Chapter 8

[1]Teoria e Storia, pp. 5-6.

[2]Teoria e Storia, pp. 15-16.

[3]Teoria e Storia, pp. 35-6.

[4]Teoria e Storia, p. 46.

[5]Teoria e Storia, pp. 51-2.

[6]Teoria e Storia, p. 145.

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

The identification of history and philosophy, in the form in which we have expounded it in the preceding chapter, is the turning point of Croce's thought; the system which in the first three volumes of theFilosofia dello Spiritohad still a somewhat static and rigid appearance, is really set to movement, animated as if by a new and intenser life, since its implicit dynamism is made explicit in the fourth and concluding volume. To Croce himself, the whole of his work appears no longer as a system, but as "a series of systematizations," and hisFilosofia dello Spirito, as a series of "volumes on the problems slowly gathering in his mind since the years of his youth." No wonder, therefore, that his later work should contain "thoughts that break the bars of the so-called system, and give, to a close scrutiny, new systems or new 'systematizations,' since always the whole moves with every one of our steps." No wonder that he should feel that he will continue to philosophize even if one day he shall abandon"philosophy," "as this is what the unity of philosophy and history implies: that we philosophize whenever we think, and of whatever object and in whatever form we may think."[1]And in fact, in these last few years, Croce has given many a severe shock to the faithful worshippers of his system, sometimes by extending his tolerance, or even his approval, to types of speculation apparently remote from his own, but in which he recognises, under a radically different aspect, some of the living impulses, and spiritual interests by which his own thought is moved; and sometimes by developing new theories, through which intellectual positions criticised by him at an earlier stage of his work were reëstablished as having a new meaning and value, once they were approached from a new and higher standpoint, partly reached by means of that same critical process which had previously revealed them as errors. Croce's conception of the function of error in the history of human thought, while making him violently intolerant of actual negative error, leads him to search painstakingly for that element of truth which is the reality of every error; and in this respect too, his philosophical career is as it were roughly divided into two periods, one of critical dissolution, and the other of critical reconstruction, respectively corresponding to the building up of the system, and to the successive liberation from the shackles of the system itself. Croce's name will certainly be remembered in the future, if on noother account, as that of the only philosopher who never became the slave of his dead thought. His coherence is never of the letter, but of the spirit.

This last phase of Croce's thought offers greater difficulties to the expositor than the preceding ones, partly because it is still in the making, and therefore lacks the necessary perspective, and partly because it is embodied not only in purely philosophical essays, but in every page of Croce's historical and critical writings; so that very often it would be impossible to give a clear account of it without ample and minute reference to the underlying historical material. The whole of Croce's thought could indeed be restated through an exposition of Croce's historical views, and it would be an alluring task to extract from his writings a kind of outline of the history of mankind, considered especially in its æsthetic and philosophical cal manifestations, and indirectly also in its moral and economic activities; but it would take us much beyond the limits which we have set to our labour. We shall therefore confine ourselves to examining, in this chapter, the latest developments of Croce's æsthetics, especially in relation with the history of art and poetry; and, in the following and concluding one, to considering his theory of truth or of the function of thought, in relation to other types of contemporary thought.

We have followed the evolution, or rather the deepening, of Croce's concept of art as pure intuition, into lyrical intuition, through which the movementand life which might seem to have been denied to the products of the æsthetic activity considered as a mere form of knowledge, were recognised as intrinsically belonging to them by reason of the very nature of that cognitive activity, and of its relations with the practical sphere of the spirit, the states of mind, which can be abstracted as the matter or content of the æsthetic form. Another difficulty, however, still persisted in Croce's theory, due to the sharp distinction between the æsthetic and the logical activity, which reserved to the first the field of individual, to the second that of universal knowledge—constituting a double-grade relation, in which the æsthetic was implied by the logic activity, but not vice-versa. The corresponding distinction of the two forms of the practical spirit, the economic and the ethic, evolved by Croce at a maturer stage of his speculation, establishes not only a double-grade relation, but also a reciprocal implication. Croce's essay onIl carattere di totalità della espressione artistica(1917) is an attempt at interpreting his first distinction in the light of the second, thereby recognising the universal or cosmic character of art. That universality which becomes explicit in the logical judgment is implicit in the intuition, already identified with the category of feeling, with the concrete states of mind, on which it imposes its form: "Since, what is a feeling or a state of mind? is it something that can be detached from the universe and developedby itself? have the part and the whole, the individual and the cosmos, the finite and the infinite, any reality, one outside the other? One may be inclined to grant that every severance and isolation of the two terms of the relation could not be anything but the work of abstraction, for which only there is an abstract individuality and an abstract finite, an abstract unity and an abstract infinite. But the pure intuition, or artistic representation, abhors abstraction; or rather it does not even abhor it, since it knows it not, because of its naïve or auroral cognitive character. In it, the individual lives by the life of the whole, and the whole is in the life of the individual; and every true artistic representation is itself and the universe, the universe in that individual form, and that individual form as the universe. In every accent of a poet, in every creature of his phantasy, there is the whole of human destiny, all the hopes, the illusions, the sorrows and the joys, all human greatness and all human misery, the entire drama of reality, which perpetually becomes and grows upon itself, suffering and rejoicing."[2]

This recognition of the implicit universality of the æsthetic expression does not abolish, as it might seem to a superficial observer, the distinction between æsthetic and logical knowledge; it rather makes it clearer and truer. An imperfect recognition may lead to an intellectualistic or mystic theoryof art; and intellectualism and mysticism in æsthetics remain for Croce as typical forms of error, whether they are directed towards a confusion between intuition and judgment, or towards a symbolical or allegorical interpretation of art, or towards a semi-religious theory of art as the revelation of theDeus absconditus. But the truth that those errors tried to express in their imperfect formulas, is finally understood by him to be that character of universality which belongs to every aspect and to every fragment of the living reality. Feeling itself, or a state of mind, partakes in its actuality of that universal character, but when expressed in art, it retains its universality only by losing its practical nature, and subjecting itself entirely to the form which expresses it. Thus the æsthetic activity, because bent on realizing its own universality, which is the perfection of its form, imposes on the artist a morality and a discipline which cannot be identified with practical morality, with the discipline of life. The sincerity of the' artist is of another order than that of the practical man, though (we can never repeat it too often) æsthetic virtues being incommensurable with moral values, his work as an artist does not exempt him from his duties as a man.

This further determination of the concept of expression is used by Croce to clarify a distinction which had already been adumbrated in the Estetica; the distinction between poetic, intellectual, and practical expression, between the word in whichthe pure intuition embodies itself, the word which is a sign or symbol of thought, and the word which is an instrument for the awakening of the emotions, a preparation for action. Thus the old categories of poetry, prose, and oratory reappear, but no longer as criteria of material classification, no longer to be identified with classes or genres of expression. They become synonyms, respectively, of the æsthetic, the logical, and the practical activity; to be used as instruments of literary and artistic criticism, if the critic is willing to renounce all external helps and material standards, and to penetrate into the "individuality of the act, where only it is given to him to discern the different spiritual dispositions, and what is poetry from what is not poetry. Under the semblance of prose, in a comedy or in a novel, we may find a true and deeply felt lyric; as under that of verse, in a tragedy or in a poem, nothing but reflection and oratory."[3]It is easy to perceive how this distinction will also react on Croce's theory of language as intuition and expression, not by altering its initial position, but by offering new means for the empirical analysis of the facts of language, the nature of which is obviously determined by the kind of impulse which man obeys in the individual act of expression. By the employment of such a method, the history of language as æsthetic expression can be qualified and illumined through the consideration of the momentsin which language ceases to be a pure act of æsthetic creation, and is subordinated, as a symbol or instrument, to the purposes of the logical and practical mind.

Similarly, in the history of poetry or of art, the consideration of the logical and practical moments in the expression will help to define and isolate that which is purely æsthetic expression, that is, poetry and art. Croce's expressionistic theory, when thus understood, differs both from other expressionistic theories and from the narrow interpretations of Croce's own theory that have been given by some of his followers and by all his adversaries. It does not, in fact, attempt to give an æsthetic justification of art as the mere passive reception of the transient mood; it has no sympathy for that impressionism which transforms the artist into a reed shaken by all winds of circumstance, legitimizing every intrusion of the practical personality in the æsthetic production. It reduces this modern æsthetics of the immediate feeling to an expression, not of the true spirit of what art and poetry is being produced to-day, but of that disease, or passivity, of the times, the first solemn document of which can be traced in Rousseau'sConfessions. Against it, Croce appeals to the example and the word of a Goethe or a Leopardi, who diagnosed the disease in its inception, and contrasted the classical naturalness and simplicity of the ancients with the affectation and tumidityof the moderns. But the classicism which Croce invokes is not a formal and literal ideal, limited to certain models or standards: it is that complete idealization, which the immediate practical data, in all times and climates, will undergo at the hands of the true poet and artist, whether he calls himself a romanticist or a classicist, an idealist or a realist.

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

This concept of the æsthetic personality, which we find clearly defined in Croce's most recent essays, was the guiding principle of all his literary criticism, since the time when he started his series of studies on modern Italian literature. He had inherited it from De Sanctis, whose work, in so far as it is æsthetic and not moral or political history, can be regarded as a collection of powerful characterizations of æsthetic personalities. But, in his first attempts in literary criticism, Croce employed it tentatively in what then appeared to him only as the preparatory stage of his work; beyond the individual characterizations, and once these had been sufficiently determined, he still thought of the possibility of a general literary history, in which these should find their place as parts of a more complex organism of critical thought. Butwhen he had completed his task, in a series of remarkable essays, some of which will have fixed for a long time to come the physiognomy of the most notable Italian writers of the last half-century, he perceived that he had practically exhausted the æsthetic problems which the work of those writers presented to his mind: a general literary history of the period could have been nothing but a new arrangement of the same ideas and valuations contained in the individual essays. Thus the monographic method .which he had originally adopted for convenience' sake, justified itself in the practice of his work, or rather proved to be the only legitimate method of literary and general artistic history. All the vague abstractions with which modern nationalistic or sociological histories of art and poetry are crammed, reveal themselves ultimately as either generalizations of individual characteristics, or concepts borrowed from the economic and moral history of a nation or people, more or less irrelevant to the purposes of æsthetic criticism. The true unity in the consideration of the history of art cannot be reached by the establishment of purely external and material relations between work and work, between artist and artist, but only by making one's critical estimate of the individual work or artist sufficiently vast and sufficiently deep. "Contemporaries, related or opposed to the individual poet, his more or less partial and remote forerunners, the moral and intellectual life of his time, and thatof the times which preceded and prepared it, these and other things are all present (now expressed, now unexpressed) in our spirit, when we reconstruct the dialectic of a given artistic personality. Undoubtedly, in considering a given personality we cannot, in the same act, consider another or many others or all others, each for itself; and psychologists call this lack of ubiquity the 'narrowness of the threshold of consciousness,' while they ought to call it the highest energy of the human spirit, which sinks itself in the object that in a given moment interests it, and does not allow itself under any condition to be diverted from it, because in the individual it finds all that interests it, and, in a word, the Whole."[5]

This is the purport of the essay onLa Riforma della Storia artistica e letteraria(1917), and this is the method deliberately followed by Croce in his recent essays on Ariosto, Goethe, Shakespeare, Corneille and Dante, which ought to be studied not only as characterizations of the various poets, of the feeling or tonality which is peculiar to each of them and constitutes their æsthetic personality, but also as sources for the methodology of literary criticism. To his theory Croce brings a two-fold corroboration, first, from the observation of the fact that it coincides with a more and more widespread tendency in both literary and artistic history towards the monographic form, the individual essay,as the most effectual type of criticism; and second, from the analogy with other forms of history. All history, and not æsthetic history only, is essentially monographic; all history is the history of a given event or of a given custom or of a given doctrine, and all history reaches the universal only in and through the individual. The only obstacles to a general acceptation of this view are, on one side, a persistent inability to distinguish art from the practical and moral life and from philosophy, and on the other, a lack of scientific sense, through which science is regarded not as critical research, but as a material gathering of facts. Prospectuses, handbooks, dictionaries and encyclopedias are not the ideal of history: they are instruments of which we shall always make use as practical helps for the critical research; but what is living and real thought in them is but an echo of the actual thinking of individual problems.

All æsthetic criticism, and therefore all æsthetic history, is this thinking of logical problems, rooted in the concrete ground of the works of art, which are in their turn solutions of æsthetic problems. For this the dynamic conception of the human spirit imports that every one of its acts is a creation, or a doing, in the particular form in which the spirit realizes itself; art, a creation, in respect to which all spiritual antecedents assume the aspect of a given æsthetic problem; history or philosophy, a creation on the substance of reality presenting itself as a logical problem; and the whole sphere of thetheoretical spirit, "a theoreticaldoingswhich is the perpetual antecedent and the perpetual consequent of the practical doing."[6]The mere recreation of the æsthetic impression given by a work of art is not yet criticism; the critic as a mereartifex additus artificiis not yet a critic, but still an artist. Criticism, like all other history, is not feeling or intuition, but intelligence and thought. Every history of criticism will therefore ultimately coincide with the history of æsthetic theories, with the philosophy of art. We thus reach again, by a new path, the identification of history with philosophy; to which, in this particular case, the most common objection is that what is required in a critic is much more an exquisite æsthetic sensibility than an elaborate concept of what art is as a category of the human mind. But the objection rests on a misunderstanding of the proper function of criticism. What sensibility can give is but the immediate apprehension or taste of the work of art, critically dumb in itself; on the other hand, it is impossible to conceive of a true intelligence of art, "without the conjoined capacity to understand the individual works of art, because philosophy does not develop in the abstract, but is stimulated by the acts of life and imagination, rises for the purpose of comprehending them, and understands them by understanding itself."[7]Themere æsthetic sensibility makes but a new artist; what makes the critic is his philosophy. Here also, however, as during the whole course of our inquiry, we must not identify philosophy with the official history of philosophical disciplines, which offers a large number of theories of æsthetics only remotely related to the concrete works of art, to the concrete processes of æsthetic creation, but with the whole history of human thought, with the working out of particular problems successively presented to the intelligence of man by the actual developments of poetry and art. The æsthetic judgment, like every other judgment, is a synthesis of the individual intuition, or subject, and of the universal category, or predicate; and this is but another way of stating the identity of æsthetic criticism, as of all forms of history, with philosophy. The critic must be endowed with a power to give new life, within his own mind, to the intuitions of the artist, but this is for him but the soil in which his thought must spread its roots; it is true that without that power, no criticism is possible, but it is equally true that no philosophy of art can grow on any but that same soil. The ultimate test of the validity of æsthetic thought is in its capacity to expand our sphere of æsthetic apprehension; and pure æsthetics is but the methodological moment of æsthetic history or criticism.

[1]Contributo, pp. 79-81.

[2]Nuovi Saggi, di Estetica, p. 126.

[3]Nuovi Saggi, p. 142. AlsoConversazioni Critiche, I, pp. 58-63.

[4]Nuovi Saggi, p. 231.

[5]Nuovi Saggi, p. 181.

[6]L'arte come Creazione(1918), inNuovi Saggi, p. 160.

[7]La Critica Letteraria come Filosofia(1918), inNuovi Saggi, p. 217.

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 of value—The actuality of Truth—Truth as history: the function of error and of evil—The foundations of Croce's thought.

There is one problem in the history of human thought, which, however conscious we might be of the multiplicity and historical contingency of philosophical problems, yet can appear to us as the ultimate or central one, if only because it is an abstract interrogation describing the attitude of the philosopher, and to which every concrete logical research, every act of thought, can be reduced. It is Pilate's question:Quid est veritas?What is truth?

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

The Platonic idealist, for whom the actual processes of life and thought are but shadows and remembrances of the Eternal Ideas in the hyper-uranian space, can be assumed here as the symbol of the transcendental idealist, for whom truth is adequation to an ideal model existing outside the mind. The most disparate types of philosophers belong to this herd, and among them many that commonly go under the name of realists, since the idealist who has fixed and objectified his ideas cannot help considering them as real essences, and dealing with them accordingly. The Aristotelian realist, the theologian, Hegel himself when postulating an original Logos, of which Spirit and Nature are the temporal explication, all can be gathered together in the goodly company of Platonists; and Platonists are to-day both the literal followers of German idealism, and the less barbarous among contemporary realists, who are in the habit of attributing an independent, absolute existence to logical ormathematical abstractions. But neither the ones nor the others seem to be in very close contact with the spirit of the age: what they mean by truth is not what is generally meant by truth to-day, except among those who still cling to the myths in which that form of transcendence expressed itself in past ages. The sturdiest, though hardly recognizable, survivals of Platonism are relics of formalistic logic, still very frequent in contemporary culture, and a belief in what might be called average truth, mechanically extracted from an external and material consensus of opinions. But with this conception of truth, we touch the border line between idealistic and naturalistic transcendentalism.

The most common attitude of contemporary thought (and the one that is therefore usually designated as common sense, and as such opposed to philosophy) is a naively naturalistic one. But it would be a mistake to regard it as a simple and spontaneous attitude, and to identify it, for instance, with the naïve intuition of the artist, with a first grade of knowledge as yet untroubled by logical problems. The artist's vision is more distant from naturalism than the philosopher's concept, since common sense, however unreflected and illogical, is in itself a philosophy, and, though it may sound paradoxical, a transcendental one. The artist constantly identifies himself with his object; in his consciousness, the distinction between subject and object has not yet arisen. But the naïve naturalismof which we are now speaking is posterior to the logical judgment, in which that distinction first appears; and is obtained by keeping separate the two terms of the judgment, each of which exists only in relation to the other, and by transforming that relation into a quality of the object. The unity thus disrupted is artificially reconstituted by abolishing the subject, that is, by treating the subject itself as merely an object among many objects, or as a mere abstract intersection of objects. It is with this form of naturalism that realism generally coincides, and its abstracting process is the one that has been recently systematized by the New Realists. The justification of the naturalistic conception of truth, as truth of description, and the motive of its present popularity, is that it rests on a method of knowledge which is indispensable to the natural and mathematical sciences, and that the sciences have come to usurp, in modern times, for reasons which are obvious to every one, the place of science. It is not the less true, however, that wherever that method is applied, it reduces the living reality of life and thought to a heap of dead, immovable abstractions. There is no real danger in this as long as the abstractions are taken for what they are, and used as instruments for the purposes of our doing and understanding; but when they are considered as a complete equivalent of the living reality, then we become their prisoners, and are shut out by them from all possibility of true understanding.It is especially from the misuses of this method in the historical and moral sciences, from the degenerations of sociology, psychology, and philology, that we must be constantly on guard; lest in the very sciences of the human spirit we should miss that which is their true object, the human activity which creates the world of history and the values of life.

Modern thought, at the end of the Renaissance, begins with an attempt at eliminating that static conception of truth, in which both Platonism and naturalism find the roots of their transcendence. This is the origin of the idea of Progress, first established by Bruno, by Bacon, by Pascal, by Vico, in the form of a correlation between truth and time. Mediæval thought had been shackled for centuries by the authority of the ancients; the new thinkers invoked the authority of antiquity, of old age, and, therefore, of wisdom, not for the distant ages, in which the world could be said to be still young and inexperienced, but for their own times, in which it was possible to add a perpetually new experience and thought to that which had been bequeathed by the thinkers of Greece and Rome. The consequence of this attitude was the discovery of the immanence of truth in life, the liberation from the principle of authority (which had been the characteristic mediæval form of transcendence), and a vigorous impulse towards the recognition of the dynamic nature of reality, of what an American philosophercalled the continuity of the ideal with the real. The thought that was contained in germ in those early polemics, vaguely and mythically in Bruno, and much more consciously in Vico, is substantially that of Croce's identification of philosophy with history.

We do not expect of a new philosophy that it should suddenly, as a revelation or illumination, give us a key to all the problems of reality, and resolve, once and forever, the so-called mystery of the universe. If such a thing should ever happen, it would mean the end of life, which cannot be conceived, in its ultimate essence, otherwise than as a perpetual positing and solution of problems. It must not be forgotten that a philosophy is the work of one man, and, therefore, contains only the answers to the problems that are real to him. But if we stop to consider the whole course of thought in the last two centuries, we shall realize that the idea of Progress, in many different and even in contrasting forms, is the one around which all our life, theoretical and practical, has centred in modern times. And of that idea, Croce's philosophy is the most powerful and coherent expression that has ever appeared. It is only by considering the whole of reality as activity, and the values of reality as coinciding with the forms of that activity, that Progress acquires a definite meaning: a progress which should be a constant approximation towards a preëxistent ideal, or a material process externalto ourselves, would be a purely illusory one. In one case, our whole life would tend towards making a duplicate of that which already is—a work, therefore, without intrinsic worth, and without a real end; in the other, there would be no work at all, no activity, no life.

But nothing seems more difficult to our mind than to keep together the two ideas of progress and of truth. The natural sciences have made a gallant attempt at assimilating the idea of progress, and at transforming themselves, ultimately, into history. But the static concepts of naturalism resist that assimilation, and scientific evolutionism offers but the mechanical outline, the external processes of progress, the evolved and not the evolving reality; that is, it keeps its truth at the expense of its progress. This same evolutionism, when applied to the human sciences, is obviously unable to grasp the actuality of spiritual growth and life, and it only reproduces, in aggravated form, the evils inherent in all naturalistic interpretations of the spirit. Bergson's philosophy is a new evolutionism, which succeeds much better than the old one in retaining the idea of progress, and is, therefore, a further step towards the transformation of science into history; but what it gains in this respect, it loses in relation to its principle of truth, which is mythically represented as the lowest form of consciousness, or rather as that which is below consciousness itself.

What is vital in Bergson is his criticism of thescientific, or naturalistic, intellect; but the intellect of man has other functions besides those of dissecting and classifying. From a similar beginning, that is, from the economic theory of science, derives another attempt at conciliating progress and truth, pragmatism. In pragmatism also, the critical element is more or less sound, but the constructive one is weak and arbitrary. Pragmatism does not reject the truth of science, because of its practical character; on the contrary, having recognized that the foundation of scientific truth is economic, it proceeds to deduce all truth from the will, and to verify it in action. The result of this deduction is a closer connection between truth and life than has been ever reached by any system of philosophy; but a merely apparent one, since truth itself is thus submerged and annulled in the immediacy of practical and passional life. The solution of the problem of truth is obtained only by putting truth out of the question at the beginning of the inquiry; as it is 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 its usefulness is, to say the least, very doubtful.

By some of his adversaries Croce himself has been classed as a pragmatist. It is no wonder that certain distinctions should escape the attention of men who live to-day as exiles from distant centuries, and whose critical sight is, therefore, not clearer then that of an owl fluttering in the noonday sun.But the only relation that I can think of between Croce and the pragmatists is that he advocates an economic theory not of truth, but of error; that he finds in the passions and practical interests of men the root of intellectual error. The problem of the positive relations between life and thought has been treated by him, as we know, in a very different spirit from that of the pragmatists; and in the circle of the human spirit, the ideal precedence is given by him, not to the practical but to the theoretical. On the other hand, in the actual process of time, all forms of human activity are reciprocally conditioned, and under this respect Croce's thought can be called, and has been called by himself, a new pragmatism, but "of a kind of which pragmatists have never thought, or at least which they have never been able to discern from the others, and to bring out in full relief. If life conditions thought, we have in this fact the clearly established demonstration of the always historically conditioned form of every thought: and not of art only, which is always the art of a time, of a soul, of a moment, but of philosophy also, which can solve but the problems that life proposes. Every philosophy reflects, and cannot help reflecting, the preoccupations, as they are called, of a determined historical moment; not, however, in the quality of its solutions (because in this case it would be a bad philosophy, a partisan or passional philosophy), but in the quality of its problems. And because the problemis historical, and the solution eternal, philosophy is at the same time contingent and eternal, mortal and immortal, temporary and extratemporary."[1]Croce's conception of truth is his philosophy, and it is not my intention to summarize here what this book presents in what is already so rapid a survey. I wish only to point again at those doctrines of his, through which progress and truth are reconciled, without any sacrifice of the one to the other. Truth is for Croce a universal value or category of consciousness: its absoluteness rests on its character of universality, but, as a universal has no real being outside its concrete actuality, truth is nowhere if not in the individual judgment, that is, in the mind that creates it. It is strange that this mode of its manifestation should be considered to impair the quality of truth, while a similar objection would hardly be raised to-day in regard to other forms of spiritual activity. That the Beautiful is the value of the concrete, historical productions of the æsthetic spirit, or the Good that of the concrete, historically determined moral activity, these are concepts common to all contemporary thought, though no one, perhaps, has as yet expressed them as clearly as Croce. To the artist or to the saint, reality appears at a given moment as an æsthetic or an ethical problem; the terms of the problem are always particular, contingent, historical; yet when the artist or the saintimpresses on that reality the seal of his own deepest personality, when he creatively reacts to it, then the Beautiful and the Good realize themselves, as universal values, in the individual work of art or of mercy. Our belief in the absoluteness of the æsthetic or of the moral value is not weakened but strengthened by our inability to fix them in formulas or codes or standards; we see them perpetually transcending the reality in which they express themselves, by the same process by which that reality, which is all growth and life, transcends itself in the infinite course of its realization. We cannot think of any number of works of art or of mercy as exhausting the categories of the Beautiful or of the Good. The identification of these values with the infinite series of their individual expressions fills the soul with a sense of reverence and responsibility towards life, that cannot be equalled by any faith in static, immovable ideals, by which a term, however high and remote, is set to the living spirit, no longer recognised as the creator of its own æsthetic and moral world. To the mind that has grasped this relation of the universal to the individual, of the eternal to the present (and the artist or the saint grasps it in his own unphilosophical way, to which his work or his action is witness), the whole of reality, human and natural, appears as linked by a bond of spiritual solidarity, moving towards the same end, engaged in the same sacred task.

Truth is the value of the logical activity, and therefore it coincides with the positive history of human thought. Its actuality is an infinite progress or development, but not in the sense that the value itself may be subject to increase or change from century to century. At no particular point in that history is it possible to point to a conversion from error to truth, to a total illumination or revelation. Every single affirmation of truth, from the simplest and humblest to the most elaborate and complex, takes possession of the whole of reality, in the fulness of its relations; since it is manifestly impossible to affirm the truth of one individual subject, without implicitly determining its position in the universe. Truth, as all other values, has no extension; it is incommensurable either with space or with time, it is not augmented by accumulation. Degrees in truth, and a more and a less, are inconceivable; but each act that affirms it contains its whole, since truth itself does not live except in the spirit that perpetually creates and recreates it. Truth belongs to the thinking mind, that is, to reality as a logical consciousness, as life belongs to the living body. It belongs to us, individually, in relation to that universal consciousness, in the mode and measure of our partaking of it: which means that however much of it we may conquer, however constant, laborious, honest, intense our efforts towards truth may be, yet our duty towards it will always remain infinite, inexhaustible. The conquered truth is deadin the mind that rests in it, that ceases its effort, as life gives place to death in the body that no longer functions.

In a wider sense, truth belongs to every form of spiritual activity. Beauty, utility, goodness are the truths of the artistic, the practical, the moral mind. And in the actual life of the spirit, each of these values represents all the others in the particular act in which it realizes itself. This is what Croce means by his circular conception of the spirit. And this is why what is said of one value seems to apply without any change to the others; why, as we said elsewhere, all universals are but one universal. Whether we call this one Progress or Development, Spirit or Reality, Mind or Nature, we know that our thought is grasping Life itself, not in its abstract identity, but in its infinite actuality, that is, each time, this life, this beauty, this action, this truth. What we aim at is not an ecstatic absorption into the undifferentiated unity, but the finding within ourselves of a centre of consciousness, capable of introducing order and reason into the variegated spectacle of the natural and human world, not from outside and from above, but from its very heart. The truth that we seek is therefore never external to ourselves, but our own activity, our own life, our own history.

This concept of truth as activity and as history, this activistic and energetic philosophy, truly positive in that the course of history appears to it as asuccession of only positive acts and positive values, is not however a blind and fatuous optimism. If it is true that nowhere positive error or positive evil can interrupt the process of life, that death itself does not end but fulfil it, yet from the relations and implications of the various forms of activity arises a real dialectic of good and evil, of truth and error, which is the spring and motive of life. What to the purely utilitarian conscience is the good of now and of to-day, the same conscience, awakened to a greater light, repudiates as evil. The imaginative vision of the poet, in which truth expresses itself, sensuous and finite, and yet pregnant of its infinity, dissolves like mist in the sun in the clearness of the logical concept, and is then restored in its right by the historical 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. History is but this perpetual cycle of death and resurrection, in which what is concrete distinction in the act transforms itself into opposition in the process, producing the terms of a new problem and becoming the source of the new creation. Thus the whole method of Croce's philosophy reveals itself as directed towards a realistic conception of life, and the distinctions within the concept are not abstract forms, but the very structure of reality.

The professional philosopher moves always and only in the rarefied atmosphere of the pure concept.Croce came to philosophy from art and from economics, and he never lost contact with the elementary forms of knowledge and of action. What might be termed as his fundamental discoveries are his definitions of the æsthetic and of the economic principle. On this basis the whole of his thought rests. Without a conception of a truth which is sufficient unto itself, and yet is not logical truth, and of a good which has its own justification, and yet is not moral good, he would have been compelled to maintain by the side of the concepts of truth and of goodness, error and evil as positive realities, or to include the whole of reality within what would have been truth and goodness in a purely verbal sense. In both cases, he would have been unable to make his philosophy immediately adherent to all grades of active consciousness, from the lowest to the highest, and thereby to history. Of these discoveries the one that until now has attracted the greatest attention is that of the pure intuition, and of art and language as expression. But the establishment of the economic principle, that is of the world of nature, of feeling, of passion, as a positive grade of the spiritual process, will probably be counted as Croce's greatest achievement, by those who shall be able to look back on his work with an ampler perspective. It is through it that his philosophy of the spirit, and in this philosophy, the consciousness of our day, has taken possession of that other world, of that persistent transcendance, which we call nature. In this directionlies, undoubtedly, the future course of the thought of an age, to which, in this afterglow of a great conflagration, all problems seem to gather into the one of the subjection to its better and higher self, the utilization for its purer purposes, of its own cumbersome economic body, of its nature and of its passions.

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