect, and in turn be affected by, the solution of every otherproblem. Or, to say the same thing in different words, philosophy wasa system, not in the sense that a rigid logical scheme could onceand forever fit the ever moving stream of reality, but because it isimpossible to think the distinctions without the unity, or the unitywithout the distinctions. That which appears to us, psychologically,as the main characteristic of Croce's mind, transforms itself into theintrinsic logic of his system, in which the principles of unity and ofdistinction are, as we shall see, fundamental.

In the year 1899 Croce had been compelled to spend a good part ofhis time in a more or less practical activity in connection with theCentenary of the Neapolitan Republic of 1799, and it was only towardsthe end of that year that he could dedicate[Pg 90] himself entirely tothe work he had constantly had in mind since the publication of hisessays on literary criticism: the exposition of his concept of artin the fulness of its relations and determinations. It will be wellto let Croce himself give us an account of that decisive moment, ofthe ripening and gathering of his various speculations into theirfirst coherent and systematic expression. "When I started my work,and began to collect my scattered thoughts, I found myself extremelyignorant: the gaps multiplied themselves in my sight; those same thingsthat I thought I held well in my grasp wavered and became confused;unsuspected questions came forward asking for an answer; and duringfive months I read almost nothing, walked for hours and hours, spenthalf days and whole days lying on a couch, searching assiduously withinmyself, and putting down on paper notes and thoughts, each of whichwas a criticism of the other. This torment grew much worse, when inNovember I tried to set forth in a concise memoir the fundamentaltheses of Æsthetics, because, ten times at least, having carried mywork up to a certain point, I became aware of the necessity of takinga step which was not justified logically, and I started all over againin order to discover in the beginnings the obscurity or error which hadbrought me to that quandary; and, having rectified the error, againwent my way, and a little further I again stumbled into a similardifficulty. Only after six or seven more months was I able to[Pg 91] sendto the press that memoir in the form in which it has been printedunder the titleTesi fondamentali di un' Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale; arid and abstruse, but fromwhich, once I had finished it, I came out not only quite oriented inregard to the problems of the mind, but also with an awakened andsure understanding of almost all the principal problems about whichclassical philosophers have toiled: an understanding which cannot beacquired by merely reading their books, but only by repeating withinoneself, under the stimulus of life, their mental drama."[1] We areso used to see the intellectual worker surrounded and propped up bylibraries, laboratories, files, and statistics, that the sight of aman abandoning his books, giving himself up to what by all materialstandards must be classed as a state of idleness, in order to withdrawinto the intimacy of his own consciousness, there to find an answerto the problems of reality, cannot but strike us as incongruous andanachronistic. If we were frank about ourselves, we should confess thatour unbounded confidence in the purely material helps is merely a maskfor our deep-rooted scepticism, for our absolute lack of confidencein the power of reason. What we cannot hope to attain through ourindividual effort, we expect as the product of a great machine ofthought, in which man enters as a little wheel, accomplishing agiven function, as mechanical and[Pg 92] impersonal as the rest of themachine. We strive for objectivity, and believe in the automaticfabrication of truth. Through a false analogy with the methods of thenatural sciences, imperfectly understood, and assimilated to those ofindustrial production, we call this process scientific, and we pretendto despise what we fear, the testimony of our consciousness and thehardships of personal thought. Reason, the human reason, the ultimatesource of all knowledge, we pay lip homage to, but really put in thesame category as the obscure intuition of the mystic. Outside ourmechanical objectivity, we seem unable to see anything but an arbitrarysubjectivism, a capricious and empirical individuality.

But however incongruous and anachronistic it may appear to us, thereis little doubt that this method is the only philosophical method, themethod of philosophy in all times. Croce's originality consists merelyin having reasserted its validity in such sharp contrast to all thetendencies of the age, and to have shown that true objectivity belongsonly to the truth we discover within ourselves, when the eye of ourmind is not turned on the transient spectacle of our superficial life,but is reaching under it for that universal consciousness which isthe foundation of the individual one. There is no scholar who is asexacting and punctilious as Croce in the choice and elaboration of hismaterial—as conscious of the need of thoroughness and precision—asimpatient of any form of improvisation;[Pg 93] but he never forgets thatthe end of all his labours is merely that ofknowing himself, inthe spirit of the ancient oracle, by acquiring a direct, intimateexperience of the processes through which a mind of to-day has come tobe what is truly is; of making his own individual consciousness partakemore and more of that universality which alone is true consciousness,by liberating itself from all casual determinations, and becominghistorically acquainted with itself. It is easy to see how in such ageneral attitude the road to philosophy is also the road to history;and how both in philosophy and in history the final test must be notthat 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 conceived will be a philosophy of the humanspirit—Filosofia dello Spirito—or, as we, following the habits ofEnglish-speaking philosophers, shall tentatively call it, a philosophyof mind; the second, that the universality which the individual spiritdiscovers within itself, not being a static, immovable universality,but merely the form of its ever-changing, historical actuality,philosophy itself will be a continuous progress, and at no particularmoment will it be possible to define the thought of the philosopher asa completed system. As we cannot, however, in the small compass of thisbook, minutely follow all the successive modifications and accretionsof Croce's thought, we shall speak of the ten years[Pg 94] between 1900 and1910 as of the period in which the system of the philosophy of mindwas developed and determined, and we shall attempt in the followingchapters to give a general view of the system itself as it might haveappeared in 1910 to a conscientious student of all the works of Crocepublished during that interval of time.

TheTesi contained already the substance of theEstetica comescienza dell' espressione e linguistica generale which was completedin 1901 and published in 1902, and with which Croce definitely tookhis place in modern philosophy. The book is divided in two parts, theexposition of the theory and the history of the doctrine. But the twoparts are very closely related to each other, as the exposition alreadycriticises all the possible aspects of æsthetic theory, and the historymerely disposes the same criticisms in a chronological order, andlabels each of them with a name. This plan, with slight alterations, isthat of the successive volumes of theFilosofia dello Spirito: to thereader who is already acquainted with the history of philosophy, thehistorical character of the purely theoretical exposition is readilyapparent.

Soon after the publication of theEstetica, Croce began to considerhis book merely as a programme and a sketch which needed filling inwith further developments,—with the investigation of the other formsof human activity, which had been merely postulated in the study ofthe æsthetic activity; and with a wide cultural work, to be carriedon especially by[Pg 95] means of a review, through which his ideas shouldbe tested in immediate and constant relation with the problems ofcontemporary Italian and European thought. The enormous activity of thefollowing years falls easily into this rough division. On one hand wehave the completion of theFilosofia dello Spirito, with theLogicacome scienza del concetto puro, the first edition of which appearedin 1905 (Lineamenti di una Logica, etc.), and the second, deeplymodified by his meditations on the practical activity, in 1909, withtheFilosofia della Pratica: Economica ed Etica, written in 1908,but of which some parts had already been given in 1907 in the memoirRiduzione della filosofia del diritto alla filosofia dell' economia;and with the new and fuller formulation of his Æsthetics in a paperread to the International Congress of Philosophy in Heidelberg in 1908,onL'intuizione pura e il carattere lirico dell' arte. To these mustbe added the two monographs on Hegel (1906) and Vico (1910), which areat the same time an exposition of their philosophies and a restatementof Croce's own main positions, in so far as they coincided with thoseelements of truth which he still recognized as living in their thought.

On the other hand we have the publication of a bi-monthly review,LaCritica, the first number of which appeared in January, 1903, andwhich is still being published.La Critica announced itself as areview of literature, history and philosophy, but it differed fromall other publications in the same fields in two[Pg 96] main features: thefirst, that the number of its contributors was practically limited totwo, Croce himself, and his friend Giovanni Gentile, with whom he hadfirst been brought in contact through their common interest in Marxianstudies, and who followed for some years at least a line of thoughtwhich touched his own at many points; the second, that it imposed uponitself a very definite programme of work, each number containing anessay, or part of an essay, by Croce on some Italian writer of thepreceding half-century, and one by Gentile on the Italian philosophersof the same period, besides a number of reviews of new Italian andforeign books, and notes and comments on contemporary questions ofculture and moral life. In his own main work for theCritica,Croce was at the same time aiming at giving concrete examples of theapplication of æsthetic theory in the domain of literary criticism, andat clearing the ground for the work of the new generation, through anappraisement of the literary values of the preceding one. The generaltemper of the review is clearly expressed in the following wordsfrom the already so often quoted autobiographical notes: "The idealwhich I cherished was drawn not from my own personality, but from myvaried experience, because, having lived sufficiently in the academicworld to know both its virtues and its faults, and having at the sametime preserved a feeling of real life, and of literature and scienceas being born from it and renovating themselves in it,[Pg 97] I addressedmy censures and my polemics on one hand against dilettanti andunmethodical workers, on the other against the academicians resting intheir prejudices and idling with the externals of art and science."[2]

The greatest part of the writings contributed by Croce to theCriticaduring these years were later collected in volumes, of which howeveronly theProblemi d'Estetica (1910), containing, besides theHeidelberg lecture, a large number of essays both on the theory andhistory of Æsthetics, appeared before the end of the period we are nowconsidering. 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 ofClassici della filosofia moderna, inwhich he published his own translation of Hegel's Encyclopedia; andin 1909, of the collectionScrittori d' Italia, which is in the wayto becoming the standard corpus of Italian Literature. He took alsoa leading part in the editing of the same publisher'sBiblioteca dicultura moderna, which was enriched through his care and advice withreprints of rare works of southern Italian writers of the Risorgimentoand of the early years of the Unity, and with translations of booksrepresentative 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 generouscooperation,[Pg 98] extending from the friendly discussion of plans and ideasto the humble reading of proofs, with a host of friends and disciples,we have a fairly complete idea of the significance of Croce in thecultural life of young Italy. He very rapidly became something like aninstitution; he was hailed as the master and spiritual guide of thenew generation. His work and his example, the clarity of his thoughtand the rhythm of his steady, harmonious, powerful activity, were anelement not of the limited life of the intellectual laboratory only,but of the spiritual life of the nation.

II. INTUITION AND EXPRESSION [1]

The four grades of spiritual activity—Intuition and conceptualknowledge—The intuitive consciousness—The limits of intuitiveknowledge—Identifications of intuition and expression—Art asexpression: content and form—Language as expression; the reality ofwords—Croce's use of the word intuition—The lyrical character of thepure intuition.

The whole cycle of the philosophy of mind exhausts itself in thestudy of the four fundamental forms of human activity, the conceptsof which we have seen slowly developing through the mazes of Croce'searly speculations: the æsthetic, the logic, the economic and theethic; of the distinction and the unity of æsthetic and logic in thetheoretical activity, or knowledge, and of economic and ethic in thepractical activity, or action; and finally of the relations betweenthe theoretical and the practical, or knowledge and action. This maybe said to be the positive aspect of Croce's philosophy: the negativeaspect consists in the criticism and exclusion of any other form ofactivity from the system of the human spirit, and of that which is notthe spirit, or nature, from the system of reality.

To the four forms or grades of spiritual activity, correspond fourphilosophical sciences: Æsthetics, Logic, Economics, and Ethics.Each of them can be said to be theorganum of the particular formof activity which it studies; the affirmation of that sphere ofconsciousness which is proper to it, and of its relations to the otherforms. Each of them is therefore related to the others in the sameway as the various forms of activity are related to each other. Theymight be defined as the projection on the plane of logic of the wholesystem of human activity, that is, of the whole of reality. They derivetheir intrinsic validity from this perfect coincidence of their severalobjects with the only conceivable aspects of reality.

We shall in this and in the following chapters attempt to fill in withthe strictly necessary detail this very ample frame. But we can alreadypoint to the idealistic character of such a philosophy resulting fromits method, which is that of the testimony of consciousness, as opposedto the naturalistic or psychologic method of indirect observation; fromits object, which is the human spirit or mind in the fulness of itsdeterminations; and from the exclusion of any aspect of reality whichis not immanent in consciousness, that is, both of the naturally andthe supernaturally transcendent. As against another kind of idealism,of which the typical example is Platonic transcendentalism, Croce'sidealism is realistic and immanentistic:[Pg 101] the task of the philosophy ofmind is to discover the immanent logic of reality. But against currentrealism, which considers mind as the mere spectator and observer ofexternal or natural reality, it asserts the identity of reality andconsciousness, which is the basic position of all idealism.

There are two forms of knowledge: intuitive (or æsthetic) andconceptual (or logical). Intuition is the knowledge of the individualor particular; the concept is the knowledge of the universal. Thisdistinction, as we have already seen, corresponds roughly to the oldclassical distinction ofmythos andlogos, to Vico's definitionsof poetry and metaphysics, and to the new meaning given by Baumgartento the old antithesis ofaisthēta andnoēta. Let us quote Vicoagain: "Men first feel without perceiving, then they perceive and areperturbed and moved; finally they reflect with pure mind." Here we havethree successive grades, of which the first is mere sensation, thelower limit of mental activity; the second is intuition; the third,concept. For Vico, the second grade is identical with Poetry, and thescience of this form of knowledge, which we call Æsthetics, he calledPoetic Logic, the science of poetry as "the first operation of thehuman mind." Vico's discovery consists in this definition of Poetry(and Art), not as a casual, capricious, lateral form of spiritualactivity, but as the first and necessary grade of knowledge, as anessential function of the mind. But Vico's thought was[Pg 102] clothed in whatwe might well call a mythological form: the various grades of spiritualactivity were presented by him as successive stages or epochs in thehistory of mankind; and the inter-relation of the various grades, asthe actual law of the development of human society. Croce unravelledVico's philosophy, or ideal history, history of the mind, from Vico'sconcrete, sociological history, and the result was this new Æstheticswhich 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 reflected knowledge, wehave constant evidence in our immediate experience. If I examine myown consciousness, at any particular moment, I find it crowded withthings I know, as, now, this room in which I am writing, the pianothat is open before me, the flowers in a little basket, blue fragmentsof sky and green branches washed by the recent rain swaying in theclear sunlight, the shrill voice of a child from the road, the lightsteps of a girl moving about the house. I am not conscious of allthese intuitions at once: I write, and I distinctlyknow this whitepaper only, and the black signs I am tracing, the pen guided by myhand, and the edges of a few books on my table: all the rest has fadedaway into a blurred, fused intuition, the intuition of an atmosphere,composed of mere shreds and shadows of the colours and sounds of whichI was so distinctly conscious[Pg 103] but one minute ago. But now I put downmy 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 figureplaying this morning Franck's Prelude, Choral and Fugue, the rapid andsure movements of the fingers on the white and black keys, a vagueimage of the solemn and passionate 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 witha fragment of a melody, with a succession of triumphant chords. Andagain, I look beyond the window, and the little square of green andblue expands itself into the vast valley beyond, screened from my viewby these few trees clustering around the house, and yet mysteriouslypresent to my inner eye: I see a little company of riders canteringalong a shaded lane, coming out in an open meadow surrounded by low,thick-wooded hills; the sun sets in a pale purple sky, and I hear thetramping of the slow, heavy hoofs, as the horses find their way backthrough the woods, through a darkness much more opaque and solid thanthat of the remote twilight, still visible above the highest branches,animated by the first faint glittering of a star. And the woods arefull of a myriad small breathing and stirring noises, of the sense ofthe deep surging inhuman life of trees and shrubs, of the penetratingscent of the rich damp earth, of decaying wood, of fallen leaves.

And now, I suddenly shut myself out of this world of perceptions andimaginations, or rather I keep them all before me, but not becauseof the immediate, individual interest I have in each of them. I tryto extract the common, the universal element of which I suspect theexistence not beyond but within them. I renounce all particularintuitions for the concept of intuition. I am no longer an image-makingmind, no longer engaged in this elementary or "first" operation ofthe human mind, but I have passed on to a different, and manifestly a"secondary" plane of mental activity, since it would be impossible forme to root my thinking anywhere but on the soil of my intuitions.

What, then, is intuition? Clearly it is not the mere sensation, theformless matter which the mind cannot grasp in itself, as mere matter,but possesses only by imposing its form on it. Without matter no humanknowledge or activity is possible, but matter is, within ourselves, theanimal element, that which is brutal and impulsive, not the spiritualdomain, which is humanity. Matter conquered by form gives place tothe concrete form. Matter, or content, is what differentiates oneintuition from another; the form is constant, and the form is thespiritual activity. In this way we set the lower limit of intuitiveknowledge, and we recognize its characters of awareness and activity:an intuition is not that which presents itself to me, but that whichI make my own, by giving[Pg 105] form to it. It may be an actual perception,but the distinction between that which is real and that which isimaginary 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 morethan once been considered as intuitions, are in reality categoriesof an intellectual order: they may be found in intuitions, as otherintellectual elements are found, but as ingredients and not asnecessary elements,materialiter and notformaliter. In relation tothe usual psychological concepts of association and representation, itcan be said that an intuition is an association, when by that word wemean an active mental synthesis, and not a mechanical juxtaposition ofabstract sensations; and that it is a representation, not as a complexsensation, but as a spiritual elaboration of the sensation.

The upper limit of intuitive knowledge is given by reflected, orintellectual, or logical knowledge, or whatever we may call thatwhich is no longer knowledge of the individual, of things, but of theuniversal, of relations among things, of concepts. Intuitive knowledgeis independent of intellectual knowledge, as it is possible to formintuitions without forming concepts; in the examples which I havegiven in the preceding paragraph, practically all the intuitions arepure intuitions, in the[Pg 106] sense that they do not contain any logicalingredients. But even when such are found, they appear as mereintuitions, and not as concepts: as, for instance, Hamlet's philosophy,which I do not read as a help towards the understanding of metaphysicalproblems, but as a characterization of an imaginery individual. On theother hand, logical knowledge is founded on intuitions, presupposesthe world of intuitions as its matter or content. The relation betweenæsthetic and logical knowledge is one of grade or development: theformer stands by itself, rests directly on that which is not yet spiritor form, is the first grade of spiritual or human activity; the lattergives a further spiritual elaboration to the intuitive material.This relationship, to which we shall return later, is the typicalprocess of Croce's own logic, the logic of spiritual or mental grades,which he substitutes throughout his system for the naturalistic ortranscendental logic of his early masters.

A further step in the deduction of the concept of intuitive or æstheticknowledge, is made by identifying intuition with expression. Given theactive and conscious character of intuition, we are already prepared toadmit that every true intuition is at the same time an expression; thatwhich cannot objectify itself into an expression is nothing but meresensation. The mind does not actually intuit except by doing, forming,and expressing. We must not think only of verbal[Pg 107] expressions: thereare intuitions which cannot be expressed by words, but only by soundsor lines or colours. But in any case the two words are interchangeable:what really exists in our spirit is only what we can express. It isonly when we can express ourselves, that we are conscious of actuallypossessing, that is, of having actually formed, our intuitions. It isimpossible to distinguish the expression from the intuition becausethey are not two but one.

This identification runs counter to a number of very common and verydear delusions: we constantly imagine that the difference betweenourselves and a great painter or a great poet does not consist in thepower of seeing and feeling, but in a supposed gift of merely externalexpression; and again, we credit ourselves with a number of thoughtsand images, which we might express if we only wished to. The easiestway to free ourselves of such delusions is to try to express whateverit seems to us that we possess: it becomes then apparent that ourpictorial or poetical intuitions are really mere fragments, or echoes,of intuitions; are, in fact, not more than that which we succeed inexpressing. It must however be borne in mind that we give here to theword expression a purely mental or spiritual significance: we mean byit the image that we form in our mind, and of which the painting or thepoem, as objects, are the material extrinsications. It requires butlittle reflection to realize that there is[Pg 108] no painting or poem—thereis no word that we utter—unless it be a mereflatus vocis, whichhas not been preceded in our mind by an internal image, which is thetrue expression.

The reader will have remarked that, in order to give examples ofintuitive knowledge, we have now had recourse to poetry and topainting. The fact is that there is no difference between intuitiveknowledge, or expression, and art, except a purely extensive andempirical one: that is, we call a poet or an artist a man who possessesthis 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, morecomplex, more elaborate, than those which are the product of ourcommon intuitive activity, mere waves of the continuous stream ofspiritual life, in which they are constantly interrupted by and mixedwith reflections and volitions, with logical and practical facts. Thedifference between the genius and the common man, in the æsthetic aswell as in the other spheres of human activity, is a quantitative,not a qualitative one. Art is not a peculiar spiritual function, andtherefore a closed circle to which none but the elect are admitted: theartist appeals to the intuitive man in each of us, in a language ofwhich every human mind finds the key within itself.

The definition of art as expression emphasizes the creative and formalcharacter of art; and its immediate consequence is the identificationof form[Pg 109] and content, that is, the solution of one of the oldest andmost confused of æsthetic problems. Art is form, not in the technicalor formalistic sense, but in the meaning which we have given to theword when discussing the relation between sensation and intuition; andthe content of a particular work of art cannot be abstracted from thework itself as something that existed before it, and to which a formhas been added from outside. There is no content, in art, which is notthe content of a particular form, that is, that which has ceased toexist as a possible content, and has transformed itself into a definiteform. This conception of the relations of form and content impliesalso either a new interpretation, or the repudiation, of the theoryof art as the imitation of nature, meaningless in a mechanical sense,true, and synonymous with the theory of intuition, in a creative andformative sense. Through the same critical process, all discussions ofthe relations between art and the senses appear as being founded on aconfusion between that which is still beyond the limit of spiritualactivity, the sensation or impression, and the actual æstheticelaboration, which begins only when the mind becomes aware of theimpression that has reached it through the channel of the senses.

We have mentioned, in connection with the identification of intuitionand expression, the fact that every word that we utter is constantlypreceded by an internal image; which is as much as[Pg 110] saying thatlanguage is a perpetual spiritual creation, on the same plane as allour other expressions, and as art. We are accustomed to seeing deadwords and syllables in grammars and dictionaries, and we considerthem as something external, as a kind of instrument that we use andaccommodate to this and that purpose. But words that grammariansstudy, through a naturalistic process, as independent elements ofthe linguistic organism, are really alive and full of their meaningonly in the active context of speech. The reality of words is only inthe individual spirit that speaks, and every word is new every timethat it is employed because it expresses that particular, individualmoment of spiritual activity, which cannot be the same as any otherone. Philologists have been divided on the question of the origin oflanguage for centuries, some finding it in the logical activity, othersin a system of mechanical symbols and conventions, a few admitting theconception of language as a pure æsthetic creation only for a mythic,primitive period, which is succeeded in the history of every languageby a period of development by convention and association. But, as inall other branches of spiritual activity, it is here impossible to drawa distinction between the problem of the origins and the problem ofthe nature of language: linguistic expressions have fixed themselvesin the course of centuries and stand before us as a body of language,as a reality independent of the individual activity[Pg 111] that produces theparticular expressions; this is what prevents us from recognizing inthe actual linguistic facts the same creative energy that formed thefirst words uttered by man.

In this reduction of the philosophy of language to æsthetics, Croceagain follows Vico, who professed to have found the true originsof languages in the principles of poetry, who first asserted thefunctional identity of language and poetry. This theory, however,seems to clash with the existence of what we might call the implicitconceptuality of language, of which we are constantly made aware by ourgrammatical categories. The fact is that the relation between languageand concept is the same as between intuition and concept: that is, onone side, language is the material of our reflected thought, and itwould be impossible for the reflection to begin without or before thelanguage; but, on the other hand, the concepts appear in language notas forms but as matter. In other words, to speak it is not necessaryto think logically, but it is impossible to think logically withoutspeaking. The grammatical categories are not real elements of language,but products of abstraction, of a purely practical character, of thekind that we shall soon have to examine in the rhetoric of the arts.

What may help us, in thus conceiving of the active and intuitivecharacter of language, is a comparison with other classes of expressivefacts. When we speak of musical or pictorial language, we are awarethat[Pg 112] we are using mere metaphors for the purpose of collecting certaingeneral characteristics which are common to some of these facts. Thevarious musical grammars, the rules of harmony or of orchestration, arenothing but summaries of abstractions: in the presence of a certainmusic, or of a certain picture, we cannot forget the principle that noexpression can give birth to a new expression without first undergoinga new creative process. And this is as true of the highest forms ofartistic expression as of the words which we use in our daily life.

A number of objections to Croce's æsthetics have been prompted by hisuse of the word intuition. To the reader who has followed our argument,it is not necessary to explain that Croce's intuition has nothing incommon either with the mystic intuition of the Neoplatonists or ofthe ultra-romantics, or with the intuition which Bergson substitutesfor the intellect as the proper organ of absolute knowledge. It isnot a mysterious instrument of the mind, by which man can either comein contact with supernatural realities, or, renouncing that which isdistinctively human in him, enter into the actual movement and lifeof nature. The fact that Croce has spent so much time and thoughtin trying to understand this first, naïve, elementary grade of thetheoretical activity, does not justify his critics in putting him inthe same class either with romantic metaphysicians or with romanticnaturalists. That such a confusion has ever been[Pg 113] possible is only afurther proof of the immaturity and superficiality of a large part ofour most solemn contemporary thought. It shows how it has been given togrown-up and apparently educated men, to read a book without knowingwhat its subject was, and without even being able to shield themselvesbehind 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 ofthe practical, or of will. It can be said of the theory of art asintuition, that it reduces art to a form of knowledge, to a theoreticalfunction, while what we look for in works of art is life and movement,and the feeling and personality of the artist, that is, somethingthat is not theoretical but practical. The answer might be that thefeeling is content and the intuition form; but such a dualistic pointof view would in reality destroy not only Croce's æsthetics, but thefoundations of his whole philosophy of mind. And we would be back at aposition which we thought we had already criticised and surpassed. Thetruth is that intuition, and the personality, or lyrical character,of a work of art, are only different aspects of the same spiritualprocess, that where one is, the other too will have to be found. Whatwe can abstract as the psychic content of intuition, since we havealready excluded abstractions and concepts, is only what we callappetition, tendency, feeling, will—the various facts which constitutethe practical[Pg 114] form of the human spirit. Pure intuition cannotrepresent anything but the will in its manifestations, that is, nothingbut states of mind. And the states of mind are that passion, feeling,and personality which we find in art, and which determine its lyricalcharacter.

In order properly to understand this new point of view, it must beborne in mind that the lyrical character of the poetry does nothowever coincide with the practical passion of the poet: the relationbetween the emotion and the intuition is not a deterministic one, asof cause and effect, but a creative one, as of matter and form. Thepoetical vibration is different in kind from the practical one. If Igrasp Croce's meaning correctly, the feeling and movement which wefind in art is something that belongs intrinsically to the intuitiveactivity—it is the dynamic of the creative process itself. Andin fact, what we look for in the works of art is not the empiricalpersonality of the artist, but the tonality of his individual æstheticactivity, which is always new and always unmistakably his own,—notthe rhythm of his passion but that of his vision or contemplation,of his intuition of the passion. Any other way of considering thisrelation would inevitably lead us back to the conventional distinctionof form and content, to the attribution of æsthetic characters tothe emotions themselves, and to a definition of intuition not as asimple and primitive fact, but as a combination of the practical andthe theoretical, of will and knowledge.[Pg 115] I consider this deduction ofthe lyrical character of intuition as one of the points of Croce'sæsthetics which opens the way to new problems and stand in need offurther elaboration; but what is important in it, and already firmlyestablished, is the recognition of this character, through which thewhole doctrine of intuition gains a deeper and richer meaning, andbecomes more apt to deal with the concrete facts of our æstheticexperience.

III. THE CONCEPT OF ART

Further determinations of the concept of art—Theoretical and practicalactivity—The progress of æsthetic theories—An American instance:morality and art—The typical—The ends of art—The process of æstheticproduction—Relations of the æsthetic with the practical activity—Thedelusion of objective beauty—Æsthetic hedonism—The æsthetic value.

The determination of the concept of art as pure intuition would belittle more than a verbal variation of older doctrines, if its validityand importance could not be proved in the actual practice of thought onæsthetic problems, in the study of the relations of the æsthetic factwith the other facts of human activity, and in the criticism of errorswhich have invaded the field of æsthetic thought through a confusion ofthe æsthetic with the intellectual or the practical. We shall thereforenot be able to grasp the new concept in the fulness of its meaninguntil we have surveyed the whole ground of the philosophy of mind: theæsthetic concept cannot be said to be fully determined until we havea clear conception of the other fundamental grades or forms of thespirit. For the purposes of our exposition, we may however anticipate asummary or scheme of the essential relations, which will be more fullydeveloped in the following chapters.

We have already seen how the logical activity springs from the soilof the pure intuition; how the knowledge of the universal follows theknowledge of the individual. The æsthetic and the logic grade, of whichthe second implies the first, exhaust the whole of knowledge, thewhole theoretical life of man. A third grade or form does not exist:not in history, which Croce still considered, in the first years ofthis period, as reducible to the concept of art, and differentiatedfrom it only by its employment of the predicate of existence, of thedistinction between reality and imagination; and not in the natural andmathematical sciences, which elaborate the data of intuition throughfictions, hypotheses, and conventions, which are practical and nottheoretical processes.

The relation between the theoretical and the practical activity isof the same kind as that between the two grades of the theoreticalactivity: that is, the first is the basis of the second. We can thinkof a knowing which is independent from the will, but not of a willwhich is independent of knowledge: it is impossible to will withouthistorical intuitions and a knowledge of relations. Within thepractical activity, we can further distinguish two grades correspondingto the two grades of the theoretical activity: the economic, whichis the will of the individual, of a particular end, and the ethic,which is the will of the universal, of the rational end. The relationbetween the economic and the ethic activity is[Pg 118] again the samegrade-relation as between the æsthetic and the logic, the theoreticaland the practical. The concrete life of the human spirit consists inthe perpetually recurring cycle of the four grades of its activity,which is the law of its unity and development. The concept rises fromthe intuition, and action from knowledge; ethical activity is notconceivable without a theoretical foundation, and the concreteness ofa particular end. At the close of the cycle, the spiritual life itselfbecomes the object of a new intuition, from which a new concept and anew action are reproducedad infinitum. In the history of æsthetics,the errors deriving from the confusion of that which is distinctivelyæsthetic with other forms of theoretical or practical activity,present themselves as a series of doctrines, which can be consideredas gradual approximations to the definition of art as intuition. Itis not necessarily, or not only, a chronological series, but rather asuccession of actual moments in the deduction of the concept of art.Empirical æsthetics recognises the existence of a class of æstheticor artistic facts, without attempting to reduce them under a singleconcept; practical (hedonistic or moralistic) æsthetics makes a firstattempt at interpreting them by putting them in relation with oneof the categories of spiritual activity; intellectualiste æstheticsdenies that they belong to the practical sphere, though failing todiscover their precise theoretical character; agnostic æstheticscriticises[Pg 119] all the preceding moments, and is satisfied with a purelynegative definition; mystic æsthetics, conscious of the difference ofæsthetic from logical facts, makes a new spiritual category of them,affirms their autonomy and independence, but mistakes the nature oftheir relation with conceptual knowledge. We are all more or lessfamiliar with the various aspects of these doctrines, and it can besaid that none of them (with the exception of the first, which is nowrepresented by psychologic æsthetics) is now being held consistentlyby any responsible thinker. The truth of the intuitive theory, whichwe find adumbrated already in classical antiquity in the Aristoteliantheory ofmimesis, and of which artists and critics have always had akind of obscure presentiment, is now implicitly recognised by all whohave an intimate contact with and a sincere feeling for art and poetry.The literary and artistic development of the end of the eighteenth andof the nineteenth century has been accompanied by such a wealth ofcritical thought, that a conscious understanding of the nature of artis now much more frequent than in former ages. The forces that wereat work liberating logical and moral thought from the shackles of thepast, reacted vigorously on æsthetic thought, and helped to make itmore and more independent from both intellectualistic and moralisticerrors. It would be possible to extract aphorisms and meditations fromthe writings of the greatest poets, artists, and musicians[Pg 120] of theperiod, to show how common among them was and is the knowledge of thespiritual autonomy and of the intuitive character of art. But becausethe task of the artist is not that of elaborating a philosophy of art,and a good many critics and æstheticians, on the other hand, have verylittle experience of the actual æsthetic processes, we find that thoughthe other doctrines are discredited, yet a number of prejudices whichhave their roots in them are still current,—the artists themselvesrejecting them, as it were, by instinct and not by reasoning, and thecritics and æstheticians clinging to them because they help them togain a fictitious possession of that artistic reality which escapesthem in its purity and actuality. An intellectualiste or moralisticcritic can easily mask his lack of æsthetic taste, his fundamentalignorance of art, by talking at length and with great solemnity aboutunessentials. Artists and poets, on the other hand, are apt to reactto these prejudices by falling into the errors of æstheticism, thatis by attributing to their empirical selves the freedom that belongsto their function, and by denying in the name of art the autonomyand dignity of intellectual and moral values. In both cases, what ismanifestly lacking is a proper understanding of the meaning of logical,or ideal distinctions, for which the artists, I suppose, ought to bemore readily forgiven than the critics, though æstheticism may be asdangerous to art as moralism or intellectualism are to thought.

A recent literary polemic in America offered some striking examples ofthese prejudices. A critic of the older school, in a discussion of themoral tendencies of the age, introduced a criticism of the propositionthat art is not concerned either with truth or morality, by affirmingthat this negative proposition could legitimately be converted intothe positive one: the object of art is to deny that which truth andmorality affirm. The sophism of this conversion is based on a confusionbetween the two logical concepts of distinction and opposition. Thecritic was not deducing a logical consequence of the first proposition,any more than if he were interpreting my saying that I am notinterested as a student of literature in the law of gravitation, asimplying a disbelief in the law of gravitation: he was merely statinghis own conception of art as a conceptual and moral function, and ofthe value of art as an intellectual and moral value; which is the errorof intellectualism and moralism. In his reply to the older critic, awriter of the younger generation contended that æsthetic values arehigher than either logical or moral values, and in some mysterious waytranscend and comprehend them both. The younger writer was evidentlyusing the same kind of logic as his adversary, and affirming on his ownaccount the error of a variety of æstheticism.

What the original proposition actually implies is that judgmentsregarding the logical truth or the[Pg 122] historical verity, the moral meritor demerit of a work of art, do not treat art as art, but dissolve thework itself into its abstract elements, and deal with these elements inan entirely different context. If I discuss the theology and philosophyof Dante, I shall find a number of propositions which to my mind areuntrue; but the beauty of Dante's poetry is incommensurable with thetruth or falsehood of his logical thought. The beauty of Francesca'sepisode is not impaired by the quite reasonable suspicion that thepoetical idealization of a guilty passion might have a dangerousinfluence on weak and sentimental souls.

The imperfect distinction between art and logical or scientific truthis responsible for the critical prejudice of art as expressive ofthe typical. The typical is a product of abstract thought, of thekind that is employed in the natural sciences. The expressions ofart are essentially individual and particular, and when we considerthem as typical, we merely use them as the starting point for ourown abstractions, that is, for the purposes of a quite differentmental process. Similar to the concept of the typical are those ofthe allegory and symbol, which are mechanical constructions of theintellect, and which art is unable to represent unless it reduces themto the particular and concrete.

The confusion between art and morality, being ultimately founded onthe supposition that art is not a theoretical function, but an act ofthe will,[Pg 123] gives rise to the theories of the ends of art, and of theso-called choice of the subject. But the end of art is art itself,expression or beauty, or whatever other name we shall give to theæsthetic value, just as the end of science is truth and the end ofmorality is goodness; that is, the concept of end coincides in everycase with the concept of value. And the artist cannot choose hissubject, since there is no abstract subject present to his mind, butonly the world of his own already formed intuitions and expressions;which he can neither will nor not will. This is the truth contained inthe old idea of poetical inspiration, which was merely another word forthe spontaneity and unreflectiveness of art. A choice of the subjectaccording to ends other than æsthetic is a certain cause of failure.The only conceivable meaning that advice as to the choice of a subjectmay have, is a kind of artisticknow thyself, a warning to the artistto be true to himself, to follow his inspiration, and that which isdeepest and most genuine in it. It is, however, a tautological meaning,and the reverse of the one which is given to it by the moralisticcritic.

If it is impossible for us either to will or not will our æstheticvision, the internal image which is the true "work of art," it is clearthat an element of will enters into the production of the physicalor external image, made of sounds or lines or colours or shapes,which we call works of art in a naturalistic or empirical sense. Thecomplete process of[Pg 124] æsthetic production is symbolized by Croce inthe four following stages:a, the impression;b the expression oræsthetic spiritual synthesis;c, the feeling of pleasure or painwhich accompanies the æsthetic as well as any other form of spiritualactivity; d, the translation of the æsthetic fact into physicalphenomena. The only true æsthetic moment of the whole process is inb, which alone is real expression, whiled is expression in thenaturalistic and abstract sense of the word. Such a conception clashesagainst a number of deep-rooted fallacies, which in their turn are thesource of innumerable æsthetic prejudices. It is clear, however, thatwhat we call a printed poem is no poem at all, but only a collection ofconventional black signs on a white page, which suggest to me a numberof movements of my vocal organs destined to the production of certainsounds; and again, that these sounds are not the poem in itself, apartfrom my understanding of their meaning, from my re-creation of theinternal image which prompted their original production now recorded inthe pages of a book. Physically, a painting is constituted by colourson a wall, or board, or canvas: here, the first stage of reproductionwhich is required for the written poem is not necessary: the material(visual, as it was auditive for the poem) on which the original imagefixed itself is directly present to me; and yet, again, that materialobject is not the æsthetic vision, but a mere stimulus for itsreproduction.[Pg 125] Starting from the material object, Croce symbolized theinverse process of æsthetic reproduction in the following series:e,the physical stimulus;d-b, the perception of physical facts (sound,colours, etc.), which is at the same time the æsthetic synthesispreviously produced;c, the æsthetic pleasure or pain. Here, again,the only moment of true æsthetic activity is inb where, at least inthe hypothesis of a perfect understanding, my vision coincides with theorignal creation.

It must be understood, however, that these successive stages are notreal, but abstract or symbolical distinctions. We cannot re-createan æsthetic vision except through the sounds or colours in which itoriginally expressed itself; and those sounds or colours coincide withthe original expression. The words and rhythm of a poem are to it whatthe body is to the soul, and once you have dissolved that form, thereis nothing left. Hence the theoretical impossibility of a translation,which can only exist as a new creation. But when we consider thosewords or that rhythm not within the expressive synthesis, in whichtheir reality is spiritual and not physical, but outside it, as words,as rhythm, we build up by abstraction a category of physical facts,to which we attribute a reality not inferior to that of the spiritualactivity.B andd, in the preceding analysis, are not differentrealities, but different elaborations, the first, ideal, the second,naturalistic, of the same fact.

We have now established a relation between the æsthetic and thepractical activity: the physical expression is an act of the will,and as such it falls legitimately in the domain of both economic andethical judgments. We may buy or sell the physical stimuli, books,statues, and paintings, though no amount of wealth can give theæsthetic vision: the possession of the objects of art is of anotherorder than the possession of the spiritual creation. We may considerthat the communication of a certain intuition is in certain casesmorally undesirable, and censure the artist for having willed it,or try to prevent him from accomplishing it. The principle of thespiritual autonomy of art, necessary to establish the nature ofæsthetic value, cannot be understood to imply the absolute practicalfreedom of the artist from the laws that bind all other men. But evenfrom this point of view, there is no doubt that art is more likely tosuffer from excessive constraint than from excessive freedom; and thatthe fanatics of morality in art are only too often inclined to mistakea set of arbitrary rulings for morality, and to overlook the intentionof the artist. It is a significant fact, and one which deserves moreattention than it seems to have ever received, that the so-called moralcondemnation of a true work of art has never outlasted one or twogenerations, and their prejudices and weaknesses.

The existence of the physical stimuli or material[Pg 127] helps for theæsthetic reproduction, fosters the illusion of beauty as an intrinsicattribute of physical objects, first as artistic, and then as naturalbeauty. It is hardly necessary to criticise this illusion at thispoint of our discussion: beauty is not an objective attribute, buta spiritual value. In the same way as there is no intrinsic beauty,independent dent of our either creative or re-creative activity, inwords or notes or lines or colours, there is also no category ofnatural beauty. What we call beauty of nature is either that whichin nature is merely pleasureable from a practical and sensuousstandpoint, or the presence of certain stimuli for the reproduction ofa preëxistent æsthetic vision. We recognise the obvious truth of thisfact, when we remark that the beauty of a certain landscape is notvisible to everybody, but only to him who looks at it with an artist'seye. And it would be possible to write a history of the progressivedevelopment of beauty in nature, which would practically coincidewith, or follow at a short distance of time, the various stages of thehistory of poetry and painting.

Closely related with the confusion between the physical attributesof the objects of art, and the true æsthetic value, are all thetheories of æsthetics which consider that the end of art is pleasure,or æsthetic hedonism in its various forms. Of these the most ancientis the one that considers beautiful that which gives pleasure to thehigher[Pg 128] senses, he hearing and the sight; and other forms of it canstill be found, if not among artists and critics, at least amongpsychologists. Two of the most recent interpretations of æstheticfacts, the theory of empathy orEinfühlung and the theory of tactilevalues, are merely modern scientific variations of the old prejudice.But no hedonistic theory can ever give a consistent account ofæsthetic facts, as it is impossible to draw a distinction, on a purelypsychological plane, between those pleasures of the senses which mayprecede or accompany the æsthetic fact, and those that are purelysensuous; and the inevitable result is a complete reduction of theæsthetic to the sensual. In such theories, the real æsthetic problemdoes not even reach the stage of being formulated.

The truth that the hedonist obscurely foresees is that everyspiritual activity is constantly accompanied by the practical reflexof satisfaction and dissatisfaction, pleasure and pain, value anddis-value. Value is every activity that unfolds itself freely,dis-value is the contrasted, hindered, impeded unfolding of the sameactivity. If we call beauty the æsthetic value, then beauty is but thesuccessful expression, or better, the expression, since an unsuccessfulexpression is not an expression at all. And it is not necessary torepeat that by expression we distinctly mean not the physical stimulus,but the spiritual synthesis.

With this definition of æsthetic value we reach[Pg 129] one of the mostimportant points of Croce's thought: the solution of what he callsthe dualism of values, or ideals, to the concrete realities. As thebeautiful expression is simply expression, the true thought is simplythought, and so on, so the ugly expression or the false thought arenon-expression and non-thought, the non-being which has no realityoutside the moment of its opposition and criticism.

IV. TECHNIQUE AND CRITICISM

Art and technique—Errors deriving from the common conception oftechnique—The theories of the particular arts—The literary genres—The rhetorical categories—The categories of language—Genius andtaste—The æsthetic judgment—The idolatry of standards—The æstheticstandard: the true objectivity—Criticism and history.

The relation between the æsthetic activity and the practical moment ofthe production of the physical objects of art may be regarded under theaspect of the relation between art and technique. The only legitimatemeaning of the word technique is that of a body of naturalisticknowledge in the service of the practical activity of the artist. Inthis 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 rapidchange and deterioration, a musician who should be a bad singer orpianist, a poet who should not be able to recite his own poetry. Butin the common language of critics, we mean by technique somethingquite different—in painting what we call drawing or composition, inmusic, harmony or orchestration, in poetry, metre and construction.Now it is quite clear that we cannot conceive of a great painter whocould not draw, a great musician unable to harmonize or to orchestrate,a great poet whose[Pg 131] lines are defective. What we here isolate asthe technical handling of an artistic subject is but the process ofæsthetic creation itself, the succession and progression of intuitionsin the artist's mind; using the naturalistic or psychological method,we abstract certain moments of the creative process, and we attributea reality to such abstractions. We talk of the technique of a poemor of a painting as being something that has been superadded to theoriginal intuition; we see the poet or the artist engaged in learningthe technique of his art; we see him correcting or modifying hisoriginal expression according to certain technical standards. But whatwe call the technique of a poem or of a painting is that particularpoem or painting in its concreteness; and no poet or artist can learna technique except by re-creating in his own spirit the work of thegreat masters, his technical education being but one with his æstheticeducation; and finally, the process of correction or modification ismerely a stage of the expressive process itself: no poet can correct aline in his poem, no painter change a line or a shade in his picture,if the internal image has not first spontaneously undergone suchcorrections and changes in his mind.

The consequences of the common conception of technique in criticismare more dangerous, because more subtle and affecting a more intimateknowledge of art, than those of any other æsthetic error. The talkof the connoisseur and of the average musical[Pg 132] or dramatic critic isfull of such fallacies as the technical errors of great painters, theharmonic or orchestral wonders of poor music, the faulty constructionof a great play; fallacies which may sometimes have originatedfrom some real character of the æsthetic fact, but which are merecontradictions in terms. And the literary critic will speak of thefine frenzy and thequiet eye, meaning by the one, the abstractinspiration, and by the other the abstract production, and so miss thetrue æsthetic moment which is neither the one nor the other, but thesynthesis of the two. Or he will oppose romanticism to classicism, ina similar sense, without realizing that all art is at the same timeromantic and classic, truly inspired, and because truly inspired, ableto express itself.

Mere variations of the naturalistic or psychological conception oftechnique, as an actual moment of the æsthetic creation, are a seriesof theories which Croce has extensively criticised, and of which we cangive but a cursory account.

The theories of the particular arts and of their limits originate fromthe manuals of practical precepts useful to architects, sculptors,painters or musicians, and are founded on the assumed possibility offinding a field of the æsthetic activity corresponding to the physicalmeans employed by each category of artists. But we have already seenthat in the æsthetic fact there is no distinction between means andend: we can speak of[Pg 133] the various arts in a purely empirical sense, asan external classification of the objects of art, but not as classes ofæsthetic activity.

A similar kind of classification is the one which gives rise tothe literary genre, and to similar abstractions in the other arts:legitimate instruments of work as long as we do not forget that theredoes not exist anything like the idea of a tragedy or sonata apart fromall concrete tragedies or sonatas, and as long as we do not condemna new tragedy or a new sonata simply because it is not like the oldones, that is, as long as we do not transform an abstract type into alaw. Every new æsthetic creation, far from being bound to obey externallaws, establishes new laws, or rather is its own law. It must, andwill, answer only for itself, and the only claim that we can put uponit is that of internal coherence. Both the theories of the arts and thetheories of the genres, when we try to treat them as true and rigorous,and not as mere practical expedients, manifest the absurdity of theirtask through their incapacity to give precise and absolute definitions.Every work of art expresses a state of mind, and every state of mindis irreducibly individual and new: a complete classification wouldtherefore be only that in which every class has under itself a singleintuition.

Another form of the technical prejudice is the creation of rhetoricalcategories, which are also abstract classes of expressions tending to[Pg 134]transform themselves into precepts. The main prejudice of rhetoric, inliterature as well as in all other arts, is that of the distinctionbetween the simple and the ornate, which is founded on a conceptionof beauty not as the value of the expression, but as something thatcan be added, so to speak, mechanically, to the expression. Because ofits preceptive character, rhetoric has done more harm in the historyof poetry and art, than any of the other classifications of the sameorder; and though it is generally discredited among artists and criticsto-day, in its pure original form, yet rhetorical prejudices, both inthe creation and judgment of art, are still endowed with an obstinatelyvigorous life.

These naturalistic classifications in art have their counterpart in thestudy of language, in the creation of grammatical genres or categoriesor parts of speech, and in the attempts to reduce the empiricalgrammars to preceptive or normative grammars: that is, a practicalor pedagogic expedient, to a rhetoric or technique of language. Butthe individuality and indivisibility of expression is in the natureof language as well as of art, and language obeys not the abstractprecepts of grammarians, but the law of the æsthetic spirit which makesus find a new expression for every new intuition. Even phonetic laws,the modern scientific instruments of grammar, are mere descriptivesummaries of observed facts, of physical moments abstracted from theirspiritual reality, and therefore abstract or naturalistic laws, andnever[Pg 135] actually represent the concrete, individually determined factsof language.

A coherent theory of æsthetic (literary and artistic) criticism canbe deduced from the concept of art as intuition, and we have alreadyanticipated its main theses in the discussion of the concept itself. Wehave seen that in the process of reproduction of an æsthetic process,the actual moment in which the original image, through the medium ofwhat we have abstracted as the physical stimulus, reproduces itself ina mind other than that of the creator (or, in what we might consider asa particular case, in the mind of the creator himself at a time otherthan that of the original creation), is a moment of æsthetic activityidentical with that of creation. Given an identity of circumstances,that which takes place within my mind is the same æsthetic processwhich took place originally in the mind of the artist. If we callgenius the creative, and taste the reproductive activity, the corollaryof these considerations is that of the identity of genius and taste:in the act of contemplating and judging a work of art, our spiritbecomes one with the spirit of the artist. Though in practice thisidentity may never be attained (because of variations in the materialconditions of the physical stimulus, or in the spiritual attitude ofthe contemplator), yet if we deny it, and establish a difference inkind between these two aspects of æsthetic activity, we find ourselvesinevitably led to exclude the possibility not of the æsthetic judgmentonly, but of[Pg 136] all forms of æsthetic communication. There is a sensein which we can speak of the relativity of taste, and which accountsfor the actual variety of judgments, not in relation to art only, butto all forms of human activity: every judgment is relative to ourknowledge, at a particular moment, of the actual conditions in whichthe work of art was originally produced. But this is the intrinsicrelativity of all the particular determinations of reality, not arelativity peculiar to æsthetic values, which are as real, though of adifferent order, as those of logic or morality.

But the æsthetic judgment itself is not the mere intuitive reproductionof the work of art, made possible by what we call historical criticismin the narrow sense of the word, that is, by interpretation andcomment. These are the antecedent of the æsthetic judgment, whichconsists in a logical proposition of the form: "A is art," or "A is notart," "A is art in a b c, A is not art in d e f"; or again: "There is afact, A, which is a work of art," "There is a fact, A, which is falselybelieved to be a work of art." The æsthetic judgment, like all otherjudgments, establishes a relation between a particular, concrete fact,and a universal category, which is that of art. And, like all otherjudgments, it is at the same time a judgment of value and an historicaljudgment, which is the obvious consequence of Croce's identification ofvalue and fact. Æsthetic criticism therefore coincides with the historyof the æsthetic activity, with the history of poetry or art.

A frequent reaction to Croce's æsthetics, and to its implicationsin the theory of criticism, especially among literary critics, is asense of irritation caused by the loss of the so-called standards ofjudgment. It would be interesting to analyze these supposed standards,which generally are not explicitly enunciated (probably because theirclear enunciation would manifest their true nature, and annul themas standards of æsthetic judgment), but only more or less obscurelyreferred to with a mixture of pride and reverence. They would then showthemselves to be the critical duplicates of the various æsthetic errorswhich 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 æsthetics doesnot question their validity, but only their application. There is alarge number of literary critics, who are such only in name, and whosereal interests are intellectual or moral, critics of thought and ofthe ethical life, and not of art. They use works of art as documentsand undoubtedly works of art are, in the unity of the human spirit,documents of intellectual and moral life; but their error begins whenthey 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 nolonger intellectual or moral, but, because they have been transposedoutside their legitimate sphere, intellectualistic and moralistic.

All other so-called standards are derived from the[Pg 138] abstract ideas ofliterary genres and of rhetorical categories. It is easy to judge ofa new tragedy if you know what a tragedy ought to be, if you have acatalogue 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 crudest form of rhetorical criticism; there is another which isnot less frequent, but more subtle. The critic builds up an ideal ofwhat art ought to be, not with abstract categories, and classificationstransformed into arbitrary æsthetic precepts or standards, but throughhis predilection for one particular author, or for one particularepoch, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, the Classics or theRomantics: every work of art which is different either in spirit or inform from those that have been chosen is condemned in proportion to itsvariation from the ideal. This form of criticism is often also vitiatedby the intrusion of intellectualistic and moralistic errors, since anideal which is a mere particular determination of the past assumed as auniversal value is likely to be mere rhetoric of thought and moralityas well as of art.

The only legitimate standard in æsthetic criticism is the æstheticstandard, that of beauty or expression, as against ugliness ornon-expression. Our critical judgment is the reaction of our æstheticpersonality in the presence of a work of art, as the moral judgment isthe reaction of our moral personality in the presence of an action. Ourknowledge of a work[Pg 139] of art, of a concrete and individual intuition,as our knowledge of an action, approaches more or less to the ideallimit, according to the breadth of our experience and the depth of ourunderstanding; but there exist no external criteria on which we canrest our judgment, no mechanical props which will support it. Thistheory of criticism, far from justifying a capricious and arbitrarysubjectivism, requires from the critic a constant vigilance againstthat which is narrowly personal, capricious, and arbitrary in himself;a patient, unceasing effort in the labor of recapturing and recreatingthe material and spiritual circumstances from which the work of artoriginally sprang; and the quick sensitivity of the artist coupled withthe wide understanding of the historian and the philosopher.

When æsthetic criticism is raised to this plane on which it coincideswith the history of poetry, or of art, it transforms itself necessarilyinto a general criticism of life. What to the æsthetic consciousnessappears as ugly or non-expressive, since in the world of history thereare no negative facts, will not, when historically considered, appearas a negative value, but as a value of another order, as an intrusionof the logical or of the practical spirit in the work of the poet orof the artist. What in the Divine Comedy is not poetry is the outcomeof philosophical or moral preoccupations which have not become art,have not fused themselves into a new, coherent intuition, and must beapprehended not as art, but as[Pg 140] philosophy and morality. The allegoryof theFærie Queene is not art, but it is an expression of certainaspects of the Protestant spirit in the England of Elizabeth. In a poetlike Byron, the presence of practical motives is felt all through hispoetical production; and the critic cannot limit his work to tractingthe gems, and to saying of all the rest: this is not poetry. He musttell us what it is, and only by telling what it is, he criticises itcompletely as poetry. It is impossible, in fact, to give to art itsplace, without assigning its place to all the other activities of life.The great æsthetic critic will also be a critic of philosophy, ofmorality, of politics; but, as Croce says of De Sanctis, the strengthof his purely æsthetic consideration of art will also be the strengthof his purely moral consideration of morality, of his purely logicalconsideration of philosophy, and so on. The forms or grades of thespirit, which the critic employs as categories for his judgment, areideally distinct in the unity of the spirit, but cannot materially beseparated from each other or from that unity without losing all theirvitality. The distinction of æsthetic criticism from the other formsof criticism, of the history of poetry and the arts from the otherkinds of history, is but an empirical one, pointing to the fact thatthe attention of the critic or historian is turned towards one aspectrather than another of the same indivisible reality.

V. THE PURE CONCEPT [1]

The function of logic in the system—The concept—Logical concepts andconceptual fictions—The pure concept as the unity of distinctions—Singularity, particularity and universality—The dialectic processin Hegel and in Croce—Opposition, distinction and value—Theexpressiveness of the concept—Definition and individual judgment:their identity—Classification and numeration—Thea priori synthesis.

We have summarily examined in the three preceding chapters the theoryof æsthetic, or intuitive, or individual, as distinct from logical, orconceptual, or universal, knowledge. We must now leave the æstheticactivity in the background as the mere antecedent of the logical one,and proceed to investigate the latter.

In a sense it may be said that the key to every system of philosophyis to be found in the either implicit or explicit solution given tocertain logical problems and that only by understanding the logic of aphilosopher can we be sure to give its true meaning and value to histhought. The reverse is, as a general rule, also true: any solution ofa particular problem, any particular elaboration of the concept, whenfully understood, will lead us back to the philosopher's logic, to hisconcept of the concept. The main points of Croce's logic could easilybe[Pg 142] deduced from his æsthetics; but an untrained mind might unwittinglytranspose the whole æsthetic theory on a purely psychological plane,and involve it again in the errors and contradictions of which itaims at being a conclusive refutation. A study of Croce's logic willrender such a shifting of the perspective impossible. It will showthat a discussion of Croce's æsthetics has no meaning except on thelogical plane on which Croce has put it, and that therefore any seriousobjection to it ought necessarily to imply either a revision of thelogical premises, or a demonstration that the actual logical processesare not rigorously in accord with these premises. What is here saidof Croce's æsthetics is valid also for Croce's economics or ethics,and the reason is obvious. Croce'sLogica is not a manual of logic,in a scholastic and formalistic sense: it is the exposition of hisconception of the logical activity, and therefore the philosophy of hisphilosophy.

This method of approach to the logical problems, although unusual inour times, and antagonistic to the general tendencies of our culture,is not only, as its opponents assume, that of Kant and Hegel, but thatof the whole tradition of European philosophy, beginning with Socrates,Plato, and Aristotle. It was only in epochs of philosophical decadencethat logic reduced itself to a mere formalism or instrumentalism,ism, to a doctrine of the means of thought, as opposed to its properfunction, which is that of inquiring into the nature of thought, andtherefore, since[Pg 143] there is no way by which we can reach reality exceptthrough thought, into the nature of reality itself. To Croce, asbefore him to Hegel, the philosophical tradition is not a capricioussequel of unrelated speculations, but a series of connected effortsthrough which the human mind becomes progressively conscious of itsown functions and structure. Nothing is more alien from him than thattype of philosophical criticism, which exhausts itself in an attemptat reducing under a common denominator apparently similar solutions ofproblems, which in fact are profoundly different in their historicaldetermination: but this consciousness of the historical factor inphilosophy, far from breeding in him a sense of scepticism and of therelativity of truth, impels him to consider every effective thought asa necessary moment of truth, and to represent therefore the successionof effective thoughts, critically separated from what in the variousconcrete philosophies is merely postulated or imagined, as a perpetualintegration of truth. This attitude explains why the immediatefoundations of Croce's logic should be Kant's a priori synthesis andHegel's dialectic, that is, the highest stages of the development ofEuropean thought before the positivistic anti-metaphysical reactionwhich swept away for a time, not the last traces of transcendentalmetaphysics only, but philosophy and logic itself; and why also, amongall the recent critics of Kant and Hegel, Croce should be one of thekeenest and sharpest. His sure grasp of[Pg 144] fundamentals made it easyfor him to demolish all that is artificial and unessential in theirsystems; as is particularly evident in the case of Hegel, who emergedfrom Croce's criticism as the discoverer of one great principle andat the same time the creator, through the misapplication of the sameprinciple, of many a false science.

This return to the philosophical tradition, which between the endof the last and the beginning of this century, was not limited toCroce and to Italy only, was accompanied and indirectly favoured bythe researches of pure scientists on the method of exact and naturalsciences. The economic theory of the scientific concept, such as itappears especially in the works of Mach and Avenarius, and to anunderstanding of which Croce had been prepared by his own studies onMarxism, was probably the most efficient instrument in destroyingfrom within the pseudo-scientific constructions of positivism. Thescientists themselves, by defining the limits of scientific thought,proved the impossibility of building a philosophy which should be atthe same time a synthesis of all particular sciences and a system ofreality. The conclusions of this new scientific methodology are on thewhole accepted by Croce, and the fact that they naturally fall intotheir proper place in his logic is the most valid justification of hismethod, to which the distinction between the concept of philosophy andthe concepts of the sciences is essential.

We need not point to the object of logic, or concept, as we did in aformer chapter to the object of æsthetics, or intuition. The writingof this book implies a belief in its existence, and we could takepractically any page of it as an example of what we mean by concept,or logical knowledge. We shall not therefore pause to confute logicalscepticism, except by repeating the old argument that it is impossibleto deny the existence of the concept except through the formulation ofa concept. Such affirmations as that there is no other knowledge thanthe æsthetic one, or the one which is given by the ineffable intuitionof the mystic, or by practical fictions, are in their turn neitheræsthetic knowledge nor mystical intuitions, nor practical fictions, butaffirmations, however contradictory in themselves, of a universal valueand of an absolute character, that is, concepts. Through them, it ispossible immediately to distinguish the logical form of knowledge, asrepresented by such affirmations, from the æsthetic or representativeone, from the sentimental or practical state of mind of the mystic, andfrom those concepts which are mere empirical fictions. It is evident,in this last instance, that the theory of the fiction cannot be anew fiction, but must belong to an activity of a different kind, thelogical activity, whose value is truth.

Of those three forms of logical scepticism, æstheticism, mysticism,and empiricism, the third one leads us to the distinction between thelogical[Pg 146] concept and the scientific concepts, or fictions. The logicalor pure concept is beyond all individual representations, and musttherefore not contain any particular representative element; but, onthe other hand, being the universal as opposed to the individuality ofrepresentations, 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 asufficiently large fragment of reality that will exhaust them, or suchan infinitesimal one as will not admit them. This is what is meant bysaying that the concept is at the same time universal and concrete,or, in other words, that it is transcendent in respect to every singlerepresentation, and yet immanent in all of them. A third characteristicof the pure concept, besides those of universality and concreteness,is that of expressivity: being a product of knowledge, it must beexpressed and spoken, and cannot be a dumb act of the mind, such aspractical acts are.

The conceptual fictions, or, as Croce called them on account oftheir non-theoretical character, the pseudo-concepts differ from thepure concept in being either concrete and representative but notuniversal, or universal without any possible reference to individualrepresentations, that is, without concreteness. The first class isthat of empirical concepts, which contain some objects or fragmentsof reality, but not the whole of reality: such as the concepts of[Pg 147]house, cat, rose. The second is that of abstract concepts, whichcontain no object or fragment of reality: such as those of trianglein geometry or of free movement in physics. The first are real, butnot rigorous, the second rigorous, but unreal. Neither the ones northe others can be considered as mistaken concepts or errors, sinceafter having criticised them from a logical point of view, we stillcontinue to use them for what they are; nor as imperfect concepts, andpreparatory to the perfect ones, since their formation presupposes theexistence of the perfect and rigorous ones: it would be impossible toconceive the house, the rose, the triangle, before conceiving quantity,quality, existence, and other pure concepts. It is true that in theactual development of thought, conceptual fictions have again andagain given birth to true concepts; but in that case they have losttheir intrinsic nature, and have assumed the characters of the genuinelogical activity. In order to understand the proper function or natureof the conceptual fictions, it is necessary to fix our attention on themoment of their formation, which is practical and not logical. Theirjustification lies in their practical end and in their usefulness: theyare instruments by the help of which we can recall with a single wordvast groups of representations, or which indicate in a single word whatkind of operation is required in order to find certain representations.The act of forming intellectual fictions is neither an act of knowledgenor of[Pg 148] not-knowledge; logically, it is neither rational nor irrational(true or untrue); its rationality is of another order, practical andnot logical. The activity which produces pure concepts, and that whichproduces empirical or abstract concepts, have been called respectivelyReason and Abstract Intellect, or Intuition and Intellect; to whichterminology Croce objects that the word intellect is certainlyinappropriate to a non-theoretical activity. Croce himself is in noneed of a new name for it, since he considers it one with the generalpractical activity, will or action.

The definition that we have given of the pure concept seems to clashagainst an insuperable difficulty arising from the multiplicity ofconcepts. If the concept is an elaboration of reality as a universal,how can we admit the existence of more than one concept? Beautyand truth are both concrete universals, and yet they are not thesame universal: they have the same logical form, but they denotedifferent aspects of reality. If this variety of the concepts, thatis, of the aspects of reality, were insuperable, we should fall fromthe irreducible multiplicity of representations into a not lessirreductible multiplicity of concepts, which would in the end justifya new logical scepticism and take us back to a mystical solution ofthe problem of the unity of reality. The passage from the multipleuniversals to the true universal would be logically impossible, and tobe performed only by the help of some sort of mystical intuition.

The solution of this difficulty has already been hinted at in thediscussion of the relations between intuition and concept, and betweenknowledge 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 reality, as a consequence of the unity ofthe concept, of the form through which only reality is known. But ifwe suppress the distinction, the unity that we reach is an empty andineffable one: a whole is a whole only inasmuch as it has parts, asitis parts; a unity can be thought only through its distinctions.Therefore the unity and the distinctions are both necessary to theconcept: the distinctions are not something outside the concept, butthe concept itself, which is a unity of distinctions. The mind orspirit is one, but it is impossible to think of it as a pure and simpleunity, outside of the forms in which it realizes itself, and of theseforms in their necessary relations. Which is but a more comprehensiveway of saying what we have already said speaking of one of those formsin particular, the æsthetic one, that it is impossible to conceive anyof them except by determining its relations with the others.

It is necessary, however, not to convert these distinctions of theconcept into abstractions: by approximation, and for a practicalpurpose, we can speak of a given action as a theoretical or practicalone, an economic or moral one. In fact, in every fragment of realitywe find the universal,[Pg 150] and therefore all the forms of the universal.But on the other hand it is impossible to think any concrete datum,and to recognize it as an affirmation of the spirit as a whole, unlesswe distinguish each of its aspects in the most rigorous fashion. Weshall then have a criticism of art and poetry, from the æsthetic pointof view; or of philosophy, from the logical one; and a moral judgmentwhich takes into account only the individual moral initiative. Thedistinctions of the concept are then used as directing principles ofthought, but not, in the way empirical concepts are used, as criteriafor a classification of objects; nor, again, as characteristics ofepochs of actual historical development, which in the end reducethemselves to types of material classification.

Croce's theory of the unity and distinctions of the concept coincideswith the old division of concepts into universal, particular, andsingular ones. The true logical definition is reached only bydetermining the singularity of a distinction in relation with the otherdistinctions (particularity), and with the whole (universality). Forinstance, the concept of beauty is intuition (singularity), knowledge(particularity), and finally spirit or mind (universality). Thesymbol corresponding to this peculiar relation is not that of a fineor succession, but of a circle: there is not a first and a last termof the series, a beginning and an end, but a perpetual revolution,in which every distinction in turn may[Pg 151] appear as the beginning andthe end of the series. Art or philosophy, knowledge or action, may bepostulated with equal reason as the end of the spirit: the true end,however, is not any of the particular forms, but only the spirit ormind or reality as a whole.

Readers who are familiar with Hegelian logic will at once perceivethe difference between Croce's and Hegel's treatment of logicaldistinctions. There is no attempt on the part of Croce to apply to themthe dialectic process, which pervades the whole of Hegel's philosophy,and which is retained by Croce only in its legitimate sphere which isnot that of distinctions but of oppositions. The dialectic process, ofwhich the remote ancestor is Plato, and the more immediate forbearsthose Renaissance philosophers, Cusanus and Bruno, who more or lessobscurely affirmed theprincipium coincidentiæ oppositorum, onlywith Hegel reaches its rigorous logical expression. The most famousinstance of its application is to be found in Hegel's formula of theopposition 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 thesame thing in different words, we cannot think the one without theother, and we do actually think the one and the other when we think theactual reality, which is neither being nor non-being, but becoming.Being and non-being are a true couple of opposites, as ideal and real,positive and negative, value and non-value, activity and[Pg 152] passivity,and so on. By the application of the dialectic process, all thesecouples are shown to be not couples of concepts, but single concepts,each couple containing the affirmation and the negation of a singleconcept. Croce's criticism of Hegel is founded on an interpretation ofthe dialectic process as logically valid for such couples only, andinapplicable to the distinctions of the concept, or to empirical andabstract concepts; and this criticism, while emphasizing the importanceof Hegel's main contribution to philosophical thought, sweeps away atone stroke all that in his philosophy has generally been considered asmost distinctly Hegelian both by his followers and by his adversaries.

Croce's interest in such couples of opposites as those that we havementioned is very far from being as keen as Hegel's. Their dialecticsolution into single concepts is implicit in every phase of Croce'sphilosophy. This can best be seen in the constant interchange of suchwords as spirit and reality; each of them, when taken by itself, apure, 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 withinthe distinctions of the concept, the dialectic process is constantlyapplied by Croce to such oppositions as those of good and evil, trueand false, beautiful and ugly, which are nothing but the doubleaspect,[Pg 153] affirmative and negative, respectively, of the concepts ofgoodness, and truth, and beauty. We need only recall what we have saidof Croce's conception of æsthetic value, and of value in general.The dialectic process is the logical structure of Croce's concept ofvalue. The positive element of each concept is the only real one, anda negative judgment of value is not a purely logical judgment, buta statement to which is added the expression of a desire or of anexigency. If we say: A is immoral, we mean: A follows his own immediatepleasure (a logical statement), and also: A ought to follow a higherend (the expression of a desire). A positive judgment of value, on theother hand, coincides entirely with a logical judgment, or a statementof fact. The opposition of value to fact is of the same kind as thatof spirit to reality; verbal and apparent and not logical and real.The underlying reality of the opposition can be grasped only throughthe distinction; what in the opposition is a negative and therefore amere abstraction can never be anything but a positive value of anotherorder, a distinct form of activity. The action that we have judgedas morally evil, if it is an action at all, belongs to the economicorder, is economically rational, directed towards a particular endwhich confers on it its particular value; and the same applies toall the other categories of reality, in which error and evil cannotbe introduced except by the substitution of one form for the other.It is impossible to distinguish a concept from its opposite as[Pg 154] twoconcepts; but when a distinction is introduced, the opposition losesits negative character, and identifies itself with a distinct butpositive value. Error and evil as such are never present except in theact that transcends them, in the conscience that, realizing itself in ahigher sphere, turns against them and condemns them. It is superfluousto point to the importance that this process lends to the distinctionsthemselves, which are now seen at last not as mere logical instruments,but as the actual differentiations of reality, the necessary conditionsof all life and progress.

The concept does not exist outside its verbal expression, but therelation between logical thought and language, because of the purelyæsthetic or intuitive nature of language, is not of the rigorouscharacter which is postulated by the Aristotelian logician, and, inmore recent times, by the student of symbolic logic, who both assumelanguage to be an essentially logical function. It would be impossiblefor Croce to fall into that extreme of idealism which is the commonvice of the verbal realist, for whom propositions, judgments, orsyllogisms have a kind of absolute reality of their own, independentof the mind that thinks them. It may seem paradoxical to assert thatnowhere is Croce's realism more apparent than in his treatment of theverbal forms of the concept; and yet his criticism of the old logicalprinciples and forms, running parallel to that of the rhetoricalcategories and genres in the field of æsthetics, allows him to[Pg 155] reachthe actual workings of the logical activity with much greater intimacythan is possible through any kind of formalistic logic.

The logical judgment, or concept, appears in two main forms: thedefinition, and the individual judgment. In the definition, thesubject is one with the predicate, both being universal; in theindividual judgment, the subject is an individual, the predicate auniversal. "The intuition is the æsthetic form of the spirit," is adefinition; "TheDivine Comedy is poetry," is an individual judgment.The individual judgment is one with the perception, or perceptivejudgment, with the historical judgment, and, for the reason givenbefore, with the positive judgment of value; it is the last and mostperfect form of knowledge. But the distinction between the definitionand the individual judgment is not an ultimate and irreducible one.The concrete logical act is always an individual judgment, that is,the affirmation of the unity of the individual and the universal inrelation to a particular subject; and every definition is an individualjudgment inasmuch as it cannot be but the solution of a particularproblem, individually and historically determined. The particularproblem, the group of facts, from which a particular definitionarises, is the individual subject of which the definition predicatesthe concept. This identification of the definition and the individualjudgment disposes of the familiar distinctions of formal and materialtruths, of truths of reason and of fact, and of analytical[Pg 156] andsynthetical judgments; which all are reduced to mere abstractions,partial aspects of the only logical act, consisting in the thinking ofthe pure concept, as a concrete universal.

The practical imitations of the concept, or pseudo-concepts, also mayappear in the double form of definitions and individual judgments.From the empirical concepts we can form empirical judgments, whichconsist in the inclusion of an individual subject within a class ortype, and therefore can also be called classificatory judgments. Fromthe abstract concepts, the passage to the individual subject cannot beeffected without the intervention of an empirical concept, that is,without a previous reduction of the individual subjects to classes andtypes: this reduction enables us to form empirico-abstract judgments,or judgments of numeration and mensuration. The function of thesejudgments is, as that of the concepts with which they are related, nottheoretical, but practical: to classify or to enumerate is not the sameas to understand, though they are both essential operations of thehuman mind. The corresponding judgments are therefore called by Crocepseudo-judgments, or practical imitations of the individual judgment.

The reduction of the pure concept to the individual judgment is thefundamental innovation of Croce's logic. It entirely disposes of anyform of transcendental thought, of an Absolute or a Universal assome beyond and above reality, and therefore of the[Pg 157] last remnantsof metaphysics in philosophy. It means, translated into terms ofcommon language, that there is no thought outside the thinking ofindividual 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 moreact of thought. In the light of this doctrine, the relation betweenthe intuition and the concept, between æsthetic 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, creative mental act, by which theindividual is known as universal, that is, not simply known, butunderstood. Since Kant, an autonomous creative act of the human mindhas received in modern philosophy the name ofa priori synthesis, asynthesis which cannot be resolved into its components, or materialelements, because its form, and therefore its true being, cannot betraced in them, but is imposed on them by the mind. Croce's intuitionis an æsthetica priori synthesis, through which the obscure psychicmaterial rises to the light of consciousness; his concept, a logicala priori synthesis, in which the intuition is no longer form, butmatter, subject to a new form which is judgment and reason. Theapriori synthesis is thus employed by Croce as the peculiar dialecticprocess of the distinctions of the concept, the rigorous logical formof the double-grade relation between the[Pg 158] individual and the universal,between intuition and concept, between knowledge and action, and, as weshall see in his philosophy of the practical, between the economic andthe 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(æsthetic or logical, economic or ethical), that is, by constantlyre-creating itself and its own reality and values.

VI. THE FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE [1]

The elementary forms of knowledge—Philosophy as the pure concept—Development of Croce's theory of history—The identity of history andphilosophy—Subjectivity and objectivity—Distinctions and divisionsof history—The historical determination of philosophy—The economictheory of science—The natural sciences—History and science—Thenaturalistic method and the concept of nature—Mathematical processes.

The result of Croce's inquiry into the forms of man's theoreticalactivity can be summed up by saying that there are two pure theoreticalforms, the intuition and the concept, of which the second can besubdivided for convenience' sake into the definition and the individualjudgment; and two modes of the practical elaboration of knowledge, theempirical concept and the abstract concept, from which are derivedthe classificatory judgment and the judgment of numeration. Alreadyin æsthetics we have found no rigorous criterion of distinctionbetween the general intuitive activity of man, as it manifests itselfin language, and those empirically constituted bodies of particularintuitions, which we call Poetry and the Arts: every man is a poetand an artist, though we reserve these names only for those amongourselves in whom the æsthetic activity manifests[Pg 160] itself in ahigher degree, dominates the whole life of the individual spirit.The concept and the pseudo-concepts are also elementary, fundamentalforms of knowledge, of which all men partake: every man, as he isa poet, is also a philosopher and an historian, a scientist and amathematician: but, again, we reserve these names only for the mostconspicuous manifestations of those common spiritual activities, andform the empirical concepts of Philosophy and History, of Science andMathematics. We may speak of vulgar knowledge and of pure or scientificknowledge, but only by approximation and without forgetting that theonly claim to rationality and intelligibility on the part of pureknowledge lies in its relationship with the elementary forms, in thesame way as Poetry owes its power and beauty to the language in whichit spreads its roots. A particular treatment of these higher degreesof knowledge is not, therefore, logically justified; the problemsthat they present are the same that have been met with in the generaldiscussion of the theoretical activity, and all they will have to offerwill be but a confirmation, and in some points a clarification, of whathas already been said.

As Art is intuition, so Philosophy is the pure concept: it is easy tosee that all the formal definitions of Philosophy that have ever beengiven, as science of the first principles, of the ultimate causes, ofthe origins of things, of norms, of values, of categories, are mereverbal variants of the pure concept. Even[Pg 161] the most materialistic andrealistic philosophies, since matter itself or nature or reality areassumed by them as principles of universal validity, as concepts orideas, fall within the limits of this definition. In this sense thereis no philosophy which is not idealistic: the differences between onephilosophy and another are nothing but differences in the elaborationof the pure concept. What follows from this identification cation ofphilosophy with the pure concept is that all philosophies are, ofnecessity, systematic, inasmuch as it is impossible to think the pureconcept as a singular or particular one, outside its relations withthe whole. This systematic character belongs to every philosophicalproposition, and not only to the actual systems of philosophy: thesolution of every particular philosophical problem implies a visionof that problem in its universality, that is, in the system. We areconstantly reminded of this exigency by the fact that a new andoriginal elaboration of particular problems does actually react on thewhole of our thought; and that we are often compelled to revise ourfundamental opinions by the discovery of a difficulty which at firstpresents itself in one sphere of thought only.

Of such a process, the whole of Croce's philosophy is a continuousexemplification, but nowhere so clearly apparent as in the progressof his conception of history. His first step had been that ofreducing history to the general concept of art, thereby emphasizingthe concreteness and individuality of[Pg 162] history, as opposed to theabstractness of the natural sciences, the concepts of which, in thatearly stage, he could not yet distinguish from those of philosophy. IntheEstetica the conception is still practically the same, historyresulting from the intersection of art and philosophy through theapplication of the predicate of existence to the intuitive material.In his firstLineamenti di Logica, history appears as the ultimateproduct of the theoretical spirit, "the sea to which the river of artflowed, swollen by the waters of the river of philosophy." But in thesameLineamenti he had not yet arrived at the identification of thedefinition and the individual judgment, which in his secondLogicaconstitutes the final form of the pure concept, Croce's originalinterpretation of Kant'sa priori synthesis. Between the firstand the secondLogica, Croce wrote hisFilosofia della pratica,in which he denied the duality of intention and action, as in theEstetica he had denied the duality of intuition and expression: anintention which was not also an action appeared to him, as we shallsee, inconceivable. It was by analogy with his treatment of thisduality, that he solved the duality between the concept (in the senseof definition) and the individual judgment, which was also a dualityof philosophy as antecedent and history as consequent, as he perceivedthat a concept which is not at the same time a judgment of theparticular is as unreal as an intention which is not at the same timean action.

These are the successive steps by which Croce[Pg 163] reached his doctrine ofthe identity of history and philosophy, one of the most discussed andof the least understood among his theories. We shall come back to itlater. But a few more hints on its meaning can already be given here.It is clear that by introducing the predicate of existence as essentialto history Croce had already abandoned the conception of history aspure, that is, non-logical, non-intellectualized intuition: but thepredicate of existence is insufficient to form a judgment, withoutthe 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 implicitin the historical judgment, even when it is not openly enunciated.Such judgments as: This thing is, or has been, seem to present theproper form of the historical judgment; no other predicates than thatof existence are here visible, but my talking ofthis thing impliesthat I know whatthis thing is; the other predicates are concealedin the subject. Every historical statement is, therefore, a perfectindividual judgment. Its concrete and individual character, which Crocehad asserted in his early theory, is here maintained by the presence ofthe subject, though the subject itself, in history, is seen not in itsintuitive purity, as in poetry, but as a concrete determination of theconcept. The identification of philosophy and history is not so much[Pg 164]the effect of a more intellectualized view of the historical processes,as of the progressive consciousness acquired by Croce of the inherentconcreteness and individuality of the universal—of that realisticview of the concept as expressed by his elaboration of the logicalapriori synthesis.

The old distinction between a subjective and an objective treatment ofhistory receives a new light from the foregoing considerations. It isimpossible to make history without judgment, and, therefore, historyis in a sense irreducibly subjective. But the subjectivity of historyis not the arbitrary and capricious subjectivity of the individualhistorian, who introduces his own passions and tendencies into thehistorical narrative: it is the subjectivity of thought, of the earnestand dispassionate research of truth, which coincides with the onlyconceivable objectivity. What we call objective truth is not reached byrenouncing thought, but only by making our thought deeper and truer.The historian who permeates with his thought his recreation of thepast (and if he did not, he would be recreating the past as poetry,and imagination, not as history) needs not add a judgment of value tohis statements of fact: the identity of value and fact presents itselfonce more to us in the intrinsic structure of the historical judgment.Whatever the aspect of reality to which we turn our attention, truehistory and true criticism coincide.

A consequence of this identification of history and[Pg 165] philosophy is thatthe only legitimate divisions of history are those that correspond tothe distinctions of the concept,—history of knowledge and of action,of art, of thought, of the practical activity of man; and that therelation among the different branches of history is similar to that ofthe distinctions of the concept within the concept itself: that is,the history of one particular form of human activity is nothing butthe history of the whole spirit of man as it realizes itself underone of its aspects, a statement that we have already illustrated whenspeaking of the history of art and poetry. Other divisions of historyare possible and useful, deduced from empirical concepts (such as thestate, the church, the drama, the novel, society, religion, etc.), butthey are divisions of practical convenience, mnemonic and didascalieexpedients, and not rigorous distinctions. Empirical concepts are,in fact, in constant use in history, but as instruments, not asconstituents of historical thought. History is of the individualsub specie universalis, and not of the practical generalizations.This peculiar function of the empirical concept in history marksthe distinction between history and the natural sciences, the finalirreducibility of history to sociology.

As history is reduced to philosophy through the identificationof the historical with the individual judgment, so philosophy isreduced to history through the identification of the definition withthe individual judgment. Since every philosophical[Pg 166] proposition isan answer to a given question, and every question or problem isindividually and historically determined, the whole course of thehistory of philosophy is in constant function of the general course ofhistory. This is the truth contained in Hegel's formula of the identityof philosophy and history of philosophy, which had been revived inItaly, when Croce was meditating on these problems, by his friendGentile: a formula which he finally accepted and transformed into thatof the identity of history and philosophy, in accordance with his viewof philosophy as a moment or grade of the spirit of man. Thea priorisynthesis which constitutes the reality both of the definition andof the individual judgment is, at the same time, the reality of bothphilosophy and history. The distinction between the two is a purelydidactic one: in the first the emphasis is laid on the definition andthe system, in the second on the individual judgment and the narrative.But because the narrative includes the concept, every narrativeclarifies and solves philosophical problems, and, on the other hand,every system of concepts throws light on the facts which are presentto the mind. The confirmation of the soundness of the system is in thepower it displays to interpret and narrate history; the touchstone ofphilosophy is history. The concept, in affirming itself, conquers thewhole of reality, which becomes one with it.

We shall deal more briefly with Croce's treatment[Pg 167] of the organizationof the empirical and abstract concepts in the natural and mathematicalsciences because his views coincide in their general lines with theeconomic theory of science, which is the view of scientific methodelaborated by the scientists themselves in the last decades, and differfrom it only in so far as they are comprehended in a vaster system ofthought. Croce's polemic against pseudo-scientific philosophy, whichwas amply justified at the beginning of his career, has now lost agood deal of its actuality, since the ambitious attempts to organizethe concepts of science into a system of ultimate truth have finallycollapsed 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 scientificmethods, though sufficient for his purposes, is far from being asexhaustive as his discussion of either art or philosophy.

The natural sciences are systems of empirical concepts, that is, ofpractical elaborations of knowledge, and, therefore, they do not belongto the sphere of theoretical, but to that of practical activity. Thisproposition must not be understood as referring to the practicalends, or applications, of science: action requires a knowledge of theindividual fact with which we are to deal, and, therefore, the trueantecedent of action is not science, but an individual (or historical)judgment. The natural sciences are not subservient to action, but[Pg 168]they are actions in the service of knowledge. Because of the empiricaland pragmatic character of their concepts, it is impossible eitherto unify them in a single concept, or to divide them according torigorous distinctions. The natural laws which they evolve are the sameempirical concepts, which give rise to the creation of classes andtypes, expressed in a different form; their empirical character isconfirmed by what Boutroux called their contingency, which is nothingbut the reflex of their arbitrary formation. Even the most general ofthose laws, that of the constancy and uniformity of nature, assumed asthe foundation of so much pseudo-scientific thought in the nineteenthcentury, is a mere postulate of practical opportunity, without whichit would be hardly possible to construct any science: it is the firsteconomic principle of scientific method, not an attribute of objectivereality.

The truth of the natural sciences, that truth of which they and theirempirical concepts are an abbreviated transcription, is the historicaldatum, the knowledge of actual individual happenings. History is thehot and fluid mass which the naturalist solidifies in the schematicmoulds of classes and types. The naturalistic discoverer is, therefore,an historical discoverer and the revolutions of the natural sciencesare steps in the progress of historical knowledge. The difference inmethod between history and the natural sciences is not due to thesupposed difference between a higher and a lower reality[Pg 169] (spirit andnature), or to the fact that nature has no history; nature is perpetualactivity and change, that is, history, as much as the spirit, but theprogress of nature is less clearly perceptible and less interestingto us than that of the human reality, and, therefore, an abbreviatedtranscription is more apt to satisfy our needs in relation to theknowledge of what we call nature than to that of the spirit. Thenature that has no history, and which is opposed in dualistic systemsof philosophy to the spirit of man, is not the actual, historicalreality of nature, but the empirical concepts of the natural sciences,their classes, types and laws, conceived as an objective reality andsubstituted for that reality. In this sense, nature is not a specialobject, but only a method of treatment, as is proved by the factthat that same method, applied to the so-called higher and spiritualreality, by such sciences as psychology, sociology, or comparativephilology, creates the same kind of naturalistic categories in thedomain of the spirit. It is of nature in this sense that the idealistdenies the real existence, since the time when Bishop Berkeleyrepudiated matter as a mere abstraction. And here again, the scientistcomes to the support of the idealist with his keen awareness ofthe pragmatic character of his hypotheses on the ultimate physicalconstituents of reality.

It is through this theory of the natural sciences that Croce succeededin eliminating naturalistic[Pg 170] transcendence from his thought, and,singularly enough, his first impulse in this direction came to himfrom his æsthetic studies, through his criticism of literary genres,of grammars, of the particular arts and of rhetorical forms. He sawhow through them "nature" introduces itself, as a construction of thehuman spirit, in the pure spiritual world of art; and having deniedits reality in art, he proceeded to discover it everywhere not asreality, but as an product of abstracting processes. This must not beinterpreted as meaning that the naturalistic method is an illegitimatehybrid: it has its uses in its proper place, and not less in thestudy of mind than in the study of nature. It is only by mistakingits constructions or fictions for realities, that we can be temptedto deduce from the natural sciences a philosophy of nature, or fromthe applications of the naturalistic method to art and to the historyof man, an æsthetics or a philosophy of history. But the naturalsciences themselves are not responsible for the errors of philosophicalnaturalism. That such errors should not be limited exclusively tophilosophers, but very often appear within the body of sciences likebiology or psychology or sociology, is easily explained by the factthat no scientist is a pure scientist: but poor philosophy does notbecome science simply because it finds place in scientific books.The quarrel between vitalists and mechanicists, for one instance,is a philosophical (or historical), not a scientific dispute: andit[Pg 171] reveals itself, ultimately, as the opposition not of conceivablerealities, but merely of different methods in the elaboration of thehistorical datum. The coherent and clear-minded biologist is to-daya mechanicist, not because mechanism is the essence of reality, butbecause it is the postulate of his research. The vitalist, on the otherhand, is inevitably brought by the trend of his thought to abandonscience and to become more or less deliberately a philosopher. It isenough to mention in this connection such names as Driesch or Bergson.

The fictitious or conventional character of mathematics is stillmore apparent than that of the natural sciences; and we shall notadd anything to what we have said in the preceding chapter about theabstract concept, the non-concrete universal, which is the distinctiveprocess of mathematical thought. The application of the mathematicalprocesses, through the empirical concepts, to the historical datum,gives origin to what we have called the judgment of numeration (andmensuration), and to the mathematical sciences of nature. All that hasbeen observed of the natural sciences in general is valid for thesealso. Their truth is still only the truth of the intuitive, historicaldatum of which the empirical concepts are practical elaborations; theaddition of a further practical elaboration, the abstract concept,can add to their mnemonic or, as it is more often called, technicalefficiency, but not to the value of their original content. This[Pg 172]process, as the purely naturalistic one, can be applied to the human aswell as to the natural reality, but it is evident that its usefulnessdecreases in the passage from the one to the other, following the samestandards that apply to the natural sciences in general, those of therelative perceptibility and importance of the individual happening.It is at its highest in physics or astronomy, less notable in biologyor economics; practically inexistent in psychology or sociology, thetwo sciences that suffer not less from the delusions of misappliedstatistics than from the invasions of cheap philosophy. Croce's theoryof science, as we have already remarked, differs from the generallyaccepted methodology of modern science only in its context, whichis usually agnostic in, the pure scientist, while, in Croce, itconsists in the affirmation of the pure concept, or of the autonomy ofphilosophy: a proposition with which the scientist qua scientist has noreason to quarrel. In both cases, the autonomy of scientific thoughtis only relative, and the difference of context is a difference inthe determination of its limits. In both cases, scientific thought isrecognised as thoroughly legitimate only within limits. The cry of thebankruptcy of science, of which we heard so much a few years ago, is asmeaningless for Croce as for the pure scientist; science cannot becomebankrupt except by over-stepping its logical limits, that is, by firstceasing to be science and becoming the ape of philosophy.

VII. THE THEORY OF ERROR [1]

The practical origin of theoretical error—Confirmations ofthis doctrine—The forms of error—Æstheticism and empiricism;mathematicism—Philosophism: the philosophy of history and thephilosophy of nature—Mythologism: philosophy and religion—Dualism,scepticism, mysticism—The conversion to truth—The function of error.

One of the most original developments of Croce's thought—a doctrinethat does not owe its validity only to its connection with the system,since we can find it adumbrated already in such widely divergentphilosophies as those of Socrates and Thomas Aquinas, of Descartesand Rosmini, but which in Croce's system acquires a new and widermeaning—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 ornegativity, the opposite of the logical value which is truth, andtherefore inexistent outside the moment of opposition. As there arenot two values in æsthetics, the beautiful and the ugly, but one only,beauty or expression, of which ugliness or non-expression is merely thenegative aspect, so in logic also there is but one value, thought ortruth, and error is non-thought, that which[Pg 174] logically has no being orreality. There is no thought which is not a thinking of truth.

Let us pause for one instant to consider this last proposition, whichat first sight undoubtedly has a somewhat paradoxical air. And yet itis impossible not to accept it, unless we are willing to fall into themost radical scepticism, which would imply a renunciation not only ofevery form of thought, but even, since there is no action which is notfounded on knowledge, of every kind of action. If we believed thatit were possible for our thought to think that which is not true, noexternal criterion or standard of truth could even be substituted forthat which thought intrinsically would lack, since the apprehensionof such external standards would in itself be an act of thought, andtherefore suffer from the indetermination and uncertainty of thoughtitself. This belief in the validity of human thought is in fact,however disguised or even openly denied, present in every thinkingand acting being: every thought, every action of man is an implicitdeclaration of this faith. And once we have consciously acquired it,as an inalienable, intrinsic characteristic of our whole spiritualactivity, it is evident that it leaves no place for faith as such, foran obscure, independent faculty, a mystical intuition, different fromand superior to our human thought, and which could mysteriously endowthought itself with the gratuitous gift of truth.

And yet, after we have denied the logical existence[Pg 175] of error, we arestill confronted with the mass of positive errors which we can moreor less easily identify in the course of history and in our dailyexperience. Positive errors, that is, affirmations of knowing thatwhich we do not know, are real products of our activity: but since thetheoretical value, truth, is absent from them, they cannot be productsof the theoretical activity. They must therefore be products of theonly other form of spiritual activity, the practical. Ignorance orobscurity or doubt are not errors; they are the inexhaustible matter towhich the spirit of man is perpetually giving form and reality. To beaware of one's ignorance is in fact the first stage in the research oftruth, theinitìum sapientæ. Thought and truth are affirmation; thepositive error is an affirmation also, which simulates truth. We cannotthink an error, but we can pass from thought to action, by making afalse affirmation, a purely practical affirmation, which consists inthe act of producing sounds to which no thought corresponds, or, whichamounts to the same, only a thought without value, without coherence,without truth. What we have qualified in its negative aspect as atheoretical error manifests itself in its positive aspect as an act ofwill, directed to a certain end, a practical act, and, as such, havingits own rationality, which is neither logical, nor moral, but purelyeconomic, consisting in the adequacy of that particular affirmationto the individual purpose by which it has been prompted.[Pg 176] Moralityrequires that the thinking spirit should realize itself as truth; andtherefore the economic act which is error, though logically unreal,though economically useful, finds inevitably its ultimate sanction in amoral condemnation.

Though this doctrine may appear unfamiliar to the logician, yet we allconstantly depend on it in our analysis of error. We know that error isdue to the passions or interests of men, which cloud the intellect, andthe more an error is foreign to our own ways of thinking, the easier itis for us to discover the practical motives which help us to explainit away. That category of errors which goes under the name of nationalprejudices, for instance, is transparent in its origins to every manbelonging to a nation other than the one in which a particular setof such prejudices is commonly accepted. And other categories oferrors, social, professional, religious, and so on, are of the samekind, affecting only certain classes of men, because of the passionsor interests or traditions which belong to them by reason of theirpeculiar practical associations. In the field of politics, or in anykind of heated discussion, this research of the practical motive iseven pushed to the extreme, and the bad faith of the adversary becomesan obvious axiom. In such cases, the same passions being active onboth sides, the research of the practical motive is evidently not pureand disinterested, but is itself moved by a practical motive, andtherefore likely to produce a[Pg 177] new error, rather than a clear judgment.Therefore, though rigorously speaking there is no difference betweenthe error which is a deliberate lie and that which is due to a moreor less justifiable weakness, and there is no error which is not inbad faith, which is not due to a deliberate act of will, yet, froman empirical standpoint we may distinguish between errors in bad andin good faith, and recommend tolerance and indulgence for the latterkind. But tolerance is not indifference. Croce went so far, in drawingthe consequences of his doctrine, as to justify the Holy Inquisition;and in fact all our modern advocates of religious and politicaltolerance have really shaken our faith in its methods, but not in itsprinciple, which is that of the moral responsibility of error. The HolyInquisition moreover was bound to clash with the freedom, which is notthe freedom of error but the freedom of truth, because it placed itsfaith in a static, extrahuman truth, as against the veritasfiliatemporis, the truth which is engendered and conditioned by history, bythe peculiar problems and intellectual climate of the age, and which isthe object of our modern faith; and therefore defeated its own end bystriking at the roots of the value for the upholding of which it hadbeen established.

Passing from the problem of the nature of error to that of the formsactually assumed by philosophic error, Croce accepts Vico's definitionof error, as an improper combination of ideas, and therefore[Pg 178] definessuch forms, by deducing the number of possible improper combinationsfrom his own conception of the legitimate forms of theoreticalactivity. This phenomenology of error is one of the main tasks oflogic, while the refutation of particular philosophical errors is thetask of philosophy as a whole. We shall rapidly survey these generalforms, in which it will be easy for the reader to recognize the logical(or illogical) structure of many particular errors criticised in thepreceding chapters.

The pure concept can be improperly combined with, or exchanged for,the pure intuition (art), or the empirical and abstract concept (thenatural and mathematical sciences); or it can be improperly splitin its unity of intuition and concept (a priori synthesis), andarbitrarily put together again, either as a concept which simulates anintuition or as an intuition which simulates a concept. Hence the fivefundamental forms of error: æstheticism, empiricism, mathematicism,philosophism, and historicism or mythologism. To these must be addedother forms originated from combinations of the preceding ones:dualism, scepticism, and mysticism.

We have dealt elsewhere with both æstheticism and empiricism. Ofthe first, the most recent form is that which pretends to build aphilosophy of pure intuition or of pure experience, that is, of anexperience which, not being touched by any intellectual category,is also pure intuition. Empiricism is practically all the currentphilosophy of our[Pg 179] times, from the positivism of Comte and Spencerto the more modern types of the so-called philosophic elaboration ofscientific knowledge. Mathematicism is a rarer and more aristocraticform of error: it does not consist in the application of themathematical method to the exposition of philosophical concepts,which is a mere didactic expedient, more or less convenient, butinsufficient to characterize the quality of the concepts themselves;its true exponents are those philosophers or mathematicians whotake mathematical fictions, such as the dimensions of space, forrealities, and proceed to speculate on such a foundation. The nearfuture seems to promise a great extension of this kind of philosophy,through the prevailing interest in the theory of relativity, whichis fondly supposed to contain the germs of a revolution in thought.Both empiricism and mathematicism lead to a dualistic conception ofreality, by opposing either the facts of scientific and historicalknowledge, that is, a collection of facts limited in space and time,to an infinite reality beyond that knowledge, or our actual world ofspace and time, to worlds, spaces and times mathematically conceivable,but of which we have no experience. The passage from this dualism tospiritualism and other kinds of superstition, which in our times seemto be so closely associated with certain forms of pseudo-scientificthought, is of the easiest. The naturalistic experiments by whichwe attempt to peer into the mystery of the so-called unknown orunknowable,[Pg 180] hoping to detect the spirit itself as matter, howeversubtle or light, and such theories as that of the identity of thespiritual world with the four-dimensional space, are evidences of thisimmediate connection between superstition and science, for which,obviously, not science is responsible, and not ignorance even, buta chain of more or less deliberate errors in each case reducible todefinite practical motives. From the point of view of the ethics ofintellect, there is no difference between the frank impostor who ismoved to speculate on other people's feelings only by greed, and thescientist 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, philosophism, consistingin the abuse of the purely logical element, and therefore in anusurpation on the part of philosophy against either history or science,tending to the formation of a philosophy of history and of a philosophyof nature, is less common now than in times of more active and originalspeculation. The most conspicuous examples are to be met with amongGermany's classical thinkers; and we have already hinted at theconnection between one particular logical error, the undue extensionof the dialectic process to the distinctions of the concept, and tothe empirical concept, which is the basis of Hegel's philosophies ofhistory and nature. Both these sciences attempt ana priori deductionof the individual and of the empirical, a process which is[Pg 181] in itselfabsurd and contradictory. They duplicate history and science with aseries of concepts, which, unless they are the same which constitutehistory and science (in which case we have history and we have science,and not a philosophy of history or of nature), are necessarily emptyof any concrete determinations. But though Croce points to philosophyof history and philosophy of nature as to the two typical instancesof philosophism, yet he is ready to acknowledge that a good dealof thought that has gone under those names in the past has had alarge influence in moulding many of our historical and philosophicalconceptions, and, in the case of the second one, in helping us torealize the unity and spirituality of nature, and to recognize in thehistory of nature the same principles operating in the history of man.Croce's idealism, in fact, does not divide nature from the spiritexcept in the logical sense which has been made clear in the precedingchapter; it does not relegate nature in an unknowable sphere beyondthe reach of human minds. It unifies spirit and nature, buta partesubjecti, and nota parte objecti, and reduces nature to the spirit,rather than the spirit to nature; which is the only process that makessuch a unification intelligible and significant.

The last of the five fundamental forms of philosophic error consistsin the arbitrary separation of the subject from its predicate, ofhistory from philosophy, and in the consequent position of the subjectas predicate, that is, of a mere representation as a[Pg 182] concept. Thismay sound rather abstruse, but can immediately be made clear by addingthat what Croce has in mind in this definition is the production ofmyths. This error he therefore calls either historicism (from thelogical process by which it is produced), or mythologism (from theform which it commonly assumes). A myth is to him not a mere poeticor æsthetic imagination, but necessarily includes an affirmation orlogical judgment. It differs also from allegory, in which the relationestablished between a poetic fiction and a concept is always moreor less openly declared to be arbitrary, and the two terms are notconfused with each other. In a myth, on the contrary, the poeticfiction assumes the actual function of the concept, transforming bothphilosophy and history into a fable or legend. Errors of this classare frequent in every system of philosophy, when the thinker, eitherconsciously and deliberately, as in the case of Plato, or unwittingly,as in Kant'sDing an sich or in Schopenhauer'sWill, fills thegaps of his real speculation with a mere image. But mythologism ismore generally the form of religious error, since there is no religionwithout a logical affirmation embodied in a myth. If myth and religioncoincide, as the distinction between myth and philosophy is that oferror and truth, of a false and a true philosophy, we must concludethat religion as truth is one with philosophy, or, as Croce expressesit, that the true religion is philosophy; and this appears to Croce tobe the conclusion of all ancient and[Pg 183] modern thought in regard to thehistory of religions. Philosophies have sprung up in all times fromthe soil of religious thought, and more or less completely resolved inthemselves, and logically clarified, the obscure substance of myth.This is Croce's clear-cut, unequivocal solution of the problem of therelations between philosophy and religion: there is no place reservedanywhere in his system for an either internal or external revelationother than that perpetual revelation of truth, which is at the sametime history and philosophy.

From the possible combinations of these five fundamental formsof error, three more complex ones are derived: dualism, when twocontradictory methods, one logically legitimate and the otherillegitimate, or both equally false, are brought together, andconsidered to be both philosophically valid; scepticism, when themind, in the presence of confusion and error, asserts the mystery ofreality, which is the problem itself, but denies its own power todeal with it; and finally, mysticism, when even that last semblanceof thought, by which the sceptic affirms that there is a mystery, isabandoned, and the immediate actuality of life is regarded to be theonly truth. Dualism leads inevitably to the conception of a doublereality, and we have already seen how the whole of Croce's speculationcontinually tends towards the logical unification of dualities, as withspirit and nature, value and fact. Every philosophical problem seemsto present itself to his mind as involved in a dualistic[Pg 184] difficulty;every solution becomes satisfactory to him only when the last shredsof dualism are eliminated from it. While scepticism is a logical error(the affirmation of a purely negative position), it contains withinitself one of the essential moments of every progress in thought, thescepsis, or philosophical doubt, which is the negation of an error,and therefore the germ of every true affirmation. As for mysticism,we have dealt with it elsewhere as being one of the untenable aspectsof logical scepticism; we may add that, if it ever obeyed the laws ofinternal coherence, we should not even be able to discuss it, since itsonly conceivable expression would be an ecstatic silence.

The same character of necessity that invests these forms of the logicalerror is present also in the false solutions of other philosophicalproblems, and we need only refer the reader to our discussion ofæsthetic theories. In both cases, not only the number, but also thelogical succession, of the necessary forms of error, depends on thenumber of possible arbitrary combinations of the spiritual forms,or concepts of reality. But infinite, on the other hand, are theindividual forms of error, as infinite are the individual forms oftruth: the problems are always historically conditioned and variable,and so are also the solutions and the false solutions, determined byfeelings, passions, and interests.

From error to truth, there is no gradual ascent. The passage isdescribed by Croce as a kind of spiritual[Pg 185] conversion: the erringspirit, fleeing from the light, must convert itself in a researchingspirit, eager for light; pride must yield to humility; the narrow lovefor one's abstract individuality, widen and lift itself to an austerelove, to an utter devotion to that which is above the individual,becoming Bruno'seroico furore, Spinoza'samor Dei intellectualis.In this act of love and enthusiasm, the spirit becomes pure thought andattains the truth, or, rather, transforms itself into truth. And thepossession of truth is at the same time possession of its contrary, oferror transformed into truth; to possess a concept is to possess it inthe fulness of its relations, and therefore to possess, in the sameact, all the ways in which that concept, for instance, of the æstheticactivity, is at the same time the concept of hedonism, intellectualism,empiricism, and so on. The two kinds of knowledge, that of truth andof its contrary, are inseparable: the concept is at the same timeaffirmation and negation.

From this absolute possession of truth, we may distinguish a stageof research, which is not yet thought, but only the operation of thepractical will creating certain conditions for thought. Seen in thelight of this process, the series of errors through which a mind goes,when guided by a will to gather its materials and prepare itself tothink, transforms itself into a series of attempts or hypotheses. Anerror is an error when there is a will to err; the hypothesis, however,into which the error is[Pg 186] transmuted by the new will is not yet truth,and becomes truth only in the act of its verification; but it is nolonger an error, because it does not affirm itself as truth, but onlyas a means or help for the conquest of truth.

From this double consideration of the nature of error, first, as errorwhich is conquered and comprehended by truth, and then as attempt orhypotheses in the service of truth, Croce derives the identification ofthe history of error with the history of truth, or philosophy. But notin the sense in which Hegel had considered the successive apparition ofthe various philosophical categories and of the various forms of error,seeing in them a kind of gradual revelation of his own philosophy. ToCroce such a conception of the progress of philosophy is unacceptable.Philosophy as an abstract category, as one of the forms of thespiritual activity, has no origin in time, is not limited to the men wecall philosophers, but acts in every moment of the life of the spiriton the material offered by history, which it contributes to create, anddoes not, therefore, progress any more than the categories of art or ofmorality. But it progresses in its concreteness, as art and the wholeof life do; because life is development, and development is progress.Every affirmation of reality is conditioned by reality and conditionsa new reality, which in its turn is, in its progress, the condition ofa new thought and a new philosophy. In this perpetual cycle, though[Pg 187]individual errors are conquered, no form of error can be definitelyabolished; but they constantly reappear, because of the intrinsicnecessity of their structure, and when they reappear not as wilfulerrors, but as attempts and hypotheses, they have their appointedfunction in the progress of truth and reality. To this constancy oferror corresponds a constancy of truth: truth is not attained once andfor ever, but is true in the act of its affirmation, and in proportionto its adequacy to the particular problem, to the individual conditionsof fact, which necessarily include, at every given moment, the wholehistory of the past. Thus, from a different angle, Croce's theory oferror reaches the same conclusion as his general theory of logic,the identity of philosophy and history; and philosophy appears as aperpetual development, a history that never can repeat itself, sinceevery affirmation of the truth transforms itself into a new element ofreality, into one of the conditions determining every new problem andevery new solution.

VIII. THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY [1]

Philosophical introspection—Affirmation of the practical activity—Thecategory of feeling—The theoretical activity as the antecedent of thepractical—Identity of intention and volition—Identity of volition andaction—The practical judgment: philosophy and psychology —The problemof free will: liberty and necessity—Croce's solution in the context ofhis philosophy—The practical value: good and evil—The unreality ofevil, and the function of ideals—The sanction of evil—The volitionand the passions—The empirical individuality—Development and progress.

The reality of the practical activity as distinct from the theoreticalactivity, of will as distinct from knowledge, can never be provedthrough the naturalistic method of psychology, by merely pointingto a class of facts—actions—different from another class offacts—thoughts. The so-called action manifests itself, at a closeranalysis, as infinitely complex and rich in purely theoreticalelements; the so-called thought, as partly at least a work of thehuman will. The concrete life of the spirit is always both practicaland theoretical, and the distinction we are looking for is an idealdistinction, to be ascertained by the method of philosophical, notpsychological, introspection; by the direct witness of consciousness,and by the deduction of[Pg 189] its function in the concept of the spirit,or of reality, as a whole. The complete affirmation of a form, orgrade, of spiritual activity is the philosophy of that form, and ofits relations with the others; in this case, the philosophy of thepractical, or of will. It is hardly necessary, at this stage of ourexposition, to observe that the philosophy of the practical will notbe practical philosophy, a collection of rules for the attainment ofthe useful and the good, any more than the philosophy of art is acollection of æsthetic precepts: it will be a purely formal science, auniversal concept, the content of which is the infinite wealth of theindividual determinations of the will, the history of the practicalactivity.

In the following chapter we shall deal more particularly with the twoforms of the practical activity, economic and ethic, correspondingto the two forms of the theoretical, æsthetic and logic. Here weshall consider the undifferentiated practical activity, first, in itsrelations, and then, in its internal dialectic. The contents of thischapter are, therefore, intended as applying both to economics andethics, to the useful and to the good.

There are two typical forms of scepticism regarding the practicalactivity. The first denies that it is a spiritual activity, bydenying that man is conscious of his will, in the process of willing;consciousness 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[Pg 190] spiritual activity, is only our thought. Thesecond does not exclude the will from consciousness, but affirms thatthere is no real distinction between will and thought. The firstdoctrine is evidently founded on a confusion between reflected andintrinsic consciousness; and maintains something that is always trueof reflected consciousness, not in relation to the will only, but toevery form of spiritual activity; carried to its extreme consequences,it would banish consciousness from the whole life of human mind, sinceevery act of consciousness would always be consciousness of somethingelse, and never of itself. Against this view, Croce insists on theconcept of an intrinsic consciousness, which accompanies every act ofthe 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 thetheoretical activity; as every other act of the spirit becomes nature,outside its immediate actuality, when consciously reflected upon. Thesecond form of sceptism, identifying thought and will, cannot maintainitself in its purity, because of the difficulties involved by thedenial of what seems to be the immediate evidence of consciousness; it,therefore, qualifies itself by recognizing that the will is thought,but of a particular kind, thought impressing itself on nature, orrealizing itself in action: which is but an indirect way of admittingthe autonomy of the practical activity.

But do the theoretical and the practical activity exhaust the whole ofthe spirit of man? There is at least one more psychological categorywhich clamours for admission within the precincts of philosophy, thatof feeling or sentiment. For Croce, feeling as a form of spiritualactivity does not exist: the corresponding psychological class coversa number of heterogeneous facts, which cannot be reduced to a singleconcept. Its function in philosophy has always been that of servingas a temporary term for that which philosophy had not yet hillydetermined and understood; in æsthetics, for the intuitive characterof art, against the fallacies of hedonism and intellectualism; in thetheory of history for the individual and concrete element of history,or even for the subjective historical judgment, against positivismand sociologism; in logic, for the pure concept against the empiricaland abstract. Its function in the philosophy of the practical is ofthe same order: feeling or sentiment are among the names by which thepeculiarity of the practical activity first began to be recognized,being labels for classes of psychological facts in which the moment ofwill is more important than that of reason, practice more essentialthan theory. But the psychological facts thus classified resolvethemselves ultimately either into acts of knowledge or of will; andthe witness of direct consciousness does not find feeling or sentimentwithin itself as a distinct form of spiritual activity. Obviously,this[Pg 192] exclusion does not imply that Croce denies the existence of theempirical groups of facts gathered in those classes; it means onlythat he has reduced those facts to the immediate data of consciousnessof which they consist, and divested them of that mysterious halo, thehalo of ignorance or of deliberate error, with which an appeal tosentimental reasons is sure to be accompanied when introduced into aphilosophical discussion. When we hear, for instance, that philosophyand science belong to the sphere of reason, and religion to that ofsentiment, since there is no sentiment which is not either reason orwill, we at once understand that what is meant is that the speaker iswilling to believe, for practical motives, what his reason tells himto be untrue; and we know also that this error contains, sometimes atleast, an element of truth, which is the affirmation of a truer reasonthan the one employed by a certain type of philosophy, by a rationalismwhich treats the human spirit as a thing of abstract logic. The errorconsists in the putting of one's will in the place of one's reason;the germinal truth, in the attempt to make one's reason wider, morecomprehensive. It is, therefore, one of those positions in which it isa sin against the spirit to acquiesce, but which are the beginning ofwisdom in the man of good faith.

The practical activity presupposes the theoretical activity: nowill is conceivable without knowledge, and our will is such as ourknowledge is. But this[Pg 193] presupposition is of an ideal and not of atemporal order: the mind in its concreteness, at every moment of itslife, is both practical and theoretical. The a particular kind ofknowledge which conditions our will is neither the purely intuitivenor the abstractly logical one, but the historical or perceptive, orconcretely logical knowledge, which is at the same time a knowledgeof things and of the relations of things, constantly changing withthe perpetual development of the world around us, and, therefore,constantly re-creating and renovating itself as the antecedent ofevery particular volition. No other theoretical fact precedes the actof will: the so-called practical judgments or practical concepts,which some thinkers consider as a necessary intermediate step betweenthe historical judgment and the volition, are nothing but classesof historical judgments relating to volitions in the past, mentalformations 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 goodor 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 usefulor good is not distinguishable from the volition except when it comesafter the action, and is then a reflection on the act itself, notdifferent in kind from any other historical judgment.

The conclusion to be drawn from these premises is that, in relation toevery particular situation, intention and volition coincide; or, thatwhat we call intention, the abstract volition, the imaginary volition,opposed to the concrete and real one, is not a moment of the willat all, and the only volition is the one that is determined by theconcrete situation, the real and concrete volition. The distinctionbetween intention and volition has in all times been the fertileground for the growth of all kinds of hypocrisy, as it is easy toconnect in one's mind a certain concrete volition, which is evil, withan imaginary intention of good; and the doctrine that justifies themeans for the sake of the end is but a variety of this process. Theidentification of intention and volition is, therefore, not merely amatter of good logic; it is the necessary foundation of a realisticdoctrine of the will, which cannot will anything but itself, and cannever be abstracted from its real basis, from the actual determinationsof the moment of reality by which it is conditioned.

Once the concrete character of volition has been recognized, thereremains no difficulty in the way of further identifying volition andaction. The relation between the two is analogous to the relationbetween intuition and expression in æsthetics: there is no volitionwhich is not also an action, and vice versa. Volition and action arenot two distinct phases of one process, but two different ways of[Pg 195]looking at the same reality: the same fact which is, from the pointof view of the spirit, a volition, is, naturalistically speaking, anaction: we are in the presence of one more aspect of the old dualismof spirit and nature. And here again the duality vanishes when weobserve that there is not a single act of will which does not manifestitself in a physical movement, however imperceptible, and that onthe other hand there is no physical action, not even the so-calledinstinctive or habitual ones, which are not either direct or indirectproducts of the will. A That which is independent of the will is notthe action itself, but the success of the action,—what Croce calls ahappening. The volition coincides with the action, which is the work ofthe individual, and not with the happening, which is collaboration orcontrast of wills, the work not of the individual, but of the whole. Noaction ever realizes itself entirely in the happening, and no action,however hindered in its realization, is ever entirely without influenceon the happening. The measure of the adequacy of the historicaljudgment preceding the action to the particular situation is given insome degree by the relation between the action and the happening; butit is impossible, and it is in fact never done, though we may affirmour inclination to do it, to derive the value of an action, of theactual, concrete volition, from its success. When we praise a practicalhero for his success, we imply that his success was not accidental,not a mere happening,[Pg 196] but entirely due to acts of his will; if thepraise is misplaced, the error is not in the theory, on which we allimplicitly agree, but in our knowledge and judgment of the facts of hislife. And when we rise from the consideration of purely economical tothat of ethical values, the importance of success gradually diminishes,because we fix our attention more to the spiritual reality, to thequality of the individual soul, and less to the material concomitants.The great majority of mankind's moral heroes would be utter failuresfrom the standpoint of success, granted that it should be possible tospeak of such a contradiction in terms as moral success, a phrase inwhich a true spiritual value, morality, is applied to a mere materialabstraction.

The practical judgment, which is, as we have already seen, nothingbut a particular kind of historical judgment, is a reflection on theaction and not on the happening; and we shall not repeat here whathas been said elsewhere of the relation between fact and value: thepractical value is the action itself, and cannot be deduced or derivedfrom standards, principles, ideals, which are but combinations ofpreëxistent judgments. The practical judgment, economic or moral, isa philosophical judgment in the sense in which every other judgmentis also philosophical. A philosophy of the practical activity, notin the technical sense in which we speak of treatises and schoolsof philosophy, but in that universal sense in which every man is aphilosopher[Pg 197], as he is a poet, is therefore the necessary condition ofthe practical judgment. But this philosophy is fundamentally distinctfrom the psychological or naturalistic elaboration of the facts ofthe will, though at times it may have been materially connected withit. A psychologically descriptive science of the practical activityis, however, as legitimate in its own field as all other naturalsciences; it constitutes a practical rhetoric which has as glorious atradition as the rhetoric of literature, from Theophrastus to Spinozaand Descartes. It creates its classes or types of actions, the valueof which is similar to that of all other empirical concepts, and bygiving them a categorical form, it transforms them into maxims, rules,and precepts. As long as these types and precepts are taken for whatthey are, no harm can come from them; we all make similar formationsas helps to our individual conduct, and find them more than helpful,necessary. But when they are taken as philosophy, then we have theusual results of this kind of logical confusion: either the empiricalconcepts, under a rigorous analysis, lose their consistency, and typesor rules which were useful instruments for the treatment of particularproblems are discarded for philosophical concepts, which are immaterialto the discussion, or they are treated as philosophical concepts, andinvested with the character of universality and necessity which belongsto the latter. Of the first process, we shall give as an example theman who[Pg 198] maintains that war is necessary and eternal; which is true, ifby war we mean the perpetual conflict and struggle which is the life ofreality (a philosophical concept), but which is at least a gratuitousassertion, when it is said of that particular kind of war which iswaged between state and state, with arms and armies. Of the second, themoralist who identifies morality with a particular system or set ofprecepts, or the philosopher who turns his philosophy into a specialpleading for his cause or party. Turning now from the discussion ofthe relations between the practical and the theoretical activity, toconsider the intrinsic problems of the will, and the most complex anddifficult of all, that of the freedom of the will, we shall find thatCroce's solution, though reached by a totally different method, isvery similar to the one offered by Bergson. Both Croce and Bergsonrefuse to take sides in the quarrel between free-will and determinism,but transfer it to a higher or deeper ground where the contrastingterms acquire more significant, and no longer opposite, meanings.Bergson accomplishes his abolition of the dilemma through a masterfulpsychological analysis of the immediate data of consciousness, Crocecomes to the same result by applying to this problem his logic of thedistinctions of the concept, which we have already seen so often atwork. Every act of the will is determined, in the sense that it isconditioned by a given situation, and varies with the varying of thesituation; it is free, inasmuch as[Pg 199] it is something new and different,which was not given in the situation, and without which there wouldbe no change, no growth, no development. Necessity and freedom, whichso often appear as antagonistic views of the same fact, are bothpresent, though distinct, in the volition, which is the unity of thetwo, being at once determined and free. The volition is thus regardedas a practicala priori synthesis, the autonomous creative act ofthe practical mind, as the intuition is the æsthetic, and the conceptthe logicala priori synthesis; the spirit never realizes itselfexcept by acting, and it never acts except under given conditions ofplace and time. But as these conditions are nothing but what we havecalled happenings, which in their turn are complex results of singlevolitions, the concept of the freedom of the spirit coincides with thatof its activity.

This solution is the one that we were obviously led to expect fromthe whole context of Croce's philosophy, a solution in keepingwith his logic and with his general theory of knowledge. A similarparallelism we can observe in respect to the other solutions of theproblem of the will: determinism is connected with a mechanisticmaterialism, as indeterminism with one form or other of mythicism.The doctrine of the double causality, which admits of a double seriesof facts, some subject to a mechanical necessity, others free andcreative—a solution which is probably the most commonly[Pg 200] acceptedto-day—corresponds to the logical dualism of nature and spirit. Thislast one can be considered as an approximation to the abolition of thedilemma, as proposed by both Croce and Bergson, when we contrast itwith the strictly deterministic position, though it still preservesthe opposition of fact and value, of experience and philosophy, ofreality and spirit. In the new conception of the will, necessity andfreedom stand in the same relation as all these other dualities inCroce's system; and the emphasis is laid, as usual, on the second term,through which only we can understand the first. The agreement betweenCroce and Bergson in this particular instance points to a closersimilarity between their respective philosophies than is apparent toa casual observer. That external reality which seems to confront thespirit as a separate existence, and which Bergson considers as theproduct of a purely mechanical, practical intellect, corresponds towhat Croce defines as the naturalistic, not theoretical, but practical,elaboration of reality; and in Bergson's intuition andélan vital,Croce's concept of reality as spiritual activity is mythicallyadumbrated.

If activity is freedom, then freedom coincides with the value ofactivity. If we use the words good and evil, not with any specialethical connotation, but as the general terms of practical value andnon-value, good and evil are activity and non-activity, freedom andabsence of freedom. Evil, like all other purely[Pg 201] negative values, isunreal. This does not mean that the actions that we call evil have noreal existence, any more than the unreality of ugliness or falsehoodimply the non-existence of bad poetry or of logical errors; bad poetryand logical errors have no æsthetic or logical reality, but they areproducts of the practical spirit, directed towards the satisfaction ofpractical ends; and every real action, inasmuch as it is an action,considered in itself as adequate to its particular end, is good. Itis only by substituting to that end another end, that the first endmay appear as evil, and the second as good; but if this substitutiontakes place before the action, then the action is inevitably directedtowards the second end, and therefore again, it is not evil, but good.It is through a psychological delusion that we imagine ourselves ina position in which we see the good, and yet do the evil: what we dois that which appears to us as the most desirable end, and thereforeas good. The intention, outside the actual volition, is, as we haveseen, unreal; if it were real, it would realize itself as an action,and be one with it. The negative practical judgments, whether economicor ethic, are judgments which affirm the reality of a certain action,and therefore its value, at the same time comparing that value with adifferent one, which has not been realized in that particular instance.The negative moral judgment usually consists in the affirmation of apurely economic value contrasted with an ethical[Pg 202] value which is absentfrom the action which is the subject of the judgment.

The doctrine of the unreality of evil has always been regarded withdeep mistrust by the practical moralist; but that mistrust is utterlyunjustified by the doctrine itself. For practical purposes it may beconvenient to consider life as intrinsically evil, and to oppose toit a set of ideals, or abstract moral values to which we must striveto conform our actions; in fact, every one of us is constantly doingsomething of the kind, and finding in those ideals a help and aninspiration. But shall our ideals lose their value when we understandthat they have no separate, transcendent reality? That every actioncarries its own value within itself, and that therefore unless weconstantly realize those ideals in our concrete and individualactions, in every one of our actions, the ideals themselves will bebut empty shadows? Every ideal, however high and comprehensive, isbut an empirical concept derived from a class of actions in which wehave recognised a moral value; moral standards have the same characteras æsthetic standards, and are useful and active only as long aswe understand their nature. But the creation of moral values is aconstantly renovated, spontaneous, original activity, in the same sensein which art and poetry are. We can be directed, both in our activityand in our judgment, by standards and ideals; that is, standardsand ideals may help us to put ourselves in a position practicallyfavourable[Pg 203] to the creation or judgment of æsthetic or moral values.But the actual creation, as the actual judgment, takes place, bothin art and morality, so to speak, at the risk of our whole life: itis a new activity, in a situation which cannot be identical with anyprevious situation, and to which no rule will ever give us the key.

While on one hand our sense of responsibility is rather heightenedthan diminished by Croce's conception of value, if we look at thesame doctrine from another angle, it tells us that there is no evilwhere there is no consciousness of evil; that evil becomes somethingpositive, acquires an independent existence, only when it is reflectedin a higher plane of consciousness. The only conceivable sanction ofthe evil that we have willed is in the will that, tending towards abetter end, apprehends its former volition as inadequate and thereforeevil; but until that light has shown itself to the spirit, all othersanctions are meaningless. This is the foundation of the Christiandoctrine of repentance, of the uses of remorse, or grace; and theindividual intimate quality of moral values was first proclaimed by thevoice that said:nolite iudicare. If the Kingdom of Heaven is notwithin you, it is not to be found anywhere else.

We can consider the actual volition as intrinsically good, if we alsoapproach it from the point of view of the multiplicity of possiblevolitions—impulses, passions, desires—striving to realize themselvesat every moment of our life. Every single volition is[Pg 204] the result ofa struggle from which it emerges after having conquered all the otherpossible volitions. When, in this struggle, the single volition doesnot assert itself fully, we become the prey of that multiplicity,willing a volition which is not the one that we ought to will, and thatin 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 action, buta kind of passivity. When the single volition conquers the passions,when one impulse or desire becomes the will, all the other possiblevolitions lose their actual value, multiplicity gives way to unity,passivity to action, evil to good, death to life.

The passions can be empirically regarded as habits of the will, asinclinations towards one or another category of actions; by a furtherempirical elaboration, we can divide them into the various classes ofvirtues and vices, virtues being the passions or habits of rationalactions, and vices the contrary ones. Individuality or personality,as an empirical concept, is nothing but a complex of more or lesslasting habits, some natural and some acquired, or, more rigorously,the historical situation of the universal spirit in every instant oftime, and therefore that complex of habits which historical conditionshave produced. These habits are the material out of which we mould ourlife, and the first duty of every individual consists in exploringhis own dispositions, in establishing what attitudes the progress ofreality[Pg 205] has deposited in him, at the moment of his birth and in thecourse of his individual life—to acquire a consciousness of what inreligious terms we might call his vocation or mission; it is impossiblefor anyone to act except on the basis of his preëxisting personalhabits of will. But temperament, or the empirical individuality, isnot yet character, or virtue; and the respect that we owe to it, asthe necessary condition of our action, must not be confused with theultra-modern tendency which expresses itself in the cry for the rightsof the individual temperament and for the free development of thepassions. The individual has the duty of seeking his own self, butalso that of cultivating himself in the light of reason; his empiricalindividuality is a mere datum, and his life is his own work. Aneducation aiming only at the expression of individual idiosyncrasies(as so much of our modern education, at least in theory, is) is noeducation at all. The ideal is rather to be sought in such a perfectfulfilment of one's individual mission, however humble, that it shouldat the same time fulfil the universal mission of man.

The law of life is in the unity that conquers the multiplicity, in thewill asserting itself above the passions. The reality is perpetualdevelopment, an infinite possibility transforming itself into aninfinite actuality, gathering itself at every instant from the multipleinto the one, only to disrupt itself again and produce a new unity.Multiplicity, contradiction, evil, non-being, on one side, and unity,coherence,[Pg 206] good, being, on the other, are unthinkable outside thesynthesis of life, which is activity, becoming, evolution. This conceptof becoming or evolution is the one that modern thought has substitutedfor that of an immobile reality and of a transcendent divinity. And inCroce it becomes wide enough to embrace Hegel's speculative dialecticon one side, and the naturalistic evolutionism of the scientist onthe other. The dialectic of will is the dialectic of reality, bothspiritual and natural—or rather only and always spiritual, sincenature cannot be distinguished from the spirit as a concrete reality ofanother order, but only as an abstraction of the practical intellect.What we call life in nature is consciousness in the spirit, and thehistory of nature is not qualitatively different from the history ofman. The whole course of history cannot be regarded otherwise than asa continuous progress, a perpetual triumph of life over death; and itsrationality, which we call Fate or Providence, is not the work of atranscendent Intelligence, but is a Providence realizing itself in dieindividual, working not outside or above, but within history itself.The mystery of which we are all conscious is not a part of reality, butonly the presentment of future realizations, the infinity of evolution.The God transcendent, the empirical immortality, are mere figures andmyths for the God living in nature and in the spirit of man, for thespirit of man, for the spiritual activity, which is life and death inone.

IX. ECONOMICS AND ETHICS [1]

The distinctions of the practical activity—The autonomy of ethics:utilitarianism—The autonomy of the economic form: abstractmoralism—Relations of the ethical to the economic form—Pleasureand duty, happiness and virtue—Importance of the economicprinciple—Philosophy and the science of economics—The ethicalprinciple; material ethics—Ethical formalism; the universality of theprinciple—The object of the ethical will—Croce as a moralist.

The preceding chapter deals with the practical activity in general,with the general concept of will or action. We must now introduce inthat concept a distinction analogous to that by which the theoreticalactivity has appeared to us first as the knowledge of die individual orintuition, then as the knowledge of the universal or concept. But here,again, we shall not employ the merely descriptive and psychologicalmethod, nor yet attempt to deduce this distinction from the analogybetween the theoretical and the practical activity; we shall appealonce more to the immediate test of consciousness, which in fact revealstwo distinct forms of the will, the economic and the ethic. Economicactivity is the one that wills and realizes only that which relates tothe conditions of fact in which the[Pg 208] individual finds himself; ethicalactivity, the one that wills and realizes that which, though related tothose conditions, at the same time in some way transcends them. To onecorrespond individual, to the other, universal ends; on one is basedthe judgment on the coherence of the action in itself, on its adequacyto its individual end; on the other, the judgment on its adequacy touniversal ends, which transcend the individual. If we recognise onlythe ethical form, we perceive very soon that it implies the otherone, which we intended to exclude, since our action, though universalin its meaning, must always be something concrete and individuallydetermined. We do not realize morality in the universal, but always agiven moral volition, not the abstract virtues, but the concrete works.Although a moral action is not only our individual pleasure, yet itmust be that, too, or we should never be able to realize it. On theother hand, the mere economic action, the satisfaction of our immediatepleasure, though it satisfies us in relation to our individual end, yetit leaves constantly unsatisfied that which we are beside and beyondour individual determinations, our deepest and truest being. And thisdissatisfaction will last until we succeed in lifting ourselves abovethe infinite succession of individual ends, and in inserting in them auniversal value. This passage or conversion from the purely economic tothe ethic, from pleasure to duty, is designed by Croce as the conquestof[Pg 209] that peace which is not of a fabulous future, but of the presentand real; in every instant is eternity, to him who knows how to reachit. Our actions will be always new, because always new problems are putbefore us by the course of reality; but in them, if we accomplish themwith a pure heart, seeking in them what lifts them above themselves,we shall each time possess the Whole. Such is the character of themoral action; which satisfies us not as individuals but as men, andas individuals only because the individual is a man, and as men onlythrough the medium of individual satisfaction.

The denial of the autonomy of the ethical form, the attempt to reducethe ethic to the economic, the morally good to the individuallyuseful, is the substance of the many theories that go under the nameof utilitarianism. But this reduction of the practical activity toa single principle clashes in every instant of our life against thedistinction between mere pleasure and duty, between the useful and thehonest action, between the things that have a price and those thathave none, between actions which have a moral motive and those thathave only a utilitarian one. The utilitarians themselves, unable topass over the distinction, have tried to explain it away as a purelyquantitative one, defining morality as the utility of the greaternumber or as the interest or egotism of the race; but it is clear thatthese so-called quantitative distinctions are really qualitative ones:the utility of the greater[Pg 210] number is no longer individual utility orimmediate pleasure, the egotism of the race is no longer egotism, buta value which transcends the individual. A further attempt in the samedirection consists in considering morality as born from the associationbetween certain acts which are means to a pleasure, and that pleasureitself: a savage fights to defend his personal liberty or his life, acivilized man, forgetting that the tribe, or the city, or the state,are but means to preserve his life and his property, defends them forthemselves, and allows himself to be deprived of both his property andhis life for love of his country. But only through stupidity is itpossible to mistake the means for the end, and, therefore, this theoryactually reduces morality to what is practically irrational, a productof confusion and illusion; that is, to the contrary of the practicalactivity, which is, in its own sphere, rationality and wisdom. The mereenunciation of this theory, if true, ought to produce the dissolutionof those false associations, and, therefore, the destruction ofmorality; if morality subsists, this is due to its rational character,which associationism has not succeeded in disproving. The last refugeof utilitarianism is in theology and mystery: the utility of moralactions is not of this world, but derived from the conception ofanother world in which God punishes or rewards us for our conduct onearth. But this kind of utilitarianism puts itself outside the fieldof philosophy, by emptying the[Pg 211] symbols of religion of their moralcontent, which is their only logical justification.

The converse form of error, which consists in eliminating the economicmoment from the concept of practical activity, is criticised by Croceas abstract moralism. The economic moment has been regarded as purelytechnical, that is, as the theoretical moment that precedes action,action itself being always and only ethical; but some sort of knowledgeprecedes every action, and the distinction between the useful andthe good cannot be reduced to that between knowledge and will; wecan consider the useful as the means and the good as the end, onlyby forgetting that there is as much difference between knowing theuseful and willing the useful, as between knowing the good and willingthe good. The useful has also been identified with the egotistic andimmoral; but the merely useful is amoral, and not immoral, in the samesense in which the pure intuition is alogical, and not either logicalor illogical. The imagination of the poet cannot be submitted to thelogical judgment, any more than the immediate pleasure of the child,or any action which precedes the awakening of the moral consciousness.And besides, the useful is so far from being immoral, that there is nomoral action which is not also useful, as there is no logical truthwhich can express itself except through language. Finally, the usefulhas been defined as an inferior form of practical consciousness;[Pg 212] butwhat this definition actually accomplishes is to recognise, thoughimperfectly, the true distinction, which is a relation of higher andlower only in the metaphorical sense in which these adjectives can beemployed for the relation between the intuition 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 yeteconomically effective, but not of moral actions which should notat the same time be useful, or economic. Morality lives concretelyin utility, as the universal in the individual, the eternal in thecontingent. But we can never sufficiently emphasize the true characterof the distinction, which, taken as a purely abstract and psychologicalone, might justify the persistence of morally indifferent actionswithin the moral consciousness. The moral consciousness, once itis awakened, invests the whole life of the practical mind, as thelogical consciousness does for the theoretical mind, and it abolishesthat condition of innocence, in which the purely economic is notyet subject to the moral judgment, in the same way as perceptionand reflection destroy our naïve belief in the reality of purelypoetical imaginations. On the other hand, there are no actions whichare economically ally indifferent, or, as they are generally called,disinterested; morality requires that the individual should transforma universal interest into his individual one, make of morality itselfhis personal[Pg 213] utility, but it cannot ask for the abolition of allinterests, which would mean the abolition of morality as well. Thevalue of a moral action is in direct proportion with the passionand fervour with which we identify our individual ends with endstranscending our empirical individuality.

In the light of this distinction, the old oppositions of pleasure andduty, of happiness and virtue, lose a good deal of their rigour andsharpness. Pleasure as the positive economic activity or feeling cannever 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 entirelygood, not willed with all our heart, or it was accompanied by a newpractical problem, which has yet to be solved. Similarly, happiness isnot necessarily virtue, but there is no virtue which is not happiness;the sorrows of the virtuous are not intrinsic to morality, being butthe limits of human activity, which the good share with the wicked.We all can transform our limits into sorrows, by our restlessnessand unreasonableness; or, through resignation, our sorrows in limitsand conditions of activity. Asceticism, which regards pleasure andhappiness as essentially immoral, is the extreme form of moralabstractism; by destroying the economic category, it deprives moralityof its reality and concreteness. It is, in fact, in the practicalsphere, the counterpart of mysticism in the[Pg 214] theoretical, which makesthought impossible by dissociating it from expression.

The recognition of the autonomy of the economic moment as one of thefundamental forms of spiritual activity, and the study of its relationswith morality, appears to me as Croce's most important contribution tomodern thought. We have seen what light the problems of the ethicalwill receive, when they are seen in their unity and distinction withthe facts of the economic, or individual, will. We shall see in thenext chapter what a vast field of human activity, comprising thewhole political life of mankind, reveals a new rationality, once itis regarded as a legitimate product of the human mind, to be judgedaccording to its own standards and values, and not to standards andvalues belonging to a different order of facts. Croce's discovery ofthe will of the individual as the first grade, the elementary form ofthe practical spirit, is analogous to Vico's discovery of the purelyintuitive activity as the first grade of knowledge; and it establishesbetween economics and ethics, between politics and morality, the samerelation as between æsthetic and logical values. The æsthetically trueis the adequately expressive, as the economically good is the useful;but in both cases, we can never repeat it sufficiently, once thelogical and the moral consciousness are awakened, neither the æstheticcan be apprehended otherwise than as logically true or untrue, nor theeconomic otherwise[Pg 215] than as morally good or bad. The standards whichare 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, onone side, the political writers who, from Aristotle to Machiavelli,attempted to define the relations between politics and morality; on theother side, the economists, who, by isolating a type of value, whichwas not an æsthetic, intellectual, or ethical value, and which couldnot be identified with the reverse of the ethical value, or egotism,had prepared the ground for the establishment of a philosophy ofeconomics. As a matter of actual, historical derivation, it was fromhis study of Marxism, from his meditations on contemporary economicscience, that Croce drew, as we saw in one of the first chapters ofthis book, his conception of economic value as one of the universalvalues.

After what has been said of the general relationship between philosophyand science, it will not be difficult to determine the place thateconomic science occupies in Croce's thought, in relation to hisphilosophy of economics. Economics as a philosophical scienceis that branch of philosophy, the object of which is the economicactivity in its universality, the determination of the concept ofvolition or action as the volition or action of the individual, thatis, as the predicate of the economic judgment or judgment of utility.The economic judgment, in its turn, is but a[Pg 216] form of historicaljudgment, and, therefore, the concrete form of the philosophy ofeconomics is economic history, the history of the spirit of man as itrealizes itself in the individual action or volition. Between thatphilosophy and that history, there is no place, as we know, for anyintermediate form of knowledge, but only for the practical (empiricalor abstract) elaboration, of the economic datum. This is what thescience of economics actually is: an applied mathematical science,founded on empirical concepts. The postulates and types of economicscience are among the most perfect examples of conscious fictions,beginning with the fundamental one of thehomo œconomicus: theyare empirical concepts by which the economic reality is simplified tosuch an extent that it becomes possible to submit it to mathematicalcalculation, and thereby to recognise promptly its necessary aspectsand consequences. Economic science partakes, therefore, of the rigourand absoluteness of mathematics, which is obtained, as we know,only by sacrificing the concreteness of its object. Its laws arearbitrary and tautological, consisting, like all scientific laws, inthe definition of those characteristics of reality which have beenabstracted to form its postulates or empirical concepts; but it isonly through the acceptance of such definitions that it succeedsin dominating, ordering, describing, and classifying the mass andvariety of economic facts and, most important of all, in treating themquantitively. It has, in fact, the same structure[Pg 217] as another sciencewith which it has been frequently compared, and which is here assumedas typical of the proceedings of applied mathematics—mechanics. Ibelieve that very few economists would quarrel to-day with Croce'scharacterization of economic science, since its mathematical characteris now universally recognised; but Croce proves conclusively that evenin its non-mathematical phases, economics has always been a purelyquantitative science. Volition and action are assumed in it in theirindistinction; and moral facts being volitions and actions as well asthe economic facts, they can also be included in the economic calculus,because from a merely abstract point of view there is no way ofdifferentiating them from the latter.

Between the philosophy and the science of economics there isneither agreement nor disagreement, but a total heterogeneity, and,therefore, a reciprocal tolerance. It is only when one invades thefield, or adopts the methods, of the other, that conflict and errorarise. Economics as a science may then deny the legitimacy of thephilosophical study of the economic moment; or it may attribute auniversal value to its empirical concepts (as it has happened againand again in the disputes between free-traders and protectionists, oras it constantly happens when economic laws are referred to as endowedwith a character of absolute necessity); or, finally it may transformits fictions into realities, attributing for instance to the concretehuman[Pg 218] being, and to the exclusion of any other quality, the qualitiesit has abstracted for the creation of itshomo œconomicus. But, inall such cases, though we may meet these errors among the economists,they are not scientific errors but logical errors; or rather, they arepoor science only because they are bad philosophy. The true function ofthe abstract economic schemes is that of an instrument in the hands ofthe historical and sociological observer, who needs many other similarinstruments, if he wants to gain a concrete and direct knowledge ofactual historical and social conditions.

It is now time for us to return, from this discussion of the twodifferent elaborations of the economic datum, to a closer considerationof the second form of the practical activity, or of the ethicalprinciple. In the same way as the empirical concepts of economicscience are insufficient to exhaust the infinite wealth of the economicprinciple, no single action or group of single actions can define theethical principle, which is universal, and therefore merely formal. Byidentifying the principle with a series, however vast, of particulardeterminations, that is, by substituting a material ethics for a formalone, we fall back inevitably into utilitarianism, since the volition ofa single object or class of objects is not a volition of the universalbut of the particular, not an ethical but an economic act. Even thehighest forms of moral ideals, such as benevolence, love, altruism,[Pg 219]humanitarianism, etc., once they are apprehended materially, and notas mere verbal approximations to the formal ethical principle, acquirea contingent and utilitarian character, and are apt to come in actualconflict with the truly moral will. The same criticism applies, andwith greater force, to institutionalized 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 exceptionsand restrictions, that is, without losing in the act of the willits institutional character, and appearing as one of the particularconditions under which the particular moral volition takes place.The religious principles themselves are subject to this reductionfrom the ethical to the economic, when, as in the case of theologicalutilitarianism, they are taken as empirical limitations, as particularobjects, of the ethical will. The material ethical principles are infact analogous to those material æsthetic principles which we havecriticised as rhetorical; they constitute a rhetoric of the virtues notless deadly to the creative moral will than the rhetoric of the arts isto the creative intuition.

The ethical principle must be formal, but not formalistic, andtherefore Croce is not satisfied with any of the so-called universallaws or categorical imperatives, or with any of the many formulaswhich attempt to define the moral actions through one constantdetermination which ought[Pg 220] to be present in each of them. Such formulasare mere symbols or metaphors, and can be used as the equivalents ofthe ethical principle, as some of the categories of material ethicscan be used; but their danger consists in giving the illusion ofpossessing the true principle, while what we are given is an emptyand tautological one, which will again give way to purely empiricaldeterminations and therefore to utilitarianism. This empty formalism,or absolute indetermination, of the ethical principle, corresponds totwo conceptions of philosophy, which Croce respectively calls partialand discontinuous. According to the first, man may know a portion ofreality, but never reality as a whole; as regards morality, he may hearthe voice of his own conscience, but never grasp with his intellectthe content of the moral law. According to the second, he may know thereason of morality, but not within the sphere of ethics, whose taskconsists only in establishing the moral law and deducing the moralprecepts; the problem of the essence of morality belongs to anotherscience, metaphysics. The reader who has followed us to this pointknows that Croce's philosophy is neither partial nor discontinuous;that he does not admit of any limits to human thought, nor of anydivision in the body of philosophy. The whole of philosophy is alreadyincluded for him in the first philosophical proposition, and though itmay didactically be useful to divide the problems of philosophy in[Pg 221]groups, or even to deal separately with the particular philosophicalscience on one hand, and with general philosophy or metaphysics on theother, yet truth does not belong to the distinctions outside theirunity, to the parts outside the whole, to the segments outside thecircle. It is this totality and continuity of Croce's philosophy thatmakes Croce's ethical principle a form, but not an empty one; a formwhich is full in a philosophical and universal sense, which is at thesame time content, and universal as content not less than as form. Hehas defined the ethical principle, not, tautologically, as a universalform, but as the volition of the universal: a definition which isat the same time the distinction of the ethical from the economicalform, or volition of the individual. We may here recall, to test oncemore the coherence of Croce's thought, and to make this definitionclearer, his definition of the concept as knowledge of the universal;by it the concept is distinguished from the intuition, or knowledge ofthe individual, and the logical principle is seen as unidentifiableeither with an abstract logical form or with any particular systemof philosophy. The concept is real only in the infinite individualdeterminations of actual thought, as the ethical principle in theinfinite concrete volitions of the human spirit sub specie universalis.

The universal which is the object of the ethical volition is notsomething that we shall need to define at this point of our exposition,since the whole[Pg 222] of Croce's philosophy is nothing but a definition ofthe universal. The universal is mind or the spirit; it is reality, asunity of will and thought; it is life grasped in its depth as thatsame unity; it is freedom, since a reality thus conceived is perpetualdevelopment, creation, progress. Man, in willing the universal, turnsfrom his individuality to that which transcends it, to the spirit,or reality, or life, or freedom, not as abstract ideals, but as theyrealize themselves in his individual action. The volition of theindividual, of one's individual existence, is necessarily the firststep; there is no man, however deeply moral, who does not begin byaffirming his own individual life; without this affirmation, he wouldnever be able to transcend it and to deny it. But he who should limithimself to this affirmation, and accept as a place of rest what is onlythe beginning of his development, would find himself in contradictionwith his real, intimate self. He must will not only his individualself, but that self also, which being the same in all selves is theircommon Father. It is thus that he promotes the realization of reality,lives the full life, and makes his heart beat with the heart of theuniverse:Cor cordium. The moral individual is conscious that heis working for the Whole. Every action which is in accord with theethical duty is in accord with Life, and would be contrary to duty andimmoral, if instead of promoting life, it should depress and mortifyit. The most humble[Pg 223] moral action resolves itself into this volitionof the spirit in its universality. The soul of a simple and ignorantman wholly devoted to his modest duty is in perfect unison with that ofthe philosopher whose mind receives within itself the universal spirit.What one does, the other thinks; and both reach by different roadstheir full satisfaction in an act of life, in a fecund embrace withreality.

It is in pages like the ones from which we have extracted thisenthusiastic definition of morality, that the true quality of Croce'sphilosophy is best perceived. But what is here affirmed as a principlelives as an ever present spirit in innumerable able discussions ofparticular moral problems in hisFilosofia della Pratica, in hismoral essays, in his literary criticism (there is no living literarycritic who has a keener perception of moral values than this implacableenemy of moralism), in the whole of his work. It is this moralenthusiasm, together with his capacity to see clear and deep, hiscatholic tolerance for all forms of beauty and truth and goodness,however distant from his tastes and inclinations, and his courageous,outspoken intolerance for all hypocrisies, compromises, half-truths,wilful errors, that has given Croce, in the last twenty years, inItaly, a right to moral as well as intellectual leadership. He is thetrue heir of an infinitely complex moral tradition, and placed highenough to do justice to all its elements, though apparently contrastingwith each other. But when[Pg 224] recognizing the symbolical and practicalvalue of the various positive ethical systems that appear to him asgradual approximations to the full concreteness and universality of theethical principle, he emphasizes the connection of his own ethics withone of those elements in preference to every other, with the religiousand Christian element, for which morality is already what it is forthe philosopher, the love and will of the universal spirit. There isno truth of ethics which for him cannot be expressed in the words thatwe have learned as children from our traditional religion. Between thereligious man and the philosopher, between religion and philosophy,there is no enmity, but continuity and development; in the affirmationof the ethical principle, which is the crucial test of every philosophyas of every religion, the substantial identity of religion andphilosophy is finally established.

X. THE LAWS [1]

Economic society as an empirical concept—The philosophical conceptof society—Sociology, philosophy of law and political science—Thedefinition of law—Laws and customs—The laws, the natural laws and thepractical principles—Mutability of the laws: thejus naturale—Thefunction of the laws—Legalism: the Jesuit and the Puritan—Thelegislative activity as a generically economic activity—The juridicalactivity—Law and language.

One of the fundamental empirical concepts of the science of economicsis that of economic society, which is formed by abstracting certainclasses of economic relationships from the mass of relationships ofall kinds among which the life of the individual realizes itself. Anytreatise of economics can be considered as a definition of economicsociety; and we know how those definitions are apt to vary accordingto the choice of the groups of facts studied, and the method employed,by different schools of economists. The economic society of theMarxian is not the economic society of the classical economist; theCatholic economist, differing from both, will include in his treatmentthe consideration of certain ethical relations which give a greatercomplexity to his scheme. It would be possible to study the economicsof the individual in perfect[Pg 226] 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 ofnature may enter into a single, all-including, economic body. We mayeven study animal species, in their relations within themselves, orwith man, or with other animal species, or with nature at large, froman economic standpoint (symbiosis and parasitism are facts bearing aclose resemblance with human economy)—and thus form an infinite numberof new economic societies. Each of these empirical concepts can bevariedad infinitum, by the mere inclusion or exclusion of certainclasses of relationships.

The empirical, non-rigorous character of the concept of economicsociety is self-evident; and it can therefore be usefully employed toprove by analogy the similar character of the concept of society asmanufactured by jurists, sociologists, and political scientists. Itis against such fictions that philosophy reacts by building a conceptof the isolated individual, that is, of the individual isolated fromthe particular classes of relationships which enter into the formationof particular empirical concepts of society; but it does this only toplunge the individual again in the midst of that infinite multiplicity,which is one aspect, and an essential one, of reality, Society as aphilosophical concept cannot be identified[Pg 227] with any form of economicor political society; of such, as mere abstractions, no philosophicaltreatment is possible. Society is that real multiplicity, without whichwe should have neither knowledge nor action, neither art nor thought,neither utility nor morality; and from society in this sense, theindividual cannot be isolated, without reducing him, in his turn, to amerely abstract concept.

The sociologist, the jurist, the political scientist use theirconcepts of society for their purposes, which are, in the sense whichis now familiar to our reader, scientific purposes. But very oftenthey lose sight of the character of these concepts, and treat theseinstruments of classification and description as substitutes forthe actual reality which they are, by reason of their abstractness,utterly unable to reproduce. The sociologist talks of the collectivemind, and of collective representations, as if they had a realityoutside the thought and action of the individual; the jurist builds aphilosophy of law, in which society is opposed to the individual asa being to another being, and law, as a product of society, at everypoint transcends the individual will. The political scientist dealswith the community, or the association, or the State, as with conceptsof which it were possible to give a philosophical definition, validfor all times, and from which the rules of perfect government could berigorously deduced. Of these types of[Pg 228] philosophical degenerations oflegitimate scientific thought, it can be roughly said that, because ofthe peculiar cultural development of the various nations of Europe, thefirst belongs more particularly to England and France, the second toItaly and Germany; though they are all more or less common in Europeanculture as a whole. As an Italian, Croce was particularly interested inthe second, the philosophical degeneration of juridical thought, andtherefore his particular treatment of the economic facts underlyingthe problems of political society naturally took the shape of aninquiry into the nature of law. But it ought not to be difficult forthe English or American reader, for whom these problems are not partof a practically inexistent philosophy of law, but of a long traditionof political science and theory of government, to translate Croce'sthought 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 empiricalsocial determination; it includes within it all laws which aremerely individual, the laws that the individual lays down to and forhimself, the rules of conduct and programs of life and action, whichthe individual follows of his own accord. It may be objected thatindividual laws differ from social and political laws, because thelatter are coercive and constrictive, while the former are not. Thereis no law, however, that is truly[Pg 229] coercive; the individual is alwaysfree either to observe or not to observe the law. What a law does is tooffer a choice or alternative, and this is as true of individual as ofsocial laws. We may disregard our own rules of conduct or programs ofaction, and suffer from doing so, and inflict a punishment on ourselvesfor having done so; or we may alter our individual laws as social lawsare altered when they no longer respond to the need of a community,and are either violently overthrown by rebellion or quietly allowed tofall into desuetude through non-observance, or modified by the properorgans of legislation. But the importance of the concept of individuallaws lies in the fact that the so-called social laws have no realityoutside the individual: in order to observe a law it is necessary tomake it one's own, and to rebel against a law is to expel it from one'spersonality, of which it was, or tried to become, a part. The only reallaws are, therefore, individual laws.

If the criterion of sanction or coercion is insufficient to draw adistinction between individual and social laws, we can still lessuse it to divide the social laws into customs or unwritten laws, andpolitical and juridical laws. Both customs and laws carry with themsanctions, though of a different order, or, to put it in more preciseterms, both offer a choice between probable consequences to the freeindividual will. This distinction, like every other subdivision of thelaws (civil, penal, national, international, laws[Pg 230] and by-laws, etc.),is a purely empirical one. But the concept of law comprehends these andmany more in which the jurists have no interest, such as the literaryor artistic laws (that a tragedy should have five acts, or, as at onetime in England, that a novel should fill three volumes), or the rulesof religious life, or the precepts of chivalry, down to the statutesof a criminal gang and to Balzac'sdroit parisien. In fact, theempirical distinctions of the laws are coextensive with the empiricalconcepts of society, and partake of the same characteristics: to thepreceding examples of laws correspond respectively the republic ofletters, a monastery, the order of knighthood, a band of robbers, andle beau monde. But the only reality, both of the society and of thelaw, is the individual assent.

The laws have one point in common with the so-called natural laws;both are concerned with empirical concepts, or classes. But while thenatural laws are mere indicative statements of fact, the laws canalways 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 practicalprinciples which have some time received the names of moral or economiclaws, and which can be converted into such imperatives as Will theuniversal, or, in particular, Will the good, the useful, the true, thebeautiful. But these principles are concerned with the universal, thatis, with the spirit of man in the[Pg 231] necessary forms of its activity, notwith a particular product of the spirit, a class or type of actions, asdo laws in the strict meaning of the word. This distinction between thepractical principles and the laws opens the way to the recognition of avery important 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 acontradiction in terms), the laws can never exhaust the universal, andtherefore will always leave outside themselves a margin of actions,not included in any of the classes to which they refer, and thereforelegally indifferent. In more technical language, we may express thesame idea by saying that all laws, whether imperative or prohibitiveor permissive (a law, according to the ancient formula,aut iubet autvetat aut permittit), can be reduced to permissive laws: an order isalways at the same time a prohibition, and both orders and prohibitionsimplicitly permit all actions which are not contemplated by the law.

Moreover, while the practical principles are immutable, always capableof giving form to the most varied historical material, the laws are inperpetual flux and change. The particular modes of change, whether byevolution or revolution, do not concern the philosopher, for whom allcan be reduced to a angle one: the free will producing a new law undernew conditions. Against the perpetual mutability of the laws, due tothe contingent and historical character[Pg 232] of their content, clashes theconcept of an Eternal Code, or Law of Nature (jus naturale), whichpresumes to determine the content and form of the laws, according toabstract reason, once and forever. This conception is due to an errorwith which we are now familiar, consisting in the transformation ofempirical concepts into principals of universal validity. But fromthis particular error, as from all errors, we must distinguish certainelements of actual and concrete thought which have been historicallyassociated with it. In the attempts to establish a Law of Nature, weshall then recognise either new concrete legislative programs, thenew laws appearing as natural and rational by contrast with the oldones, or an attempt to deduce from, and through, juridical concepts,the principles of a philosophy of the practical. The principle ofnationality, fighting for realization against the old dynastic law,appears to its defenders as a typical natural right; and Rousseau,when deducing the principles of thejus naturale, warns us thathe is not dealing with historical truths, but with hypothetical andconventional reasonings, that is, with principles which transcend everyparticular determination and have not a positive, but an ideal value.We no longer speak of a Law of Nature, but the error which gave riseto that conception is still vigorous in current social and politicaldiscussions; every attempt to change legal conditions is alwaysadvocated or resisted by an appeal either to natural rights, which arebut arbitrary rationalizations of historical[Pg 233] contingencies, or toabstract reasons, principles, or ideas, of which the particular lawsor institutions are assumed to be the final and necessary expression.But rationality, morality, and naturality, in the sense in whichthese qualities are predicated of one or another type of laws andinstitutions, do not belong to any particular historical determinationmore than to another; they belong only to the spirit of man and to theconcrete values that it realizes among the ever-changing conditions ofhistory.

A law, being a volition of a class of actions, and therefore of anabstraction, is in itself an abstract or unreal volition. What weactually will is not the law, but the single, individual actionunder the law: the reality of the law is only in its execution. Inthe individual execution, however, what realizes itself is not thelaw, but the practical principle, economic or ethic, of which boththe observance and the non-observance of the law are particulardeterminations; the individual practical problems can never be foreseenseen by the law, which is by its nature general and abstract. What isthen, it may be asked, the use of the laws? Croce's answer is that thelaws are helps to the real volition, in the same way as the empiricaland abstract concepts, though not real knowledge themselves, are helpsto knowledge. In order to determine ourselves to the single action,it is useful to begin by fixing our attention to the class of whichthat single is an element; in order to know either the individual,or the universal, it is useful to create, between the[Pg 234] universal andthe individual, classes and types, general concepts, or, as Crocecalls them, relatively constant variables, through which the processof actual knowledge is made easier and quicker. We cannot think thepseudo-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 planor design; in practice, a plan or design, and its execution, are oneand the same thing, as we act by constantly changing our design,because reality, which is the foundation of our action, is in perpetualchange. But this unreality of the plan, as distinct from the concreteindividual action, does not deprive the plan itself of its practicaluses, which are universally recognized, and which are identical withthe uses of law.

When we identify the empirical laws with the universal practicalprinciples, economic or ethic, we fall into "legalism," which can bedefined as the belief that universal principles can be definitelyembodied in a limited number of laws, and that, on the other hand,these laws partake of the character of absoluteness which belongs tothose principles. It is especially in the treatment of ethics thatthis confusion has caused its worst effects. The two outstanding typesof legalists are the Jesuit, who admits of the morally indifferent,the justification through the intention, the pious fraud, and otherpractical means for the purely literal observance of the law, supposedto be a sufficient satisfaction of the moral[Pg 235] obligation, and thePuritan, who maintains that the unchangeable letter of the law is theonly, and always certain, guide of the moral consciousness. Both Jesuitand Puritan, or to give them the names they assumed in a historicalcontroversy, both Molinist and Jansenist, have often been in practicemuch better than their theories; but we are here interested only intheir theoretical pronouncements, which, though apparently contrasting,yet combine in substituting the letter for the spirit, and in dryingup, in the name of morality, the living springs of moral activity.And in both cases, moral legalism is associated with theologicalutilitarianism; it is, in fact, but another aspect of the same error.

The will that wills classes of actions, the legislative activity, iseither moral or merely economic, and can therefore be judged as eithermoral or immoral, economic or anti-economic. But as the laws are willin the abstract, our judgment of the laws will also be an abstractjudgment. To pronounce a concrete judgment, we must turn to the momentof the execution of the law, to the individual practical action, inwhich the law realizes itself. In this sphere, it is vain to disputewhether a law is essentially economic or moral: the economic or moralcharacter of the law is not determined by the abstract intention of thelegislator, but by the manner of its execution, by the quality of theindividual executor. The punishment which a law assigns for a categoryof crimes may be intended by the legislator either to deter or toemend[Pg 236] the criminal; but in the man who abstains from that particularkind of crime, the law is an economic one if the abstention is entirelydue to the fear of the punishment, it is a moral one if it coincideswith a sincere abhorrence of the crime. No law, therefore, can be saidto be intrinsically moral, and if we want to define the legislativeactivity in its full extension, we must define it as genericallypractical or merely economic.

The same definition obviously applies to the will that executes thelaw, as distinct from the will that formulates it: the juridicalactivity, as Croce names it, is also generically practical ormerely economic, and as such united to and distinct from the moralactivity. As the juridical activity, however, does not partakeof the abstractness of the legislative, but is as concrete anddetermined as the economic activity, there is actually no possibilityof distinguishing the one from the other; the juridical activityis therefore identical with the economic activity. This is Croce'soriginal solution of the fundamental problem of the philosophy oflaw; a solution which is closely connected with his recognition of autilitarian practical category, distinct from but not opposed to themoral category, and with his reduction of all laws to individual laws.The reader must recall what has been said elsewhere of the relationsbetween economic and moral values; and he will then understand in whatsense it can be said that Croce's theory of law is an answer to thesecular disputes on the relations[Pg 237] between law and morality, betweenpositive and ideal law, historical law and the Law of Nature. And hewill also be able to perceive the difference between the reduction ofthe juridical to the mere economic activity, which, as we know, isalso the form through which only morality realizes itself, and thetheories of law as the pure embodiment of force and of the positive,established right as the only conceivable right, which are nothing butthe counterpart of moral utilitarianism in the field of law. Croce'stheory of law is, as all the rest of his philosophy is, a purely formaldoctrine; not intended to defend one type of laws and institutionsagainst any other, but attempting to furnish a conception of law, as anindividual, perpetually new activity of the spirit of man, of which alllaws 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 oflanguage for analogies by which its own problems could be clarified. Adoctrinaire view of the juridical and political problem, for which theorigin of law and society is to be found in an abstract convention,and which therefore tends to build up, by new conventions, a modellegislation, or an Eternal Code, shows its real nature when related tothe corresponding conception of language as a collection of signs, apurely symbolical organism, which can be so perfected by reason as tobecome an absolute, universal language, embodying in its signs every[Pg 238]conceivable type of logical operations: a universal language, whichshould also be a universal symbolic logic. Sharply opposed to thedoctrinaire, the traditionalist views certain types of positive lawsand institutions as endowed with a character of necessity which putsthem above the reach of the individual judgment of man; and as he failsto discover the ever present creative activity, by which man constructshis juridical and political world, he also withdraws from the humanspirit the power to create its own language, and makes of words adivine institution. Equally remote from the sociological as from thetheological concept, which are the extreme theoretical forms of popularerrors, Croce establishes between law and language an analogy by whichboth manifest their intrinsic creative and human character. The realityof law is the individual juridical or economic activity, as the realityof language is the concrete intuitive activity. Law is the will of theindividual, as language is the knowledge of the individual. Grammarsand dictionaries are the codes of language, mere abstractions from theactual living flux of the creative expression, as the written laws andcodes are but the grammars of law, mere abstractions from the actualliving flux of political history. Language is not logic, and yet thelogical thought cannot realize itself except through language; lawis not morality, and yet the ethical activity cannot live except byincorporating itself in laws and institutions, and in the execution oflaws,[Pg 239] the concrete, individual life of institutions, that is, in thejuridical and economic activity.

Thus, the end of this exposition of Croce's system, the doctrine oflanguage with which the system opens links itself intimately with thisdoctrine of law, with which it closes. And both as regards languageand as regards law, the last word is, of necessity, a new implicitaffirmation of the identity of the philosophical with the historicalmethod. The true history of a language is not a history of abstractgrammatical schemes, but the history of the poetry and literaturein which that language has realized itself, a history of individualexpressions; the true history of law is one with the social andpolitical history of a people, which is, and cannot be but the historyof 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 tohistory—Croce's attitude during the war—Essays on the great poets.

To the reader of the three volumes of theFilosofia dello Spirito,which were published before 1910, the whole of Croce's thought appearedas a solidly constructed system, in which the four grades or formsof spiritual activity were studied in their intrinsic essence, andpresented in their relations as completing the cycle of living reality,in contrast with that reality which the mind postulates outside itsliving self, and which the system reduces to a complex practicalproduct of the mind, a collection of material helps subservient to theessential forms of its activity. Knowledge and action, reciprocallyimplicated, are the substance of reality; and both knowledge andaction, rising, the first, from the intuition to the concept, thesecond, from the economic 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 themselvesin the concrete and individual. A universal more universal than thatwhich is present in the individual act is inexistent, or exists onlyas an impotent abstraction[Pg 244] renouncing the concreteness and reality ofthe individual, and therefore also that true universality which hasno being outside this action, this thought, this life. The soul ofthe system, slowly extricating itself from the traces of naturalismor intellectualism, which are still visible in theEstetica, is thelogic of the pure concept, which resolves in the concrete universal thedualisms of nature and spirit, of fact and value, of life and thought,and, finally, of history and philosophy. But while this logic can beseen at work in all the parts of the system, and is, in fact, the formtowards which all Croce's thoughts seem to have constantly tended fromthe time of his earliest philosophical essays, yet, to an attentiveeye, it is possible to discover the successive stages by which itactually incorporated itself in the system. In particular, we have beenable to point to the effects of the later meditations on the philosophyof will, on one side, on a more intimate understanding of the pureintuition as the lyrical intuition, on the other, on the identificationof the definition with the individual judgment, and thereby on therelations between history and philosophy. On the whole it can be saidthat two apparently contrasting directions were at work within thesystem itself: one reflecting Croce's mental need for clear and finedistinctions, the other, that deep consciousness of the unity of thereal, without which all distinctions tend to solidify themselves intodead abstractions.

If we imagine two students of Croce's philosophy,[Pg 245] endowed withantagonistic philosophical temperaments, the one a dialectician,the other a mystic, we can easily conceive them as the founders oftwo diametrically opposed schools of thought. The first would haveemphasized the rigorous distinctions, the formal character, theintellectual precision of the system; he might have retained theidentification of philosophy and history, but to him these words wouldhave stood only for the names of two formal disciplines, and not forthe concrete life of the human spirit which is present in them. Thesecond would have passed lightly over the distinctions, and probablyconsidered them as partaking of the same unreality which belongs toscientific or legal abstractions; and by obliterating the logicalprocesses without which the mind of man is unable to grasp and toexpress itself, he would have taken refuge in an ineffable, thoughnot necessarily silent, contemplation of the underlying unity. Thishypothesis is not a criticism of Croce's philosophy; it is merely theindication of the fact that, when the system appeared as completed,new problems, and therefore new errors or new truths, were bound togrow out of the elements of the system itself. And nobody was moreconscious of this fact than Croce himself, who concluded his volume ontheFilosofia della Pratica by expressly warning his readers of theinexhaustibility of thought, which is one with the infinity of realityand of life. No philosophical system is final, because life itselfhas no end. Every[Pg 246] system of philosophy, being conditioned by life,can do no more than solve a group of problems historically given, andprepare the conditions for new problems and new systems. Of his ownwork in relation to his readers, he conceived as of nothing more thanan instrument of work.

In these last few chapters we shall see Croce himself at work onthe new problems generated by his own system, trying "more rigidlyto eliminate the last remnants of naturalism, and to put a strongeraccent on the spiritual unity,"[1] yet constantly defending hisconception of the spirit as the unity of distinctions, especiallyagainst the mystical tendencies of the new actual idealism. Whilenever, in the course of his whole life, has he limited his activity tomere systematic thinking, during the last eleven years he has showna more marked tendency to return from a philosophy, which is all ameditation of the formal problems of history, to those concrete worksof history, by which he was started on his philosophical career; toreturn to them, however, with a mind in which the original uncertaintyand obscurity has given place to a definite consciousness of the natureand purpose of history. The passage from the more philosophical to themore historical stage is marked by the publication of a fourth volumeof theFilosofia dello Spirito, in which, under the title ofTeoriae Storia della Storiografia, he collected a number of essays[Pg 247] writtenbetween 1912 and 1913, containing an elaboration of the theory ofhistory already expounded in theLogica. This volume does not forma new part of the system, but rather the natural conclusion of thewhole work, since the problem which it discusses is the one towardswhich tended all his former inquiries into the forms of the spirit,into their concrete life which is development and history, and theconsciousness of which is historical thought. But before proceeding toanalyze this final form of Croce's theory of history, we shall give arapid account of the rest of his intellectual activity from 1910 onward.

As during the preceding eight years, theCritica continues to thisday to be the main organ of Croce's work and influence, and in theCritica the greatest part of his writings are still published forthe first time. The general features of the Critica have remainedpractically unchanged, except that his series of essays on the Italianliterature of the last fifty years (which he collected in 1914-15 inthe four volumes ofLa Letteratura della Nuova Italia) has beenfollowed by studies on Italian historiography from the beginning of thenineteenth century to our day (since 1914), by essays on some of thegreatest European poets (since 1917), by notes on modern Italian andforeign literature (since 1917), and by the Frammenti di Etica (since1913), containing discussions of particular problems of contemporarymorality. But practically all the reviews and essays[Pg 248] published inthe Critica and elsewhere are now being collected in the edition ofhis complete works, of which a full list will be found at the end ofthis volume. In 1912, for the inauguration of the Rice Institute inHouston, Texas, he wrote hisBreviario di Estetica, which we havepartly utilized in our exposition of his æsthetic doctrine, and whichhe reprinted in 1920 in hisNuovi Saggi di Estetica, which alsocontains his most significant philosophical essays of the last four orfive years. HisContributo alla critica di me stesso ("Contributionto the Criticism of Myself") was written in April, 1915, on the eve ofItaly's entrance into the war, and is the best essay in existence onthe development of his thought.

Of Croce's attitude during the war we shall say but a few words. Hewas one of the very few European philosophers or scholars who did nottransform themselves into improvised statesmen, or into passionatedefenders of national prejudices and proclaimers of national hatreds.Differing from the Germanized philologist, who was the type prevailingin most universities before the war, in that he had not waited forthe war to become aware of the many weaknesses and imperfectionsof modern German culture, while on the other hand he had lived foryears in true and intimate contact with the great spirits of GermanRomanticism, he resisted with all his power the universal tendency ofthe time to make of the contingent issues of the war a criterion ofintellectual truth and of scientific[Pg 249] conduct. At the same time, histemper and education reacted violently against the false ideologies ofthe war, the superstructure of verbal ideals with which on all sidescunning statesmen and naïve philosophers attempted to veil the truenature of the conflict. Against these, he reasserted his conceptionof the political life and struggles of states as manifestations ofthe economic, amoral or pre-moral, activity, and of life itself as aperpetual struggle, finding its reason and its rest in the struggleitself. The theory of the state as justice appeared to him merely asa theoretical error, the fortune of which lay in the opportunity itafforded to give a convenient mask of morality to particular interests,either of individuals or of states. The intrinsic morality of thewar he conceived as resting on its tragic reality, as reflected ina severely historical thought, to which it appears as a moment ofthat historical fate which crushes and destroys states as well asindividuals, to create from their ruins always new forms of life.

It is needless to say that for a time at least Croce shared withBertrand Russell and with Romain Rolland, two thinkers in many respectsvery distant from him, and yet as impervious as he was to the rhetoricof the war, the privilege of a vast unpopularity. Looking back now onhis writings which were later collected in the volumePagine sullaguerra, it is possible to discover among them many attitudes whichwere justified and useful only as a reaction[Pg 250] against the currentfallacies of the time; and also to realize that the man who speaks tous through them is not always and only a pure philosopher, but a manwith a given complex of moral and political tastes and passions. Butthis is, in a way, as it should be; in the same way, between Croce thephilosopher of æsthetics and Croce the critic of poetry, there is adifference which is inherent in the nature of the two different formsof intellectual activity; the philosopher is a man of understanding,the critic a man of tastes and passions. In both cases, his idealhas always been to make the critic or the moralist worthy of thephilosopher, his particular comprehension of history adequate to hisconcept of the universal. To say that the equation is never perfect,is only another way of saying that every particular historical problemcontinually raises new problems of thought, and that Croce's thoughtfinds therefore in itself the motives of its own development, thesprings of its own life. Where passion and reason ultimately coincide,the roots of the development are taken away, and death takes the placeof life.

Yet, notwithstanding these limitations, I know of no man whose thoughton the war is on the whole more acceptable to those among us who livedthrough the war not as spectators, looking on it as on a vast moralabstraction, but as humble actors, in the midst of its human reality. Asense of collaboration between one side and the other, of being, hereas[Pg 251] there, employed in a common task, whose meaning was much deeperthan any that had been offered to us by the national rhetoricians,—acollaboration which happened to take the aspect of a struggle, andimposed duties antagonistic, but of the same nature—was probably themost usual frame of mind among the soldiers who could think; and itexisted, subconsciously, even among the unthinking ones, provided thattheir duties were of a definite, concrete kind, touched them in thedeepest chords of their beings, involved the fundamental issues of lifeand death. To the man who consciously faces death, there is no comfortin wilful error; only this realization of an end that transcends allparticular ideals, because it is the end of life itself, can be worthyof that price. You cannot willingly die for fourteen points any morethan for one point, but death which is loathsome in the drama of merecircumstance, however adorned with brilliant rhetoric, is no longerdeath but an act of life in the tragedy in which the hero is consciousof his fate. There was no war, probably, that was ever more full thanthe last one of what might be called the material of tragedy; but whathave the official celebrators done with it, they who have not fearedto desecrate, in all our countries, one at least of the concrete,individual tragedies, in order to make of it an empty symbol, totransform an unknown hero into abstract heroism? In some of Croce'spages, there is a more concrete realization of the ideal[Pg 252] tragedy ofthe 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 greatestpoetical spirits of modern Europe, Ariosto, Goethe, Corneille,Shakespeare, bringing to the understanding of their work, to this taskof concrete history, the deep consciousness of the nature of poetry,and of the relations of poetry with life, acquired in twenty years ofphilosophical meditations. Even his functions as Minister of PublicEducation during the last two years did not distract him entirely fromhis studies, and this year of the sixth centenary of Dante's deathwas celebrated by him with the publication ofLa Poesia di Dante,which will certainly remain as the most lasting monument raised to thememory of the poet on this occasion. This troubled peace cannot makehim deviate from the path of his appointed labour any more than the warcould; 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 ishis work is as little shaken by the prophets of despair in peace, asit was by the messiahs of the promised land who were so loud above theturmoil of war. He is probably now noting with a smile that the samemen who talked of the war to end all wars, are now very busy preventingour civilization from dying away; that is, building a peace in theabstract, with programs and words, as they fought a war which was notthe 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, andphilological history—Poetical and rhetorical history—Universalhistory—The universality of history: history and philosophy—Theunity of thought—Philosophy as methodology—The positivity ofhistory—The humanity of history—Distinctions and divisions—Thehistory of nature.

There are two meanings to the word history, in English as well as inother European languages; on one hand it denotes the actual doing, theimmediacy of life, on the other, the thinking that seems to followthe doing, the consciousness of life. In a rough, approximate way, wespeak of men who make history, and of other men who think or writehistory—though we are all perfectly aware of the fact that we cannotmake history without first thinking history, that the action, in otherwords, follows a judgment of the situation, which is an elementary formof historical thought, and is accompanied by its own consciousness,which is its immediate history. In this sense, the action cannot bematerially severed from its history: the distinction between the twois a purely formal and ideal one. And again, the thinking of history,in the second meaning of the word, consists in making present to ourspirit, in re-living,[Pg 254] an action or group of actions, which thusbecome as actual an experience as any practical doing, a fragmentof our own life, and, ultimately, the consciousness of our ownindividual experience. Thus the two meanings which stand out as sharplycontrasting when we objectify and solidify them, as an external,chronological series of happenings, and as a formal disciplineattempting to give, in innumerable books, a description and as it werea verbal duplicate of that series, once we examine them in the lightof our consciousness, reveal themselves merely as different aspects ormoments of the same spiritual process.

Croce's latest writings on history may be puzzling to the averagereader because this ambiguity cannot be overcome by him unless he iswilling to penetrate to the heart of Croce's doctrine, in which theword history acquires a more pregnant and fundamental meaning. Inmany of us there is a tendency to balk at any attempt at filling oldwords with deeper and more precise connotations; but philosophy isnot a matter of words. A new thought will in any case alter the wholephysiognomy of our vocabulary, and to stand up for the old meaningsis as much as to refuse to think, or rather, to refuse to live. Forhistory as a formal discipline, for the actual writing of history,Croce uses the word Historiography; but in hisTeoria e Storiadella Storiografia (Theory and History of the writing of History),history still means both the doing and the thinking,[Pg 255] life and theconsciousness of life, though not in the abstract distinction in whichthese meanings are generally apprehended. In Croce the distinction isalso unity, and there is no doing which is not also a thinking, no lifewhich is not also the consciousness of life, no consciousness which isnot also the consciousness of itself. The ambiguity, some traces ofwhich could still be seen in theLogica, entirely disappears in thisfourth volume of the system, at least for the reader who has followedthe whole development of Croce's thought.

We call contemporary history the history that is being made, ratherloosely including in it a more or less extended stretch of time upto the actual present. But contemporary history rigorously oughtto be only history in the actual making, the immediate present andthe consciousness of the immediate present. All history, however,is contemporary history in this rigorous and precise sense; it is acondition of all history that it should live, be present in the mindof the historian; all history springs directly from present life,since only an interest of our present life can induce us to inquireinto the past, which, by being made history, is no longer a past buta present. If, Croce says, "contemporaneity is not the characteristicof one class of histories (as it is held to be, and with good reasons,in an empirical classification), but the intrinsic character of allhistory, the relation between history and life must be conceived ofas a relation of unity:[Pg 256] not certainly in the sense of an abstractidentity, but in that of a synthetic unity, which implies both theunity and the distinction of the terms. To speak of a history, ofwhich we do not possess the documents, will then seem as absurd asto speak of the existence of a certain thing, of which we should atthe same time affirm that one of the essential conditions for itsexistence is lacking. A history without relation with the documentwould be an inverifiable history; and since the reality of historylies in this verifiability, and the historical narrative in which itrealizes itself is an historical narrative only in so far as it is thecritical exposition of the document, a history of that kind, withoutmeaning and without truth, would be inexistent as history. How couldever a history of painting be composed by a man who should not see andenjoy the works of which he intends to describe critically the originand development? How, a history of philosophy, without the works, orat least the fragments of the works of the philosophers? How, thehistory of a feeling or a custom, for instance, of Christian humilityor of chivalresque honour, without the capacity to re-live, or rather,without actually re-living those particular states of mind? On theother hand, having established the indissoluble connection of lifeand thought in history, the doubts that have been advanced about thecertainty and utility of history suddenly and totally disappear, andit becomes almost impossible to understand them. How[Pg 257] could that everbe uncertain, which is a present product of our spirit? How could aknowledge be useless, which solves a problem rising from the womb oflife?"[1]

If history is thus regarded not as an object but as an activity, not asthe irrevocable past but as the living present, the difference betweenhistory and chronicle, which is one of the puzzles of historicalthought, becomes an important and significant distinction. We are usedto think that the original form of historical writing is the chronicle,and history a later and maturer development. Now if history is theconsciousness of a present, it follows that history is contemporarywith the event; that, therefore, the most meagre chronicle, in the mindof 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 ofthe past, whether appearing to us, from a literary point of view, asmere chronicles or as true histories, become history again wheneverthey 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 samerecords, on the other hand, are a mere chronicle, an empty narrative,a truly irrevocable past, whenever they are not re-lived by a livingmind, either because they do not correspond to any interest of presentlife, or because the essential[Pg 258] conditions for the recreation of thatpast, the documents which enable us to revive within ourselves theoriginal experience, are irrevocably lost. The true distinction betweenhistory and chronicle is not, therefore, a literary or material one,but a distinction between forms of spiritual activity: history is theliving 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 tolife, transform itself again, under an impulse rooted not in the pastbut in the present, into a living thought.

"These revivals have purely inward motives; and no amount of narrativesor documents can produce them; on the contrary, it is the inner motivethat gathers and brings before itself documents and narratives,which, without it, would remain dispersed and inert. And it will befor ever impossible to understand the effectual process of historicalthought, unless one starts from the principle that the spirit itselfis history, and, in every one of its moments, the maker of historyand at the same time the result of all foregoing history; so that thespirit carries within itself the whole of its history, which in factcoincides with the spirit itself. To forget one aspect of historyand to remember another is nothing but the rhythm of the life of thespirit, which works by determining and individualizing itself, and byin-determining and dis-individualizing[Pg 259] the preceding determinationsand individualizations, in order to create new and richer ones. Thespirit would live over again, so to speak, its history, even withoutthose external objects which we call narratives and documents; butthose external objects are instruments that it fashions for itself, andpreparatory acts that it accomplishes, in order to effect that vitalinterior evocation, in whose process they resolve themselves. And forthis purpose the spirit asserts and jealously preserves the 'memoriesof the past.'"[2]

This practical function of the preservation of the dead documentsand records is the work of the pure scholar, of the erudite, thearchivist, the archæologist, or what might be termed philology in thestrict 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, andto substitute itself for the true process of history, by attempting tomake history with the external objects that have been confided to itscare. Philological histories are never anything but mere compilations,learned chronicles, useful repertories; and as such, blameless; butas histories they lack the living spirit, the creative impulse, whichalone can transform the document into history. We have only to turn ourattention to the greatest part of our modern histories of literature,whether written by a single philologist or by a learned society, torealize that[Pg 260] that which is philology in them is not history, butrepertory; and the rest, which is history, is not philology, but avivid reaction, an act of present life, by which some at least of thedocuments of the past (since some philologists are men) have suddenlybecome part of the actual experience of the writer, answered hisspiritual need, stirred that which is still human in his soul. And ifa further confirmation of the philological error is needed, and of thefurther errors in which it involves the philological historian, it issufficient to open those same literary histories at the pages in whichthey attempt to explain the origins of the Renaissance. Because asthose writers make history from the sources, so they imagine that lifeitself springs from material sources; and the Renaissance finds itscauses in the discovery of monuments and documents of the classicalworld, in the lives and travels of humanists, in the munificence ofpopes and princes. It does not seem to occur to them that monumentsand manuscripts, which materially had existed in Europe during all theso-called Dark and Middle Ages, could not have been discovered unless,at a certain moment in the development of European civilization, thespirit of the Western nations had not craved those particular helpsto its own life, because of motives and impulses generated by its ownactual experience; and that the mediæval clericus was not less of atraveller than the humanist, and that the economic aspect of life cannever be intelligibly[Pg 261] conceived as a cause of that life of which it isbut a moment. For the philological historian, the Renaissance beginsbetween the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenthcentury; but the historiantout court knows that the fundamentalimpulses and motives by which we empirically ally characterize thatperiod in the history of the human spirit were already present in theItaly of the thirteenth century, and slowly maturing in the otherEuropean countries long before any of the Italian humanists had come tothem as the apostles of a new creed.

If philological history is not history but pseudo-history, so are alsotwo other forms of so-called historical thought, poetical history andrhetorical history. The first substitutes for the value of history,which is thought, a purely immediate and sentimental, or æstheticvalue; it presents itself very often as a reaction to philologicalhistory, but it falls into the opposite error, which is that of puttingthe imagination in the place of the document. Rhetorical history isthat which is animated by practical ends (moralistic, nationalistic,or other), and it really consists of two distinct elements, historyitself, and the particular end towards which the recitation of historyis directed, converging into a single practical act. Both partake oflife much more intensely than philological history; but the life ofthe one is poetry, that of the other is economic or moral action. Theyare, therefore, legitimate as[Pg 262] poetry and as action, and become errorsonly in so far as they are presented as history. It is important tomake this distinction as clear as possible: the actual interest whichmakes history is not for Croce a sentimental or practical interest,but an interest of thought. In the distinction of the various forms ofspiritual activity, history is not the sentimental or practical moment,but the moment of ultimate consciousness, the reflection and not eitherthe intuition or the action, the thought which is consciousness oflife and not life immediate; neither art nor morality, in a word, butphilosophy, if by philosophy, we mean not a formal discipline, butall knowledgesub specie universalis. The defenders of rhetoricalhistory have become more frequent during and after the war than theywere before it, it being only too natural that in times of exceptionalstress truth should be made subservient to practical ends, and the manof knowledge should be unwittingly transmogrified into a man of action;and they insist more than ever on the moral efficacy of history as itsproper educational value. But "if by history we mean both that historywhich is thought, and those that are poetry, philology or moral will,it is clear that 'history' will enter into the educational process notunder one only, but under all these forms; though as history proper,under one only, which is not that of moral education, exclusivelyand abstractly considered, but of the education or development ofthought."[3]

The conception of history as contemporary history, 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, anda very small part, of the whole. If we should imagine that infinitewhole, 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 orderto concentrate our attention on that detail only which answers toa problem and, therefore, constitutes a living and active history.That whole is not something of which we can affirm the existence atany given moment, but the eternal phantasm of the thing in itself,the limiting concept of the infinity of our doing and knowing: anaturalistic construction similar to the external and material realityof physical science. It is this naturalistic process that gives birthto agnosticism, in history as in science; that is, to the affirmationof the impossibility of knowing that which has no reality outside ourown thought, which has created, or rather posited it, for its ownpurposes. A further consequence is that we must renounce the knowledgeof universal history, not as a fact, because as such it has neverexisted, but as a pretence under which, in fact, we are given somethingquite different. The pretence consists (and it will be well to recallCroce's own words, written long before some recent attempts, which inthose words find their precise valuation) in "reducing within a singleframe all[Pg 264] the facts of mankind, from its origins on earth to thepresent day; or rather, since in this way history would not be trulyuniversal, from the origins of things or from the Creation to the endof the world; hence a tendency to fill the abysm of prehistory or ofthe origins with theological or naturalistic novels, and somehow tooutline the future, either with revelations or with prophecies, as inthe Christian universal history (which extended to the Anti-Christ andto the universal judgment), or with forecasts, as in the universalhistories of positivism, democraticism, and socialism. Such is thepretence; but the fact turns out to be different from the intention,and what we get is either a more or less heterogeneous chronicle, ora poetical history expressing some aspiration of the heart, or even atrue history, which is not universal but particular, though embracingthe life of many nations and of many epochs; and, more often, in thesame literary body we discern these divers elements, one by the side ofthe other."[4]

Universal history is a utopian ideal similar to those of a universallanguage, or of universal art, or of a law that should be valid forall times; the only useful meaning of the word universal when appliedto history is that of a recommendation to enlarge the sphere of ourhistorical interests, and to turn from the knowledge of one time andone people to that of the great facts and currents of history. But adenial[Pg 265] of the validity of universal history must not be understood aswithdrawing from history the knowledge of the universal. The reader whohas followed us through the preceding chapters, and especially throughour analysis of the historical judgment, knows how the concretenessand individuality of history is determined by thought, and thereforeknown as a universal. History is thought, and, as such, the thoughtof the universal in its concrete and particular determinations. Theobject of history is never this or that poet, but poetry; not this orthat nation or epoch, but culture, civilization, progress, freedom, ora similar word which denotes the development of the human spirit as awhole, and is therefore a universal. It is of history, thus conceived,of contemporary history, as opposed to the naturalistic moment(chronicle, or philological history), that Croce asserts the identitywith philosophy: history as, the knowledge of the eternal present beingone with the thought of the eternal present, which is philosophy.History renounces the pretence of an objective universality in the sameway as philosophy, immanent in and identical with history, abolishesthe idea of a universal philosophy: the two negations are but one,since the closed system, the final truth, is as much a cosmologicalnovel as universal history is. "This tendency was implicit in Hegel'sphilosophy, but contrasted within it by old prejudices, and whollybetrayed in the execution, so that even that philosophy converteditself into a cosmological novel;[Pg 266] we can therefore say that that whichat the beginning of the nineteenth century was a mere presentiment,only at the beginning of the twentieth is transforming itself into afirm consciousness, which defies the fears of the timid, that in thisway we endanger the knowledge of the universal; maintaining that, onthe contrary, in this way only this knowledge is obtained truly andfor ever, because in a dynamic mode. History becoming actual history,and philosophy becoming historical philosophy, have freed themselves,one from the dread of not being able to know that which is not knownonly because either it was or it will be known, and the other, from thedespair of never attaining the final truth: that is, both have freedthemselves from the phantasm of the 'thing in itself.'"[5]

This final affirmation of the unity of human thought, thisqualification of all thought as at the same time historical andphilosophical, is the last answer given by Croce to the problemwhich had occupied him for the last twenty years, ever since hisfirst speculations on history as art. From the consideration of theindividual moment which is essential to history, he had slowly raisedhimself to the contemplation of the pure universal, only to returnfinally to the individual moment in which only the universal realizesitself. And while this answer can be regarded, on the whole, as thenatural conclusion of the idealistic movement in philosophy, yet it[Pg 267]differs from Kant in its ultimate repudiation of thenoumenon, fromHegel, in that it makes it impossible to build, side by side with adynamic logic, a mythology of the Idea, a philosophy of history and ofnature, in which the transcendental element, eliminated already fromthe logic, should find its ultimate refuge. It is to be hoped thatCroce's critics will not level against him those same criticisms thatare generally employed against Kant or Hegel, because they would be forthe most part ineffectual against a Kantian and Hegelian philosopherwho has discarded the whole of Kantian and Hegelian metaphysics.From this standpoint, Croce is not only the heir of the idealistic,but also of the positivistic or realistic tradition, which he hasconstantly opposed, not because of its anti-metaphysical character,but because in the external reality of the realist, in the natural orhistorical philosophy of the positivist, he is unable to see anythingbut naturalistic disguises of the old metaphysical entities. A realistwho should not in principle refuse to become acquainted with Croce'sthought, but honestly attempt to understand it, would probably find hisown realism purified and made more truly realistic by the experience.

A material distinction, as of formal disciplines, between history andphilosophy still survives in Croce's theory, philosophy proper beingconsidered as the categoric or methodological moment of history—adistinction roughly corresponding to the one he made in his logicbetween the individual judgment[Pg 268] and the definition. But philosophyitself is profoundly modified once we fully realize that its historicalcharacter implies the abandonment of certain features which areconstantly associated in our minds with the idea of philosophy, becauseof its early associations with mythology and the positive religionsions. To these belong the belief in the existence of a fundamentalproblem of philosophy, which remains the same throughout the history ofhuman thought, and of which the various philosophies are but successiveapproximations to an answer; the consequent stress laid on the unityof the system rather than on the fine and clear distinctions; theresearch of an ultimate truth; and finally, the prejudice by whichthe philosopher is regarded as a Buddha or priest, freed from humanpassions and human illusions, resting in the pure contemplation ofa truth, which, by being tom from the soil of active life that hasborne it, cannot but wither away and become as empty and unreal as theBuddha's own Nirvana frankly professes to be. Metaphysics to Croce isthe last incarnation of theology; and the professor of philosophy inour universities, with a culture formed exclusively on the books of thegreat philosophers of the past, unmoved by the passions and problemsof life, is but the heir of the mediæval master of theology. "A strongadvancement 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[Pg 269] historical matters,should become conscious and well-disciplined philosophers; and thephilosopher in general, thepurus philosophus, should no longer findplace among the professional specifications of knowledge."[6]

We shall not follow our author in all his developments of the theoryof history. It suffices to say that these developments are obviouslybut new presentations, made here and there more precise and morecoherent, of the various problems already discussed in the precedingvolumes of theFilosofia dello Spirito. We shall thus recognise inCroce's criticism of the philosophy of history as a special discipline,distinct both from history as such and from a so-called generalphilosophy, his polemic against transcendence, either metaphysicalor naturalistic; and in his claim for the positivity of history, histheory of value, by which the only real values are the positive ones,coinciding with the fact, while negative values are but expressionsof feelings and desires. In the light of this theory, since historyis obviously concerned with that which is, and not with that which isnot, the limits of historical judgment are clearly established, in theway in which we saw them established for literary criticism. As theliterary critic is never concerned with anything but with expression,or art, or beauty, non-expression, non-art, non-beauty being as suchinexistent, and truly existent only as manifestations of the logicalor practical activity of[Pg 270] man; so the historian at large will nevermeet negative values, but positive facts only, which assume the aspectof ugliness, or error, or immorality, only in the dialectic process ofreality, in the creation of a higher form of life. His affirmation ofthe positive fact is sufficient judgment, and it becomes an implicitmoral judgment whenever the consciousness of the historian is a moralconsciousness, without any need for him to usurp the function of themoralist or of the judge in apportioning praise or blame on the objectsof his history.

Against the humanistic or pragmatic conception of history, which findsthe reasons and motives of history in the abstract individual, asagainst the opposite view, for which the true history is only thatof the collectivity, of the institutions, of the human values, Crocereasserts his concept of the actuality of the spirit, in regard towhich the individual is as much of an abstraction as the society orthe value which does not entirely realize itself in the fact. Theobject of history is neither Pericles nor Politics, neither Sophoclesnor Tragedy, neither Plato nor Philosophy; but the universal in theindividual, that is, Politics, Tragedy, Philosophy, as Pericles,Sophocles, and Plato, or Pericles, Sophocles, and Plato as particularmoments of Politics, of Tragedy, and of Philosophy.

As there are no special philosophical sciences, and then a generalphilosophy, which should be outside or above them, but whenever wethink of reality[Pg 271] under one of its aspects or distinctions, we thinkof the whole of reality in one of its determinations, so there are nospecial histories, the limits of which can be definitely stated, andabove them a general history, which would in a new form revive the mythof universal history. We have seen how literary history, for instance,tends inevitably to become the whole spiritual history of a nation;and the same applies to all special histories, whether political ormoral, or philosophical. There are divisions of history, accordingto the quality of the objects, to time and space, but such divisionsare mere empirical classifications, practical instruments or literaryexpedients; and we can use as the foundation of such divisions even theideal distinctions of the fundamental forms of spiritual activity. Butwhen these distinctions are understood as actual distinctions of theaspects of the spiritual life, of which we make history, then all theother aspects will inevitably be present in the particular distinction,once we truly apprehend it in the fulness of its relations. In thissense, history is always special or particular, because it is only inthe special and particular that we can grasp the effectual and concreteuniversality, the effectual and concrete unity.

Finally, the difference between the history of man and the history ofnature is not a difference in the object but in the method of history.The whole of reality is spiritual reality, and nature apprehendedin its concreteness and actuality, if we are able to[Pg 272] recreate itwithin ourselves, becomes actual, concrete, contemporary history asmuch as any part of human history. On the other hand, the applicationof empirical and abstract concepts, the practical manipulation ofthe data of human history, transforms the history of man into merenatural history. This difference in method we have already analyzed instudying Croce's logic, and we shall only add here that the reader ofCroce may often be tempted to regard Croce's conception of reality aslimited to the human spirit only, and therefore to give a metaphysicalinterpretation to his exclusion of "nature." The correct interpretationis a purely epistemological one, and again and again Croce insists thatin the whole of reality, which is development or life, man and natureare but empirical and abstract distinctions. On the other hand, Croce'sinterests are certainly more human than natural, and not only in thesense in which this is true of every man; in the more precise sensealso that the effort to recreate within himself the consciousness of ablade of grass, which he advises the historian of nature to perform,clearly appeals to him so little, that he may even seem doubtful of itssuccess. The accent is continually laid, in Croce's thought, on thehistory of man, and on the thought of man; to many of us, our dealingswith nature (not the dead nature of Linnæus, but the living nature ofVirgil and Shelley) would probably suggest a shifting of the accentby which the spirituality of nature, the continuity of the dynamic[Pg 273]process from nature to man would become more emphatically affirmedthan it is in any of Croce's writings. We are probably touching hereon one of the possible, and probable, lines of development of Croce'sphilosophy; which, however, will not become actual until the historicalproblems of the living nature shall not urge Croce himself, or one ofhis successors, as powerfully as the problems of human history havemoved him. At present, with very rare exceptions, the students ofthe history of nature are occupied in transforming their historicalexperience into classes and types and laws; but a time may come whenfrom the naturalistic constructions we shall be able more frequentlyto recreate the life of which these are but the dead spoils, theaccumulated vestiges, by the same process by which history re-kindlesthe old chronicles into new, contemporary life. That such a developmentis implied in Croce's own theory of history can hardly be questioned,though, when realized, it will undoubtedly react on more than one pointof Croce's logic.

III. CRITICISM AND HISTORY

Beyond the system—The universality of art—The discipline ofart—Poetry, prose and oratory—Classicism and impressionism—Practical personality and poetical personality—The monographicmethod in criticism—The reform of æsthetic history—Criticism asphilosophy—Sensibility and intelligence.

The identification of history and philosophy, in the form in whichwe have expounded it in the preceding chapter, is the turning pointof Croce's thought; the system which in the first three volumes oftheFilosofia dello Spirito had still a somewhat static and rigidappearance, is really set to movement, animated as if by a new andintenser life, since its implicit dynamism is made explicit in thefourth and concluding volume. To Croce himself, the whole of his workappears no longer as a system, but as "a series of systematizations,"and hisFilosofia dello Spirito, as a series of "volumes on theproblems slowly gathering in his mind since the years of his youth."No wonder, therefore, that his later work should contain "thoughtsthat break the bars of the so-called system, and give, to a closescrutiny, new systems or new 'systematizations,' since always the wholemoves with every one of our steps." No wonder that he should feel thathe will continue to philosophize even if one day he shall abandon[Pg 275]"philosophy," "as this is what the unity of philosophy and historyimplies: that we philosophize whenever we think, and of whatever objectand in whatever form we may think."[1] And in fact, in these last fewyears, Croce has given many a severe shock to the faithful worshippersof his system, sometimes by extending his tolerance, or even hisapproval, to types of speculation apparently remote from his own, butin which he recognises, under a radically different aspect, some ofthe living impulses, and spiritual interests by which his own thoughtis moved; and sometimes by developing new theories, through whichintellectual positions criticised by him at an earlier stage of hiswork were reëstablished as having a new meaning and value, once theywere approached from a new and higher standpoint, partly reached bymeans of that same critical process which had previously revealed themas errors. Croce's conception of the function of error in the historyof human thought, while making him violently intolerant of actualnegative error, leads him to search painstakingly for that element oftruth which is the reality of every error; and in this respect too, hisphilosophical career is as it were roughly divided into two periods,one of critical dissolution, and the other of critical reconstruction,respectively corresponding to the building up of the system, and to thesuccessive liberation from the shackles of the system itself. Croce'sname will certainly be remembered in the future, if on no[Pg 276] otheraccount, as that of the only philosopher who never became the slaveof his dead thought. His coherence is never of the letter, but of thespirit.

This last phase of Croce's thought offers greater difficulties to theexpositor than the preceding ones, partly because it is still in themaking, and therefore lacks the necessary perspective, and partlybecause it is embodied not only in purely philosophical essays, but inevery page of Croce's historical and critical writings; so that veryoften it would be impossible to give a clear account of it withoutample and minute reference to the underlying historical material.The whole of Croce's thought could indeed be restated through anexposition of Croce's historical views, and it would be an alluringtask to extract from his writings a kind of outline of the historyof mankind, considered especially in its æsthetic and philosophicalcal manifestations, and indirectly also in its moral and economicactivities; but it would take us much beyond the limits which we haveset to our labour. We shall therefore confine ourselves to examining,in this chapter, the latest developments of Croce's æsthetics,especially in relation with the history of art and poetry; and, in thefollowing and concluding one, to considering his theory of truth or ofthe function of thought, in relation to other types of contemporarythought.

We have followed the evolution, or rather the deepening, of Croce'sconcept of art as pure intuition, into lyrical intuition, throughwhich the movement[Pg 277] and life which might seem to have been denied tothe products of the æsthetic activity considered as a mere form ofknowledge, were recognised as intrinsically belonging to them by reasonof the very nature of that cognitive activity, and of its relationswith the practical sphere of the spirit, the states of mind, which canbe abstracted as the matter or content of the æsthetic form. Anotherdifficulty, however, still persisted in Croce's theory, due to thesharp distinction between the æsthetic and the logical activity, whichreserved to the first the field of individual, to the second that ofuniversal knowledge—constituting a double-grade relation, in which theæsthetic was implied by the logic activity, but not vice-versa. Thecorresponding distinction of the two forms of the practical spirit,the economic and the ethic, evolved by Croce at a maturer stage of hisspeculation, establishes not only a double-grade relation, but alsoa reciprocal implication. Croce's essay onIl carattere di totalitàdella espressione artistica (1917) is an attempt at interpreting hisfirst distinction in the light of the second, thereby recognising theuniversal or cosmic character of art. That universality which becomesexplicit in the logical judgment is implicit in the intuition, alreadyidentified with the category of feeling, with the concrete states ofmind, on which it imposes its form: "Since, what is a feeling or astate of mind? is it something that can be detached from the universeand developed[Pg 278] by itself? have the part and the whole, the individualand the cosmos, the finite and the infinite, any reality, one outsidethe other? One may be inclined to grant that every severance andisolation of the two terms of the relation could not be anythingbut the work of abstraction, for which only there is an abstractindividuality and an abstract finite, an abstract unity and an abstractinfinite. But the pure intuition, or artistic representation, abhorsabstraction; or rather it does not even abhor it, since it knows itnot, because of its naïve or auroral cognitive character. In it, theindividual lives by the life of the whole, and the whole is in the lifeof the individual; and every true artistic representation is itself andthe universe, the universe in that individual form, and that individualform as the universe. In every accent of a poet, in every creature ofhis phantasy, there is the whole of human destiny, all the hopes, theillusions, the sorrows and the joys, all human greatness and all humanmisery, the entire drama of reality, which perpetually becomes andgrows upon itself, suffering and rejoicing."[2]

This recognition of the implicit universality of the æstheticexpression does not abolish, as it might seem to a superficialobserver, the distinction between æsthetic and logical knowledge; itrather makes it clearer and truer. An imperfect recognition may leadto an intellectualistic or mystic theory[Pg 279] of art; and intellectualismand mysticism in æsthetics remain for Croce as typical forms of error,whether they are directed towards a confusion between intuition andjudgment, or towards a symbolical or allegorical interpretation ofart, or towards a semi-religious theory of art as the revelation oftheDeus absconditus. But the truth that those errors tried toexpress in their imperfect formulas, is finally understood by him tobe that character of universality which belongs to every aspect andto every fragment of the living reality. Feeling itself, or a stateof mind, partakes in its actuality of that universal character, butwhen expressed in art, it retains its universality only by losing itspractical nature, and subjecting itself entirely to the form whichexpresses it. Thus the æsthetic activity, because bent on realizingits own universality, which is the perfection of its form, imposes onthe artist a morality and a discipline which cannot be identified withpractical morality, with the discipline of life. The sincerity of the'artist is of another order than that of the practical man, though (wecan never repeat it too often) æsthetic virtues being incommensurablewith moral values, his work as an artist does not exempt him from hisduties as a man.

This further determination of the concept of expression is used byCroce to clarify a distinction which had already been adumbratedin the Estetica; the distinction between poetic, intellectual, andpractical expression, between the word in which[Pg 280] the pure intuitionembodies itself, the word which is a sign or symbol of thought, andthe word which is an instrument for the awakening of the emotions, apreparation for action. Thus the old categories of poetry, prose, andoratory reappear, but no longer as criteria of material classification,no longer to be identified with classes or genres of expression. Theybecome synonyms, respectively, of the æsthetic, the logical, and thepractical activity; to be used as instruments of literary and artisticcriticism, if the critic is willing to renounce all external helps andmaterial standards, and to penetrate into the "individuality of theact, where only it is given to him to discern the different spiritualdispositions, and what is poetry from what is not poetry. Under thesemblance of prose, in a comedy or in a novel, we may find a true anddeeply felt lyric; as under that of verse, in a tragedy or in a poem,nothing but reflection and oratory."[3] It is easy to perceive how thisdistinction will also react on Croce's theory of language as intuitionand expression, not by altering its initial position, but by offeringnew means for the empirical analysis of the facts of language, thenature of which is obviously determined by the kind of impulse whichman obeys in the individual act of expression. By the employment ofsuch a method, the history of language as æsthetic expression can bequalified and illumined through the consideration of the moments[Pg 281] inwhich language ceases to be a pure act of æsthetic creation, and issubordinated, as a symbol or instrument, to the purposes of the logicaland practical mind.

Similarly, in the history of poetry or of art, the consideration ofthe logical and practical moments in the expression will help todefine and isolate that which is purely æsthetic expression, that is,poetry and art. Croce's expressionistic theory, when thus understood,differs both from other expressionistic theories and from the narrowinterpretations of Croce's own theory that have been given by some ofhis followers and by all his adversaries. It does not, in fact, attemptto give an æsthetic justification of art as the mere passive receptionof the transient mood; it has no sympathy for that impressionism whichtransforms the artist into a reed shaken by all winds of circumstance,legitimizing every intrusion of the practical personality in theæsthetic production. It reduces this modern æsthetics of the immediatefeeling to an expression, not of the true spirit of what art and poetryis being produced to-day, but of that disease, or passivity, of thetimes, the first solemn document of which can be traced in Rousseau'sConfessions. Against it, Croce appeals to the example and the wordof a Goethe or a Leopardi, who diagnosed the disease in its inception,and contrasted the classical naturalness and simplicity of the ancientswith the affectation and tumidity[Pg 282] of the moderns. But the classicismwhich Croce invokes is not a formal and literal ideal, limited tocertain models or standards: it is that complete idealization, whichthe immediate practical data, in all times and climates, will undergoat the hands of the true poet and artist, whether he calls himself aromanticist or a classicist, an idealist or a realist.

Closely related with this line of thought is Croce's distinction ofthe practical from the poetical personality of the artist, and ofbiography from æsthetic criticism, as we find it in the essay ofAlcune massime critiche, and in the first chapter of his study onShakespeare (1919). The knowledge of the facts of an artist's life isundoubtedly required for the purposes of biographical or practicalhistory; but their relation with the æsthetic personality of the artistis not, as it is generally assumed, a relation of cause and effect.They may have an indirect utility for the definition of the æstheticpersonality, and especially for the recognition of that which in theworks of art themselves is still purely practical, not yet stampedwith the seal of the æsthetic activity. But in the apprehension ofart, the critic must prescind from the biographical elements, because"the artist himself has prescinded from them in the act of creation ofhis work of art, which is a work of art inasmuch as it is the oppositeof the practical life, and is accomplished by the artist raisinghimself above the practical plane, abandoning the greatest part ofhis practical feelings, and[Pg 283] transfiguring those even that he seemsto preserve, because putting them into new relations. The artist, aswe say, 'transcends time,' that is, the 'practical time,' and entersthe 'ideal time,' where actions do not follow actions, but the eternallives in the present. And he who pretends to explain the ideal time bythe practical time, the imaginative creation by the practical action,art by biography, unwittingly denies art itself, and reduces it toa practical business, of the same kind as eating and making love,producing goods or fighting for a political cause."[4]

This concept of the æsthetic personality, which we find clearlydefined in Croce's most recent essays, was the guiding principleof all his literary criticism, since the time when he started hisseries of studies on modern Italian literature. He had inheritedit from De Sanctis, whose work, in so far as it is æsthetic andnot moral or political history, can be regarded as a collection ofpowerful characterizations of æsthetic personalities. But, in hisfirst attempts in literary criticism, Croce employed it tentativelyin what then appeared to him only as the preparatory stage of hiswork; beyond the individual characterizations, and once these hadbeen sufficiently determined, he still thought of the possibility ofa general literary history, in which these should find their place asparts of a more complex organism of critical thought. But[Pg 284] when he hadcompleted his task, in a series of remarkable essays, some of whichwill have fixed for a long time to come the physiognomy of the mostnotable Italian writers of the last half-century, he perceived thathe had practically exhausted the æsthetic problems which the work ofthose writers presented to his mind: a general literary history ofthe period could have been nothing but a new arrangement of the sameideas and valuations contained in the individual essays. Thus themonographic method .which he had originally adopted for convenience'sake, justified itself in the practice of his work, or rather provedto be the only legitimate method of literary and general artistichistory. All the vague abstractions with which modern nationalistic orsociological histories of art and poetry are crammed, reveal themselvesultimately as either generalizations of individual characteristics, orconcepts borrowed from the economic and moral history of a nation orpeople, more or less irrelevant to the purposes of æsthetic criticism.The true unity in the consideration of the history of art cannot bereached by the establishment of purely external and material relationsbetween work and work, between artist and artist, but only by makingone's critical estimate of the individual work or artist sufficientlyvast and sufficiently deep. "Contemporaries, related or opposed to theindividual poet, his more or less partial and remote forerunners, themoral and intellectual life of his time, and that[Pg 285] of the times whichpreceded and prepared it, these and other things are all present (nowexpressed, now unexpressed) in our spirit, when we reconstruct thedialectic of a given artistic personality. Undoubtedly, in consideringa given personality we cannot, in the same act, consider another ormany others or all others, each for itself; and psychologists call thislack 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 aword, the Whole."[5]

This is the purport of the essay onLa Riforma della Storia artisticae letteraria (1917), and this is the method deliberately followed byCroce in his recent essays on Ariosto, Goethe, Shakespeare, Corneilleand Dante, which ought to be studied not only as characterizations ofthe various poets, of the feeling or tonality which is peculiar to eachof them and constitutes their æsthetic personality, but also as sourcesfor the methodology of literary criticism. To his theory Croce bringsa two-fold corroboration, first, from the observation of the fact thatit coincides with a more and more widespread tendency in both literaryand artistic history towards the monographic form, the individualessay,[Pg 286] as the most effectual type of criticism; and second, from theanalogy with other forms of history. All history, and not æsthetichistory only, is essentially monographic; all history is the historyof a given event or of a given custom or of a given doctrine, and allhistory reaches the universal only in and through the individual. Theonly obstacles to a general acceptation of this view are, on one side,a persistent inability to distinguish art from the practical and morallife and from philosophy, and on the other, a lack of scientific sense,through which science is regarded not as critical research, but as amaterial gathering of facts. Prospectuses, handbooks, dictionariesand encyclopedias are not the ideal of history: they are instrumentsof which we shall always make use as practical helps for the criticalresearch; but what is living and real thought in them is but an echo ofthe actual thinking of individual problems.

All æsthetic criticism, and therefore all æsthetic history, is thisthinking of logical problems, rooted in the concrete ground of theworks of art, which are in their turn solutions of æsthetic problems.For this the dynamic conception of the human spirit imports that everyone of its acts is a creation, or a doing, in the particular formin which the spirit realizes itself; art, a creation, in respect towhich all spiritual antecedents assume the aspect of a given æstheticproblem; history or philosophy, a creation on the substance of realitypresenting itself as a logical problem; and the whole sphere of the[Pg 287]theoretical spirit, "a theoreticaldoings which is the perpetualantecedent and the perpetual consequent of the practical doing."[6]The mere recreation of the æsthetic impression given by a work of artis not yet criticism; the critic as a mereartifex additus artificiis not yet a critic, but still an artist. Criticism, like all otherhistory, is not feeling or intuition, but intelligence and thought.Every history of criticism will therefore ultimately coincide with thehistory of æsthetic theories, with the philosophy of art. We thus reachagain, by a new path, the identification of history with philosophy; towhich, in this particular case, the most common objection is that whatis required in a critic is much more an exquisite æsthetic sensibilitythan an elaborate concept of what art is as a category of the humanmind. But the objection rests on a misunderstanding of the properfunction of criticism. What sensibility can give is but the immediateapprehension or taste of the work of art, critically dumb in itself;on the other hand, it is impossible to conceive of a true intelligenceof art, "without the conjoined capacity to understand the individualworks of art, because philosophy does not develop in the abstract,but is stimulated by the acts of life and imagination, rises for thepurpose of comprehending them, and understands them by understandingitself."[7] The[Pg 288] mere æsthetic sensibility makes but a new artist; whatmakes the critic is his philosophy. Here also, however, as during thewhole course of our inquiry, we must not identify philosophy with theofficial history of philosophical disciplines, which offers a largenumber of theories of æsthetics only remotely related to the concreteworks of art, to the concrete processes of æsthetic creation, but withthe whole history of human thought, with the working out of particularproblems successively presented to the intelligence of man by theactual developments of poetry and art. The æsthetic judgment, likeevery other judgment, is a synthesis of the individual intuition, orsubject, and of the universal category, or predicate; and this is butanother way of stating the identity of æsthetic criticism, as of allforms of history, with philosophy. The critic must be endowed with apower to give new life, within his own mind, to the intuitions of theartist, but this is for him but the soil in which his thought mustspread its roots; it is true that without that power, no criticismis possible, but it is equally true that no philosophy of art cangrow on any but that same soil. The ultimate test of the validity ofæsthetic thought is in its capacity to expand our sphere of æstheticapprehension; and pure æsthetics is but the methodological moment ofæsthetic 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 immanence ofvalue—The actuality of Truth—Truth as history: the function of errorand of evil—The foundations of Croce's thought.

There is one problem in the history of human thought, which, howeverconscious we might be of the multiplicity and historical contingencyof philosophical problems, yet can appear to us as the ultimate orcentral one, if only because it is an abstract interrogation describingthe attitude of the philosopher, and to which every concrete logicalresearch, every act of thought, can be reduced. It is Pilate'squestion:Quid est veritas? What is truth?

The question itself has no definite meaning, until it receives from theindividual thinker a definite content, which is history or experience,and the infinite variety of the answers it has received is due to theinfinite variability of that content. But at all times man has beenurged by a passionate desire to lift his own individual answer from theflux of life, to put it as it were over and against that experiencefrom which it had emerged, not as the truth of his particular problem,but as an abstractly[Pg 290] universal truth. It is by violently breaking theprocess of thought, and hypostatizing in essence the subject of histhought, abstracted from its object, or the object from its subject,and both from the creative activity which produces truth, that man hascreated, both in philosophy proper and in the minds of the multitude,a double transcendence, of pure ideas, on one side, of brute matter onthe other, from which the two most common meanings of the word truthare derived.

The Platonic idealist, for whom the actual processes of life andthought are but shadows and remembrances of the Eternal Ideas inthe hyper-uranian space, can be assumed here as the symbol of thetranscendental idealist, for whom truth is adequation to an ideal modelexisting outside the mind. The most disparate types of philosophersbelong to this herd, and among them many that commonly go under thename of realists, since the idealist who has fixed and objectifiedhis ideas cannot help considering them as real essences, and dealingwith them accordingly. The Aristotelian realist, the theologian,Hegel himself when postulating an original Logos, of which Spirit andNature are the temporal explication, all can be gathered togetherin the goodly company of Platonists; and Platonists are to-day boththe literal followers of German idealism, and the less barbarousamong contemporary realists, who are in the habit of attributingan independent, absolute existence to logical or[Pg 291] mathematicalabstractions. But neither the ones nor the others seem to be in veryclose contact with the spirit of the age: what they mean by truth isnot what is generally meant by truth to-day, except among those whostill cling to the myths in which that form of transcendence expresseditself in past ages. The sturdiest, though hardly recognizable,survivals of Platonism are relics of formalistic logic, still veryfrequent in contemporary culture, and a belief in what might be calledaverage truth, mechanically extracted from an external and materialconsensus of opinions. But with this conception of truth, we touch theborder line between idealistic and naturalistic transcendentalism.

The most common attitude of contemporary thought (and the one that istherefore usually designated as common sense, and as such opposed tophilosophy) is a naively naturalistic one. But it would be a mistaketo regard it as a simple and spontaneous attitude, and to identify it,for instance, with the naïve intuition of the artist, with a firstgrade of knowledge as yet untroubled by logical problems. The artist'svision is more distant from naturalism than the philosopher's concept,since common sense, however unreflected and illogical, is in itselfa philosophy, and, though it may sound paradoxical, a transcendentalone. The artist constantly identifies himself with his object; in hisconsciousness, the distinction between subject and object has notyet arisen. But the naïve naturalism[Pg 292] of which we are now speakingis posterior to the logical judgment, in which that distinctionfirst appears; and is obtained by keeping separate the two terms ofthe judgment, each of which exists only in relation to the other,and by transforming that relation into a quality of the object. Theunity thus disrupted is artificially reconstituted by abolishing thesubject, that is, by treating the subject itself as merely an objectamong many objects, or as a mere abstract intersection of objects. Itis with this form of naturalism that realism generally coincides, andits abstracting process is the one that has been recently systematizedby the New Realists. The justification of the naturalistic conceptionof truth, as truth of description, and the motive of its presentpopularity, is that it rests on a method of knowledge which isindispensable to the natural and mathematical sciences, and that thesciences have come to usurp, in modern times, for reasons which areobvious to every one, the place of science. It is not the less true,however, that wherever that method is applied, it reduces the livingreality of life and thought to a heap of dead, immovable abstractions.There is no real danger in this as long as the abstractions are takenfor what they are, and used as instruments for the purposes of ourdoing and understanding; but when they are considered as a completeequivalent of the living reality, then we become their prisoners, andare shut out by them from all possibility of true understanding.[Pg 293]It is especially from the misuses of this method in the historicaland moral sciences, from the degenerations of sociology, psychology,and philology, that we must be constantly on guard; lest in the verysciences of the human spirit we should miss that which is their trueobject, the human activity which creates the world of history and thevalues of life.

Modern thought, at the end of the Renaissance, begins with an attemptat eliminating that static conception of truth, in which both Platonismand naturalism find the roots of their transcendence. This is theorigin of the idea of Progress, first established by Bruno, by Bacon,by Pascal, by Vico, in the form of a correlation between truth andtime. Mediæval thought had been shackled for centuries by the authorityof the ancients; the new thinkers invoked the authority of antiquity,of old age, and, therefore, of wisdom, not for the distant ages, inwhich the world could be said to be still young and inexperienced, butfor their own times, in which it was possible to add a perpetuallynew experience and thought to that which had been bequeathed by thethinkers of Greece and Rome. The consequence of this attitude was thediscovery of the immanence of truth in life, the liberation from theprinciple of authority (which had been the characteristic mediævalform of transcendence), and a vigorous impulse towards the recognitionof the dynamic nature of reality, of what an American philosopher[Pg 294]called the continuity of the ideal with the real. The thought thatwas contained in germ in those early polemics, vaguely and mythicallyin Bruno, and much more consciously in Vico, is substantially that ofCroce's identification of philosophy with history.

We do not expect of a new philosophy that it should suddenly, as arevelation or illumination, give us a key to all the problems ofreality, and resolve, once and forever, the so-called mystery of theuniverse. If such a thing should ever happen, it would mean the end oflife, which cannot be conceived, in its ultimate essence, otherwisethan as a perpetual positing and solution of problems. It must not beforgotten 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 lasttwo centuries, we shall realize that the idea of Progress, in manydifferent and even in contrasting forms, is the one around which allour life, theoretical and practical, has centred in modern times. Andof that idea, Croce's philosophy is the most powerful and coherentexpression that has ever appeared. It is only by considering thewhole of reality as activity, and the values of reality as coincidingwith the forms of that activity, that Progress acquires a definitemeaning: a progress which should be a constant approximation towardsa preëxistent ideal, or a material process external[Pg 295] to ourselves,would be a purely illusory one. In one case, our whole life would tendtowards making a duplicate of that which already is—a work, therefore,without intrinsic worth, and without a real end; in the other, therewould be no work at all, no activity, no life.

But nothing seems more difficult to our mind than to keep togetherthe two ideas of progress and of truth. The natural sciences havemade a gallant attempt at assimilating the idea of progress, and attransforming themselves, ultimately, into history. But the staticconcepts of naturalism resist that assimilation, and scientificevolutionism offers but the mechanical outline, the external processesof progress, the evolved and not the evolving reality; that is, itkeeps its truth at the expense of its progress. This same evolutionism,when applied to the human sciences, is obviously unable to grasp theactuality of spiritual growth and life, and it only reproduces, inaggravated form, the evils inherent in all naturalistic interpretationsof the spirit. Bergson's philosophy is a new evolutionism, whichsucceeds much better than the old one in retaining the idea ofprogress, and is, therefore, a further step towards the transformationof science into history; but what it gains in this respect, it losesin relation to its principle of truth, which is mythically representedas the lowest form of consciousness, or rather as that which is belowconsciousness itself.

What is vital in Bergson is his criticism of the[Pg 296] scientific, ornaturalistic, intellect; but the intellect of man has other functionsbesides those of dissecting and classifying. From a similar beginning,that is, from the economic theory of science, derives another attemptat conciliating progress and truth, pragmatism. In pragmatism also, thecritical element is more or less sound, but the constructive one isweak and arbitrary. Pragmatism does not reject the truth of science,because of its practical character; on the contrary, having recognizedthat the foundation of scientific truth is economic, it proceedsto deduce all truth from the will, and to verify it in action. Theresult of this deduction is a closer connection between truth and lifethan has been ever reached by any system of philosophy; but a merelyapparent one, since truth itself is thus submerged and annulled in theimmediacy of practical and passional life. The solution of the problemof truth is obtained only by putting truth out of the question at thebeginning of the inquiry; as it is dear 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 itsusefulness is, to say the least, very doubtful.

By some of his adversaries Croce himself has been classed as apragmatist. It is no wonder that certain distinctions should escapethe attention of men who live to-day as exiles from distant centuries,and whose critical sight is, therefore, not clearer then that of anowl fluttering in the noonday sun.[Pg 297] But the only relation that Ican think of between Croce and the pragmatists is that he advocatesan economic theory not of truth, but of error; that he finds in thepassions and practical interests of men the root of intellectualerror. The problem of the positive relations between life and thoughthas been treated by him, as we know, in a very different spirit fromthat of the pragmatists; and in the circle of the human spirit, theideal precedence is given by him, not to the practical but to thetheoretical. On the other hand, in the actual process of time, allforms of human activity are reciprocally conditioned, and underthis respect Croce's thought can be called, and has been called byhimself, a new pragmatism, but "of a kind of which pragmatists havenever thought, or at least which they have never been able to discernfrom the others, and to bring out in full relief. If life conditionsthought, we have in this fact the clearly established demonstration ofthe always historically conditioned form of every thought: and not ofart 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 lifeproposes. Every philosophy reflects, and cannot help reflecting, thepreoccupations, as they are called, of a determined historical moment;not, however, in the quality of its solutions (because in this case itwould be a bad philosophy, a partisan or passional philosophy), but inthe quality of its problems. And because the problem[Pg 298] is historical,and the solution eternal, philosophy is at the same time contingent andeternal, mortal and immortal, temporary and extratemporary."[1] Croce'sconception of truth is his philosophy, and it is not my intention tosummarize here what this book presents in what is already so rapid asurvey. I wish only to point again at those doctrines of his, throughwhich progress and truth are reconciled, without any sacrifice of theone to the other. Truth is for Croce a universal value or category ofconsciousness: 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 themind that creates it. It is strange that this mode of its manifestationshould be considered to impair the quality of truth, while a similarobjection would hardly be raised to-day in regard to other forms ofspiritual activity. That the Beautiful is the value of the concrete,historical productions of the æsthetic spirit, or the Good that of theconcrete, historically determined moral activity, these are conceptscommon to all contemporary thought, though no one, perhaps, has asyet expressed them as clearly as Croce. To the artist or to thesaint, reality appears at a given moment as an æsthetic or an ethicalproblem; the terms of the problem are always particular, contingent,historical; yet when the artist or the saint[Pg 299] impresses on that realitythe seal of his own deepest personality, when he creatively reacts toit, then the Beautiful and the Good realize themselves, as universalvalues, in the individual work of art or of mercy. Our belief in theabsoluteness of the æsthetic or of the moral value is not weakenedbut strengthened by our inability to fix them in formulas or codes orstandards; we see them perpetually transcending the reality in whichthey express themselves, by the same process by which that reality,which is all growth and life, transcends itself in the infinitecourse of its realization. We cannot think of any number of worksof art or of mercy as exhausting the categories of the Beautiful orof the Good. The identification of these values with the infiniteseries of their individual expressions fills the soul with a sense ofreverence and responsibility towards life, that cannot be equalledby any faith in static, immovable ideals, by which a term, howeverhigh and remote, is set to the living spirit, no longer recognisedas the creator of its own æsthetic and moral world. To the mind thathas grasped this relation of the universal to the individual, of theeternal to the present (and the artist or the saint grasps it in hisown unphilosophical way, to which his work or his action is witness),the whole of reality, human and natural, appears as linked by a bond ofspiritual solidarity, moving towards the same end, engaged in the samesacred task.

Truth is the value of the logical activity, and therefore it coincideswith the positive history of human thought. Its actuality is aninfinite progress or development, but not in the sense that the valueitself may be subject to increase or change from century to century.At no particular point in that history is it possible to point to aconversion from error to truth, to a total illumination or revelation.Every single affirmation of truth, from the simplest and humblestto the most elaborate and complex, takes possession of the whole ofreality, in the fulness of its relations; since it is manifestlyimpossible to affirm the truth of one individual subject, withoutimplicitly determining its position in the universe. Truth, as allother values, has no extension; it is incommensurable either with spaceor with time, it is not augmented by accumulation. Degrees in truth,and a more and a less, are inconceivable; but each act that affirmsit contains its whole, since truth itself does not live except in thespirit that perpetually creates and recreates it. Truth belongs to thethinking mind, that is, to reality as a logical consciousness, as lifebelongs to the living body. It belongs to us, individually, in relationto that universal consciousness, in the mode and measure of ourpartaking of it: which means that however much of it we may conquer,however constant, laborious, honest, intense our efforts towardstruth may be, yet our duty towards it will always remain infinite,inexhaustible. The conquered truth is dead[Pg 301] in the mind that rests init, that ceases its effort, as life gives place to death in the bodythat no longer functions.

In a wider sense, truth belongs to every form of spiritual activity.Beauty, utility, goodness are the truths of the artistic, thepractical, the moral mind. And in the actual life of the spirit, eachof these values represents all the others in the particular act inwhich it realizes itself. This is what Croce means by his circularconception of the spirit. And this is why what is said of one valueseems to apply without any change to the others; why, as we saidelsewhere, all universals are but one universal. Whether we call thisone Progress or Development, Spirit or Reality, Mind or Nature, weknow that our thought is grasping Life itself, not in its abstractidentity, but in its infinite actuality, that is, each time, thislife, this beauty, this action, this truth. What we aim at is not anecstatic absorption into the undifferentiated unity, but the findingwithin ourselves of a centre of consciousness, capable of introducingorder and reason into the variegated spectacle of the natural and humanworld, not from outside and from above, but from its very heart. Thetruth that we seek is therefore never external to ourselves, but ourown activity, our own life, our own history.

This concept of truth as activity and as history, this activistic andenergetic philosophy, truly positive in that the course of historyappears to it as a[Pg 302] succession of only positive acts and positivevalues, is not however a blind and fatuous optimism. If it is truethat nowhere positive error or positive evil can interrupt the processof life, that death itself does not end but fulfil it, yet from therelations and implications of the various forms of activity arisesa real dialectic of good and evil, of truth and error, which is thespring and motive of life. What to the purely utilitarian conscienceis the good of now and of to-day, the same conscience, awakened to agreater light, repudiates as evil. The imaginative vision of the poet,in which truth expresses itself, sensuous and finite, and yet pregnantof its infinity, dissolves like mist in the sun in the clearnessof the logical concept, and is then restored in its right by thehistorical 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. Historyis but this perpetual cycle of death and resurrection, in which whatis concrete distinction in the act transforms itself into oppositionin the process, producing the terms of a new problem and becoming thesource of the new creation. Thus the whole method of Croce's philosophyreveals itself as directed towards a realistic conception of life, andthe distinctions within the concept are not abstract forms, but thevery structure of reality.

The professional philosopher moves always and only in the rarefiedatmosphere of the pure concept.[Pg 303] Croce came to philosophy from art andfrom economics, and he never lost contact with the elementary formsof knowledge and of action. What might be termed as his fundamentaldiscoveries are his definitions of the æsthetic and of the economicprinciple. On this basis the whole of his thought rests. Without aconception of a truth which is sufficient unto itself, and yet is notlogical truth, and of a good which has its own justification, and yetis not moral good, he would have been compelled to maintain by the sideof the concepts of truth and of goodness, error and evil as positiverealities, or to include the whole of reality within what would havebeen truth and goodness in a purely verbal sense. In both cases, hewould have been unable to make his philosophy immediately adherent toall grades of active consciousness, from the lowest to the highest,and thereby to history. Of these discoveries the one that until nowhas attracted the greatest attention is that of the pure intuition,and of art and language as expression. But the establishment of theeconomic principle, that is of the world of nature, of feeling, ofpassion, as a positive grade of the spiritual process, will probablybe counted as Croce's greatest achievement, by those who shall be ableto look back on his work with an ampler perspective. It is throughit that his philosophy of the spirit, and in this philosophy, theconsciousness of our day, has taken possession of that other world, ofthat persistent transcendance, which we call nature. In this direction[Pg 304]lies, undoubtedly, the future course of the thought of an age, towhich, in this afterglow of a great conflagration, all problems seem togather into the one of the subjection to its better and higher self,the utilization for its purer purposes, of its own cumbersome economicbody, of its nature and of its passions.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Croce's Complete Works form a collection of twenty-eight volumes, infour distinct series, published by Laterza e Figli, of Bari, who arealso the publishers ofLa Critica, and of the following collectionsinitiated or directed by Croce:Scrittori d'Italia, ScrittoriStranieri, Classici della Filosofia Moderna.

We give here a full list of theOpere di Benedetto Croce, adding tothe title of each volume the year of the last available edition, theyears of their composition having already been indicated in the text:

Vol. III,Filosofia della Pratica, 1915. (Translated under the tideof "The Philosophy of the Practical: Economics and Ethics.")

Vol. IV,Teoria e Storia della Storiografia, 1920. (Translated underthe tide of "Theory and History of Historiography" in England, andunder the ride of "History: Its Theory and Practice" in the UnitedStates.)

Vol. II,La Filosofia di Giambattista Fico, 1911. (Translated underthe title of "The Philosophy of Vico.")

Vol. III,Saggio sullo Hegel, 1913. ("Essay on Hegel," followedby essays on the history of philosophy; the essay on Hegel translatedunder the tide of "What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy ofHegel.")

Vol. IV,Materialismo Storico ed economia marxistica, 1918.[Pg 306](Translated under the title of "Historical Materialism and MarxianEconomics.")

Vol. V,Nuovi Saggi di Estetica, 1920. ("New Essays on Æsthetics";contains theBreviario di Estetica, translated under the title of"The Essence of Æsthetics.")

Scritti di Storia letteraria e politica. ("Writings on Literary andPolitical History"):

Vol. I,Saggi sulla Letteratura italiana del Seicento, 1911. ("Essayson Italian Literature in the Seventeenth Century.")

Vol. II,La Rivoluzione napoletana del 1799, 1912. ("The NeapolitanRevolution of 1799.")

Vols. III-VI,La Letteratura della nuova Italia, 1914-15. "(TheLiterature of the New Italy.")

Vol. VIII,La Spagna nella Vita italiana durante la Rinascenza, 1917.("Spain in Italian Life during the Renaissance.")

Vol. XI,Storie e leggende napoletane, 1919. ("Historical Tales andLegends of Naples.")

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 underthe title of "Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille.")

Vols. XV-XVI,Storia della Storiografia italiana, 1920. ("The Historyof Italian Historiography.")

Cultura e vita morale, Bari, 1914. ("Culture and Moral Life.")Aneddoti e profili settecenteschi, Palermo, 1914. ("Anecdotes andProfiles of the Eighteenth Century.")

Contributo alla critica di me stesso, Naples, 1918. ("Contributionto a Criticism of Myself"; one hundred copies printed for privatedistribution.)

Pagine Sparse, edited by G. Castellano, Naples, 1919-1920.("Scattered Pages," consisting ofPagine di letteratura e di cultura,2 vols.;Pagine sulla guerra; andMemorie, scritti biografici eappunti storici.)

A complete bibliography, cataloguing the whole of Croce's multifariousactivity, is outside the scope of this note. The nearest approach to itcan be found in G. Castellano'sIntroduzione alle opere di B. Croce,Bari, 1920, which contains, besides, a full list of translations ineight languages, a bibliography of the Italian and foreign criticalliterature on Croce, and a very useful series of abstracts ofdiscussions and judgments on Croce's work.

Besides articles and essays in American and English magazines andreviews, the following works of Croce have been translated intoEnglish: the four volumes of theFilosofia dello Spirito, the essayon Hegel, theEssence of Æsthetics, and the essays onAriosto,Shakespeare, and Corneille, by Douglas Ainslie; the essay on Vico, byR. G. Collingwood, and the essays on Historical Materialism, by C. M.Meredith. But the English or American student of Croce ought to relyas little as possible on translations; the reading of the Italian textwill be found comparatively easy, on the basis of a good acquaintancewith Latin or with French. The labour entailed by the surmountingof the first difficulties will be largely repaid by the advantagesgained in coming into direct contact with Croce's thought, and by theacquisition of at least a reading knowledge of Italian.

For the vast critical literature on Croce, scattered through theliterary and philosophical reviews of Europe and of America duringthe last twenty years, we are compelled again to refer the reader toCastellano's book. We[Pg 308] shall only mark out Croce's own autobiographicalnotes, the Contributo listed above, which, however, having been printedfor private circulation only, is not generally accessible except inthe French translation printed in theRevue de Métaphysique et deMorale, XXVI, pp. 1-40. The following are the only books which givea 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. Thefirst is an able, but very cursory sketch; the second examines Croce'sphilosophy from the standpoint of neoscholasticism; the third is anample summary written by a distinguished writer well acquainted withthe various currents of modern thought. Each of them ought to be readwith a critical and discriminating eye.

In the English-speaking world, Croce's fame rests emphatically on hisæsthetics, and its applications to literary criticism. His influenceon English and American critical thought has already gone much deeperthan a mere list of writings on his theories would show; especially inEngland, his ideas are, so to speak, in the air, and appear in manywriters who have no direct knowledge of his work. The best expositionof this phase of his philosophy is to be found in E. F. Carritt'sbook,The Theory of Beauty, 1914, chap. XIV. The writings of A. B.Walkley, and of J. E. Spingam, contain the most vigorous prosecutionof his thought as applied, respectively, to English and to Americanscholarship and criticism.

For the general history of Italian thought, to which many a referenceis made in the course of this book, the best helps, besides Croce'sessay on Vico, and B. Spaventa,La filosofia italiana, recentlyreprinted, Bari, 1909, are the historical works of Giovanni Gentile,and especially[Pg 309] hisStoria della filosofia italiana, Milano, n.d. Gentile is one of the most profound and earnest modern Europeanthinkers, and it is desirable that his theoretical works, similar intendency to, but widely divergent in temper from those of Croce, shouldbecome better known to the Anglo-Saxon world. Two of his books,LaRiforma dell' Educazione andTeoria generale dello Spirito, are soonto appear in English. Croce's judgment on Gentile's Actual Idealism isexpressed inUna discussione tra filosofi amici, inConversazioniCritiche, II, pp. 67-95. But a complete understanding of the vitalrelations between the two thinkers can be gathered only through anadequate knowledge 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, æsthetic and practical,
relations,126; theoretical and
practical,117
Æsthetic criticism,135,136
Æsthetic personality,282
Æsthetic principle,303
Æsthetic production,124
Æsthetic standards,137,138
Æsthetic value,128
Æsthetics,100; Croce's theory,
49; German,63,65; hedonistic
theories,127; importance
in Croce's thought,63;
theories and doctrines,118;
Vico'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 criticism
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; objective,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, Giosuè,23,26
Chronicle,257
Classicism,281
Classification,156
Comte, Auguste,179
Concept,101,105; as a unity of
distinctions,149; expression
and,154; identity of pure concept
with individual judgment,156;
language and, hi; logical,145,
146; pure concept,141,146,
160; two forms,155;
universal, particular and
singular,150
Conceptual fictions,146
Consciousness,190,206
Contemporaneity,255
Content and form,108,109
Copernicus,15
Creation,286,288
Critic,287,288
Critica, La,95,247
Criticism, æsthetic, theory,135;
history and,274; monographic
method,283; technique and,
130;see also Literary criticism
Criticism of life,139
Croce, Benedetto, activities in
1900-1910,93; æsthetic theory,
49; approach to philosophy
and method of work,28;
bibliography of works,105; birth
and early life,3; first philosophical
essay,45; fundamental
discoveries,303; intellectual
activity from 1910 onward,
247; later life,15-16; mental
characteristic,87; pragmatism,
296; spirit and distinction,68;
travels,13; war attitude,248
Culture, American,21;
contemporary European,18;
Italian,17
Cusanus,151

D'Annunzio, Gabriele,9,27;
Croce's difference from,68
Dante, ix,26,122,139,252
De Sanctis, Francesco,23;
Croce's debt to,64,283
Descartes,36,39
Dualism,170,183,195,244
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
Einfühlung,128
Empathy,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 intuition,106;
language as,110;
meaning of the word,107

Faith,174,177
Filosofia dello Spirito,94,243,
246; résumé 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,180

Hedonism and art,127
Hegel,24,25,74,142,143;
Croce's criticism of,152;
Croce's relation to,31;
dialectic process in Hegel and in
Croce,151,180; monograph
on,95; on philosophy and history,166
Hegelianism,67,69,70
Herbart, J. F.,9
Historical method,20
Historicism,182
Historiography,254
History, an art or a science?47;
chronicle and,257; contemporary,255;
criticism and,139,274; Croce's
tentative definition,54; Croce's
theory, growth,161; divisions,165;
economics and,270; humanity,
270; identity with philosophy,
163,265,287; monographic
method,286; object,270; of
man and of nature,271;
philological,259; philosophy of,
180; poetical,261; positivity,
269; problem of,13, return
to, and elaboration of the theory,
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
Immanentism,100-101,152
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; volition
and,194
Intuition,101; 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, æsthetic,136;
individual,155; kinds,155,156;
practical,196
Jus naturale232

Kant,37,61,142,143,182; ethics,83
Knowledge, forms,101,159; will and,193

Labriola, Antonio, influence on
Croce,8; on Marxism and
materialism,71
Language, law and,237; origin
and nature,110,280; 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;
function 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;
criticism and interpretation,75
Mathematical thought,171,217
Mathematicism,179
Mechanists,170
Metaphysics,157,268
Methodology, philosophy as,268
Moral concepts,66
Moral standards,202
Moralism, abstract,211
Morality,208,223; art and,121,
126; Marxism and,82; utility
and,212
Mysticism,183
Myth,182
Mythologism,182

National prejudices,176
Nationality,232
Natural laws,230
Natural rights,232
Natural sciences,167
Naturalism,33,40,291
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; æsthetic,282
Philology,19,60-61,259
Philosophy, as the pure concept,
160; Croce's approach to,28;
Croce's first essay,45; development,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,26,101,280; identity
with language,111
Poets, great,252,285
Political science,227
Politics,176,214
Positivism,20,68,144,179
Practical activity,148; æsthetic
activity and,126; affirmation
of,188; distinctions,207; forms,
189; philosophy of,196;
scepticisms about,189,190
Practical judgment,196
Practical principles,230
Pragmatism,296
Progress,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;
distinction from art,53; 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,72,75,79,82
Society, economic,225;
philosophical concept,226-227
Sociologism,48
Sociology,52,79,172,227
Sorel, Georges,84
Spaventa, Bertrando,3-4,19;
Croce's relations with,68
Spaventa, Silvio,4,7
Spencer,47,179
Spinoza,36,185
Spirit,246,247,295,301; as history,258
Spiritual activity,118,189,301;
four forms,100
Spiritualism,33,40,68
Standard,202; æsthetic,137
Syndicalism,84
Synthesis, a priori,157,199

Tactile values,128
Taste and genius,135
Technique, art and,130;
criticism 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
activity and history,301;
conversion to,184-185; Croce's
conception,298; progress and,295;
progress in,186; thought and,
174; what is truth?289
Typical, the,122

Unity,246; of distinctions149;
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 æsthetics,53-54;
metaphysics,75; monograph on,95;
on error,177; on poetry,101
Vitalists,170
Volition,193; action identified
with,194; intention coincident
with,194; passions and,
203; see also Will

War, Croce's attitude toward,248
Will,117,126,148,188,296;
freedom of,108; its past in errors,
175; knowledge and,193; struggle
of,203; practical activity;
see also Volition

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	I.	The Beginnings
	II.	Early Environment
	III.	The Origins of his Thought

	I.	History as Art
	II.	On Literary Criticism
	III.	History and Economics

	I.	The Growth of the System
	II.	Intuition and Expression
	III.	The Concept of Art
	IV.	Criticism and Technique
	V.	The Pure Concept
	VI.	The Forms of Knowledge
	VII.	The Theory of Error
	VIII.	The Practical Activity
	IX.	Economics and Ethics
	X.	The Laws

	I.	Works and Days
	II.	The Theory of History
	III.	Criticism and History
	IV.	Veritas filta temporis

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The Project Gutenberg eBook ofBenedetto Croce: An Introduction to His Philosophy

BENEDETTO CROCE

AN INTRODUCTION TO HIS PHILOSOPHY

by

RAFFAELLO PICCOLI

WITH A FOREWORD BY

H. WILDON CARR

JONATHAN CAPE

ELEVEN GOWER STREET, LONDON

1922

BENEDETTO CROCE

FROM PHILOLOGY TO PHILOSOPHY

(1893-1899)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

(1900-1910)

I. THE GROWTH OF THE SYSTEM

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE