Read Ebook: Benedetto Croce: An Introduction to His Philosophy by Piccoli Raffaello Carr Herbert Wildon Author Of Introduction Etc

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to move towards those ends, and a kind heart makes itself truly and seriously kind only through an ever broader and deeper understanding."

After three years of residence in Rome, Croce returned to Naples, where he lived in the society of curious and learned old men, librarians and archivists, all absorbed in minute and painstaking historical researches. The moderate fortune which he had inherited from his parents gave him the independence he needed for his quiet, laborious tastes, and allowed him gradually to collect in his own house a very large and precious library. To it he owed also the possibility of learning without teaching, and therefore of keeping his own work entirely free from any academic taint: of subordinating his studies rather to the necessities of the development of his own personality than to those of professional specialization.

We have here a Croce, who, though not a professor, was yet truly a specialist: one of that great host of local and municipal historians which are to be met with in even the least important Italian towns. And undoubtedly this kind of activity offered him, as he willingly acknowledges, not only an outlet for his youthful imagination, in the reconstruction of an adventurous and picturesque past, but a formal discipline of precision and thoroughness in scientific work. But it must be remembered that municipal or regional history in Italy has in many cases the breadth and depth of national history in other countries, because of the number and variety of divergent political, literary and artistic traditions which are present in the life of each Italian city or state. And Naples, though she never had as preponderant a part in the formation of the national consciousness as either Rome or Florence, was a world in herself, with her own art and poetry, with her own philosophical and political tendencies, with her peculiar relations to non-Italian states and cultures, such as France and Spain. Croce's Neapolitan researches, however specialized and barren they may appear at first sight, were therefore well fitted to give him, in one particular instance, that direct and concrete experience of historical reality, of a complex and variegated historical reality, which is among the necessary premises of his philosophical thought. They gave him also a clearer consciousness of the processes of thought which were naturally connected with that particular experience, and they thus helped him to penetrate the minds of his two great Neapolitan predecessors, Vico and De Sanctis. And finally, especially through his interest in the cultural relations between Naples and Spain, they enlarged his horizon from the problems of local to those of general European history.

But his old methods and habits followed him in the new field: again it seemed to him that there would be no end to his merely preparatory work, once he had undertaken it in what was practically still his old spirit. In fact he had sensed a spiritual need which had announced itself by that peculiar feeling so closely resembling one of moral dissatisfaction, but he had not been able as yet to formulate the terms of his problem. It is probable that what kept him for quite a long time from doing so was partly the character of his literary education, and partly a kind of intellectual humility, which made him distrust his own powers, on entering into a completely new form of mental activity.

I may add here, since it will be very hard to interrupt the history of his intellectual development with biographical details, that the new direction of his thought did not alter Croce's external mode of life; that the discipline acquired in his early work remained the norm of all his later activity; that he accepted public offices in his own town, and later as a senator and as a Minister of Public Education in the last Giolitti Cabinet, certainly more out of the consciousness of a moral obligation than through his inclination or his ambition. His life on the whole has been and is essentially that of the scholar and of the thinker: his work, a political work only in the wide meaning which Plato gives to the word.

Benedetto Croce was thirty-four years old in nineteen hundred: his education is therefore the work of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A rapid examination of the intellectual conditions of Italy during those years will help us to see that education in its true light, that is, as a reaction to, rather than a fruit of, the environment.

The Risorgimento, with its fifty years of wars and revolutions coming close on the heels of the great Napoleonic upheaval, left Italy materially and morally exhausted. After centuries of foreign domination, of political and spiritual servitude, all the elements of Italian culture had been gathered by the two generations of the Risorgimento into a new culture, which was much more an instrument of combat, for the conquest of unity and independence, considered as the necessary premises of national life, than the best soil for the spiritual growth of that life after the conquest. This new culture, in the poets who had announced and formed it, Parini, Alfieri, Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni, in its philosophers, Rosmini and Gioberti, and in its prophet and apostle, Mazzini, had forms and spirits, the value and meaning of which by far transcended the importance of its immediate historical purpose; but through the difficulties and labors of the practical effort, it reached the end of the period shorn of a good deal of what was deepest, most beautiful, nearest to the universal, in it. Italy in 1870 was very much like the sprinter who wins the race, but collapses at the crossing of the line.

The culture of Italy had been for centuries oscillating between the pursuit and discovery of certain universal values, which had gradually become part of the common European culture , and the development of purely local, regional characteristics. At the end of the Risorgimento, the links that had kept Italian culture in constant contact with the rest of Europe were broken, 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 advanced by a literary and abstract national ideal. The duties of Italian culture, clearer to us now than to the men who lived in the midst of those events, were then, on one side, to re-establish the connection between Italian and European culture, and this time more by learning than by teaching--and on the other side to utilize the less particular elements of the regional cultures as a foundation for a real and concrete and diffused cultural life in the nation.

Thus Italy becomes, at the beginning of her new, unified existence, little more than a province of European thought. She looks around herself and she is compelled to take notice of what had happened beyond her frontiers during the last two or three centuries. It is interesting to compare the characteristics of the other great nations of Europe as they appear to Italy during and after the Risorgimento. England, who had been a symbol of political liberty, a source of political and economic wisdom, reappears as a model of industrial development and at the same time as the proclaimer of a new creed to the world, the creed of evolution, which after having infused a fresh spirit in the natural sciences with Darwin, seems to promise a new interpretation of human life, a new organization of science and of social thought, with Spencer. France, the mother of revolutions, the deliverer of the spirit of man from the shackles of divine and earthly tyranny, remains, in a vague and hazy fashion, through the many disappointments that her policies give to her Italian lovers during all this period, the same kind of inspiration that she has been ever since the Encyclop?die and the Revolutions; but contributes to the new effort little more than her veristic fiction, in which art itself is reduced to a handmaid of the goddess of the hour, biological and social science.

Germany had saturated with the romantic atmosphere of her poetry the passionate struggle of the times, and she had captured a little band of thoughtful patriots, among whom we find Croce's uncle, Bertrando Spaventa, with the fascination of her new metaphysics, in which they found the fulfilment of all the promises of Italian thought in the foregoing centuries; but after her victory over France, the same cause that makes French influence less vigorous, makes also German influence less deep and less inspiring. A Germany who has like Faust sold her romantic and metaphysical soul, yields only a shadow of her great historical and philosophical culture of the eighteenth and of the first half of the nineteenth century, though a tremendously powerful one, and such that for a long time it overawes the academic mind not of Italy only, but of the whole continent. A narrow and materialistic philology, under the name of historical method, becomes the heir to the humanistic tradition, and substitutes itself for every native impulse, even in fields in which Italian thought had been master for centuries, as in that of law: where it mercilessly destroys, of the ideologies of the Risorgimento, not only that which was arbitrary and fanciful, and therefore destined to perish, but even that which through the subsequent course of history was to prove vital and sound. The Italian school of international law, the new conception of the Law of Nations, for instance, which was the fruit of the Italian juridical tradition during the experiences of the Risorgimento, and which is the more or less consciously accepted foundation of all the doctrines of international relations striving for realization in our times, in no country and in no schools was so resolutely repudiated as in the Italian universities. And it could not have been otherwise, since the new philology was as static and deterministic a doctrine, only more logically and rigorously so, as the evolutionary positivism which we had learnt from England.

The analogies between this general cultural atmosphere, and the present conditions of the intellectual world in America, are, provided we do not stress them too hard, so striking that I cannot refrain from calling the attention of the reader to them. I believe this will help him to apply a good many of Croce's criticisms and ideas to tendencies and problems with which he is thoroughly familiar. The most recent forms of American philosophy, pragmatism, instrumentalism, realism, are indigenous elaborations of that same English positivism and empiricism which was dominant in Italy a generation ago: the relations between science and philosophy are seen in the same light in America to-day as in Italy before the beginning of this century. And the two most significant and far-reaching directions of research, social psychology and psychoanalysis, branching out into every ramification of social and moral and ??sthetic thought, are based on assumptions, and lead to results, very similar to those of the Spencerian sociology and of the Lombrosian theory of insanity and genius. Even in fiction America is to-day trying her hand at verism, and in poetry, apart from a few marked exceptions, she is experimenting in the same spirit in which we began to follow, about the end of the period, the most recent fashions of Paris in verslibrism and decadentism. In academic circles German philology has maintained its sway for a much longer time than in Europe, and the war has brought about more an emotional than an intellectual consciousness of the need of a vaster and deeper understanding of history. Finally, certain aspirations towards ancient and totally different systems of moral and ??sthetic standards, embraced with an enthusiasm that is akin to an act of faith--the hope to discover a refuge and a consolation from the chaos of modernity in a restoration of classical or medi??val ideals--are American varieties of an attitude of mind which found its satisfaction in Italy in patterns which we drew after the models of Ruskinism and of French traditionalism.

On the whole, Italian culture was suffering from the effects of the same delusion which accounts for the straits in which American culture is to-day: that European culture could be assimilated through its representatives at one particular moment only, and as if it were at the surface of time, rather than by the only legitimate and fruitful method, which is that of delving beneath that surface for the truly fundamental contributions that each nation has made to the common mind. Not one of the nations of Europe was then, or is now, at one of those turning points in the history of culture in which principles of universal value are elaborated within the limits of a single national group. The only possible exception was that of Russia, sending out to an age-worn Europe a fresh message of human pity and Christian love in a succession of epic masterpieces; but the quality of the message was such as to affect the heart much more than the intellect, to produce a new and deeper feeling rather than a sounder knowledge.

Two great individual figures, however, dominate the whole period, and among so many contrasting currents of thought and feeling, among the fluctuating fashions of the times, connect the new generations with the traditional elements of Italian culture. That breadth of vision, that sense of the perspective of history, which was totally lacking in the prevailing cosmopolitan thought, was a conspicuous characteristic of the work of a great critic, Francesco de Sanctis, and of a great poet, Giosu?? Carducci. And what made the secret of the strength of the one as well as of the other, was their fidelity to the regional traditions from which they were issued, coupled with a power to invest them with a much broader significance than they had ever possessed. With De Sanctis, the speculative trend of the Southern Italian mind, with Carducci the humanism of Florence and Tuscany, for the first time in 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 these were elements of more permanent value than the ones which attracted the attention of the crowds, and they both succeeded in grafting those foreign elements on their native dispositions in such a way and with so little violence that they seemed to belong rightfully to them. This is true of what De Sanctis learnt from the idealistic philosophers of Germany, and particularly from Hegel, as well as of what Carducci acquired from the great poets and historians of the two previous generations in France, in England, and in Germany. Nor should we marvel at this, since by going deep enough or high enough into any of the European cultures, it is always possible to find a level that is common to all of them.

There are philosophers for whom it is possible, and relatively easy, to trace the roots of their speculations and of their systems in the thought of one or a few predecessors. The research of what we might call their sources, or more precisely of the terms in which certain problems were handed down to them through the particular philosophical tradition to which they belong, would probably not lead us very far in space or very deep in time: it might be useful in such cases to preface the history of their thought by a brief summary of these immediate antecedents. But in the case of Benedetto Croce, such a summary ought to extend, in relation to the problems in which he is or has been interested, to the whole range of the history of human thought. This is due partly to his peculiar approach to the problems of philosophy, and partly to his method of work.

Philosophy is to him neither a special science nor a specialized technique: not a discipline which requires a scholastic training, and which you can definitely acquire after a given number of years of study, but just what it was in the beginning: that love of wisdom which prompts every man to the exercise of his thinking powers. The problems of philosophy cannot be enumerated and defined, but that which happens to you, or your own doings, in your life, in your conduct, in your work, in your study, is the perpetually renewed material for your meditation. Problems are not given to you from outside, as puzzles at which you might try your skill or duties imposed by a pedagogue: they are your experience, and your philosophy is your conscious logical reaction to them.

This unprofessional and broadly human view of philosophy was not, however, an obvious and spontaneous attitude of Croce's spirit, but a laborious conquest. In the years of his erudite and unphilosophical youth, at his first coming in contact with philosophy in the strict and technical meaning of the word, with philosophical treatises and dissertations, his attitude was one of profound respect for the professors of philosophy, "as I was persuaded," , "that they, as specialists, should possess that abstruse science, of whose sacred curtain I had hardly lifted a few folds, and I did not know that in a few years I should with wonder and irritation discover that most of them did not possess anything, not even that very little which I, merely by my good will to understand, had succeeded in acquiring." The fact is that these professors and specialists could hardly be termed philosophers at all, while Croce had already in himself that obscure and tormenting desire for intellectual clarity, which is the beginning of philosophy.

But in this initial ignorance, in his coming as if unaware to the gates of the temple, we shall find the reasons of Croce's method of work. When a given problem presents itself to him, not as a subject of learned controversy, but as a spiritual necessity, he becomes suddenly conscious of the duty of following the history of that particular problem through centuries of thought. The first impulse may come from a mere attempt at understanding the terms under which the problem presents itself to him: a clarification of words. His mental habits are, in fact, those of the conscientious and painstaking philologist, and he brings the method and discipline of the severest erudition into the field of logic. There is no problem for him that is purely logical, in an abstract and formal sense; still less, purely psychological. The mere occasion for his speculation is sometimes offered, as we shall see, by contemporary discussions, but he feels from the very beginning that 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 of his final identification of philosophy with history, he practically identifies each problem with its own history, by retracing, generally in an inversely chronological order, the original meanings of terms and theories of which contemporary culture gave him only a pale and distorted reflection.

This last hypothesis describes what actually happened in the case of another among the ancestors of Croce's Philosophy of Mind. For two centuries either unknown or misunderstood, Vico came into his own only a few years ago, and mainly through the efforts of Croce himself. In Vico, that is in Italy at the beginning of the eighteenth century, practically all the germs of the idealistic philosophy, and of the historical and critical culture of the nineteenth century, were already present, as a natural development of the philosophical and humanistic Renaissance. And it is through what, in Vichian style, we may call the discovery of the true Vico, that Croce inserts himself in the central tradition of Italian, and European, culture, and is saved from the dangers inherent in his catholic attitude towards the philosophers of the past, that of a material, mosaic-like eclecticism on one side, and that of a metaphysical syncretism, such as led Hegel to the dialectic constructions of his Philosophy of History, on the other.

The philosophy of the Renaissance, in which the fundamental impulses that are the soul of that movement find their clear and distinct expression, had produced a new naturalism and a new spiritualism with Giordano Bruno and Tomaso Campanella: that is, two widely divergent views of reality, which however had sprung from a common source, the opposition to that scholastic synthesis in which all the transcendental elements of Greek and Roman philosophy had been gathered to the support of medi??val theology, in direct relation with the medi??val description of the cosmos. There has probably never been made in the world, either before or after the Middle Ages, such a resolute and comprehensive attempt at an intellectual understanding of the moral and material universe, as the one that is the work of medi??val philosophy: but that attempt had been made possible, and had brought definite results, only through the acceptation of the limits of revealed truth, which, however freely accepted, proved in the end to be much more compelling than to the modern scientist are the freely accepted limits of external reality. Revealed truth could not be a mere object of thought, as it carried within itself, under the mythological disguise, its own metaphysics and its own ethics: a new principle, in fact, a more absolute and intimate spirituality than had been known to either the Greeks or the Romans, which attracted to itself all the kindred elements in ancient thought, and determined the essential characteristics of medi??val speculation.

The discovery and establishment of this spiritual principle, as a universal reality which transcends nature and the spirit of man, and which to this natural and human world is as a law dictated from outside and from above, is the message of the Middle Ages, not in pure philosophy only, but in religion and ethics, in science and in the life of society. The Renaissance is the beginning of our modern world, inasmuch as it is, through the infinite variety of its artistic, social, religious, scientific manifestations, an effort to see that same spiritual principle no longer as a transcending reality, but as the active, immanent, all-pervading soul of immediate reality, both natural and human. The Ptolemaic cosmography, which is the visible form of medi??val thought, a system of the finite universe, of which the Earth is the centre, and which leaves an infinite space for the seat of the only real, transcending existences, beyond the compass of the heavenly spheres, and as if it were outside itself, loses its hold on the imagination, and therefore on the conscience of men, long before Copernicus and Galileo read in the skies a new system of an infinite universe, within which, or nowhere, the divine principle must live and work.

The impulse towards the identification of the spirit with nature, on one side, and with man on the other, had been at work in Italian life and thought all through the Renaissance; but it is only at the end of that miraculous spring of Western civilization, between the close of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, that it expresses itself in the philosophies of Bruno and Campanella. Bruno presents himself as an expounder and defender of Copernican astronomy, and Campanella writes the apology of Galileo. And to each of them the scientific discoveries are much more than mere helps and suggestions for metaphysical speculation; they are the revelation, in one field of human thought, of a new logic which has to be recognized, in one form or another, as the fundamental principle of modern civilization.

The two main directions of modern thought, or rather of all human thought, are thus represented in the naturalism of Bruno and in the spiritualism of Campanella, at the conclusion of the Renaissance, respectively prefiguring the pantheism of Spinoza and the rationalism of Descartes, that is, the two systems through which similar conceptions became active and effective in all subsequent developments of European philosophy. And it is useful to recall their names as an introduction to the exposition of the ideas of a modern Italian philosopher, because we are to-day only too prone to identify certain forms of common European thought, originating from Greece and from Italy, with what was only their last expression in the great idealistic movement in Germany in the nineteenth century; where Bruno and Spinoza reappear in Schelling, and Campanella and Descartes, through the intermediary of the English thinkers of the eighteenth century, in Kant and Hegel.

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

Vico was brought to this second and final form of his theory of knowledge by his studies on the history of law, of religion, of language and poetry: his philosophy is essentially a philosophy of the moral sciences, of philology in its widest meaning. And the whole of his speculation, in his Scienza Nuova takes the shape of an enquiry into the origins and development of human society: not essentially of a sociology, an empirical and inductive science of man , but rather, through "the unity of the human spirit that informs and gives life to this world of nations," of an ideal and eternal history of mankind, a philosophy of the human mind.

We are now in a position to understand why it would be vain to look in the work of Croce for either an organized synthesis of scientific thought, understood as a means through which the mind of man grasps the reality of nature, or a system of metaphysics attempting to explain the facts of our human life by reference to an order of superhuman and supernatural realities. These are two types of philosophy, a criticism of which is implicit in every step of Croce's philosophical career, as well as in the quality of his philosophical ancestry. But in their place we shall find a series of meditations on the problems of the human spirit in its actual historical development; on the distinctions and inter-relations of the various forms of spiritual activity, not as they appear, in a purely abstract and external consideration, to the eye of the psychologist, but as they reveal themselves in the intimacy of those spiritual and historical processes, in which man creates at the same time his own being and his own truth. As we have stated already, the philosophy of Croce is essentially a philosophy of the humanistic tradition, of that Italian and European tradition the consciousness of which seems to be fast disappearing even among those who consider themselves as its exponents and defenders; and which in his thought not only justifies and understands itself, but brings that justification and that understanding to a greater depth, to a more comprehensive clarity, than it ever reached during the many centuries of its existence.

PART FIRST

FROM PHILOLOGY TO PHILOSOPHY

Croce's first philosophical essay--Is history an art or a science?--The essence of art--History as the representation of reality, and therefore, art--The distinction between art and science--A tentative definition of history.

What saved Croce from the academic weakness which seems to be congenital to this kind of lucubrations was, besides the native temper of his mind, an instinctive realization of the true philosophical import of the problems involved. The question, whether History is an art or a science, had been a favourite one with the generation to which Croce's masters belonged; and it was really threatening to become an endless, insoluble one, since no attempt was ever made to solve it by the only method which could give positive results, that is, by an accurate definition of the concepts of both art and science. The most common answer to it, and the one that most clearly proved the confused state of mind of those who formulated it, was that history was at the same time a science and an art. The traditional humanistic view, which considered history as one of the arts, and to which the inclusion of Clio in the college of the Muses bears witness, found but little favour in a time which was entirely under the domination of the pseudo-scientific philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and could therefore hardly admit of any form of knowledge which was not scientific knowledge. The third solution, history as a science, was in fact the most usually accepted one, being but one aspect of that general tendency of the age, superficial and uncritical, through which all forms of knowledge were striving hard to assimilate themselves to the mathematical and natural sciences. This tendency which was present in all fields of philology, manifested itself in history either in the attempt to transform history into sociology, and to substitute a system of institutional schemes or of so-called general laws for the actual historical processes, or in the raising of the usual canons and criteria of historical method, that is, of a collection of maxims and precepts for the proper handling of sources, documents, and monuments, to the dignity of a supposititious science. It is characteristic of Croce, that he did not directly attack the English and French and Italian sociologism which was so popular in his day: to a mind which had received its first logical training at the hands of a Thomistic schoolmaster, and had been introduced to modern philosophy through Labriola's Herbartism, the logic of the average sociologist was so abhorrent in its barbarity, that it did not even afford him a starting point for his own criticism. The fallacy of sociologism is made evident in the course of the discussion, but rather by implication than through a direct animadversion. He chose his own adversary among the exponents of the other form of the same error, among the German critics, whose ideas were more clearly defined and logically more consistent.

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

The most important part of this demonstration is that which concerns art. Croce's object was to discover the nature of history, but his real achievement in his first essay was that of stating the ??sthetic problem in its true terms. His opinions about history and about science were destined to undergo many changes in the further development of his thought; but his whole theory of ??sthetics is already virtually present in these few pages about art and the Beautiful.

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

This part of Croce's argument is undoubtedly the weakest. His conception of science was inadequate, and his discussion of the relations of history with science suffered from this inadequacy: the problem which he had attacked could not be solved at this stage of his speculation. While his ??sthetics was contained in germ in his conception of art, his logic was not even adumbrated in his conception of science. In fact, the only real function of the latter was to mark the limits of the former: "In the presence of an object, human mind can perform but two operations of knowledge. It can ask itself: what is it?, and it can represent to itself that object in its concreteness. It can wish to understand it, or merely to contemplate it. It can submit it to a scientific elaboration, or to what we are wont to call an artistic elaboration." "Either we make science, or we make art. Whenever we assume the particular under the general, we make science; whenever we represent the particular as such, we make art."

The problem of literary criticism--The three phases: exposition, valuation, history--??sthetic judgment and history of art: the exigency of a new ??sthetics--The place of ??sthetics in Croce's thought--Moral and logical preoccupations--Croce and Spaventa.

Only a few of the conclusions of this particular research were destined to have any kind of permanency in Croce's theories; but it is useful to recall them, not only as a step in the development of his thought, but as representing a marked progress in that conception of literary criticism which is still predominant wherever the influence of that thought has not yet been felt. Croce submitted that conception to a process similar to what a French critic calls a disassociation of ideas, trying to establish which can be said to be the essential operations of literary criticism, and the relations between these and the various kinds of possible works on literary material. Given this method, which is that of abstract classification, and having approached his problem through criticism itself instead of starting from the other end and deducing the concept of criticism from the concept of art and literature, he was bound to reach a number of abstract concepts, apparently irreducible to each other, and the fundamental unity of which he could only later affirm through the general progress of his theory of ??sthetics.

The study of the principles of literature does not belong to literary criticism, but to ??sthetics; or, to use Vico's distinction, not to Philology but to Philosophy. Textual criticism, and interpretative comment, are preliminaries of literary criticism, which begins only with the contemplation or ??sthetic enjoyment of literature: that is, with that operation of reading which is made possible through the establishment of a correct text, and by the help, when needed, of a convenient commentary. In literary criticism proper Croce distinguishes three successive phases, or moments, answering respectively to the questions: What have I read? What is the value of that which I have read? Which is the genesis and fortune of this particular work? The first is the exposition or description--which in itself is a work of art of which another work of art is the subject; the second, the valuation or ??sthetic judgment; the third, the history of the work under consideration. Outside these three moments or phases, Croce does not admit of any other independent critical operation: the research of the sources of a work is only part of the history of that work; comparative criticism is an instrument of historical criticism; philology in the strict sense of the word can in turn be used as a help to each of the three main operations, but when it is exclusively concerned with the general history of a language, it is no longer a literary discipline; bibliography is a mere external element of the history of the work; the study of the content is a literary study only if it is pursued in relation with either the exposition, valuation or history of the work, that is, when the work itself is viewed as literature, and not as a document for the purposes of another science or discipline; the biography of the author is an element of the genesis of the work, and therefore of its history, but its main interest is moral and not literary.

The discussion that follows, on the relations between the ??sthetic judgment and the history of a work of art, obviously suffers from the impossibility of drawing useful consequences from a distinction of purely abstract concepts; from the fact that that which was Croce's only real discovery at the time, his conception of art, had not yet been thought out by him in the fulness of its relations with the other activities of the human spirit. As regards history, this little book is a step forward because it is a valid criticism of a confused and na??ve state of mind, in which these abstract concepts could help to introduce some sort of order and method; but, on the whole, though it clarifies the terms of the general problem, it does not bring it appreciably nearer to a solution.

But from Croce's published work at this time it would be easy to gather the fallacious impression that his interest was an exclusively literary one: that he proceeded to create a philosophy of literature and art, and that only through the necessities of the system he was led to the consideration of logical, economic and ethical facts. If that were true, with the exception of his theory of ??sthetics, practically the whole of his philosophy would be opened to the reproach that he levelled against the greatest part of the German ??sthetic theories of the nineteenth century: "of not being derived from spontaneous and direct researches, but rather from the need of filling a compartment in a philosophical system." A good many among Croce's critics have been the victims of such a misconception of the actual genesis of his thought; and have discounted the importance of any but his ??sthetic theories, considering all the rest as a kind of philosophical by-product, with the result that they have not been able properly to understand even that part of his work in which they were interested. The typical example is given by those moralistic critics of his ??sthetics, who would have been spared many mistakes and inanities, if they had thought Croce's ethics and logic worth a little consideration. They would then have realized that their criticisms had been anticipated and criticized long before they had been uttered. But perhaps it is asking too much of the average student of literature, once he has made the effort to think about the problems of art, that he should also try to turn the light of his reason on the obscure promptings of his moral consciousness; a suggestion which in many cases would be violently rejected as the height of immorality.

On the whole, Croce's position at that time was, as he himself defined it many years later, a Platonic-Scholastic-Herbartian one; one that, in the moral held, had at least the advantage of being "invulnerable to the subtle menace of sensualism and decadentism," in the European life and thought of the nineties, the acme of spiritual distinction--an illusory reaction to and escape from the prevailing positivism and determinism, of which in reality they were but thinly disguised variations. Croce "never lost, even for an instant, the power of discerning sensual refinement from spiritual finesse, erotic flights from moral elevation, false heroism from sheer duty." Here lies the fundamental difference, "of spiritual race," between him and his most illustrious contemporary, Gabriele d'Annunzio, with whom he has more than once been coupled by superficial critics. The character of their respective influence on the younger Italian generations, of D'Annunzio between 1890 and 1900, and of Croce between 1900 and 1910, is more than sufficient evidence on this point.

It is something of a surprise to find that he had learnt practically nothing from his uncle Bertrando Spaventa, who had been the most powerful representative of the Hegelian tradition in Italy. The central problem of Spaventa's speculation had been that of the relations between knowing and being, of transcendence and immanence; and although it was only through a solution of this problem that Croce could hope for progress in any of his particular philosophical researches, yet he could take no interest in it when its discussion was earned on independently of those problems of art, of moral life, of law and history, towards which his attention was naturally drawn. Croce himself explains this lack of interest as due to his "unconscious immanentism": "as I met with no difficulty in conceiving the relation between thinking and being; if I had any difficulty, it was rather in conceiving a being severed from thought, or a thought severed from being." But in this case he is probably seeing himself in the light of his later experience: that difficulty did exist, and is the fundamental difficulty of his early speculation. Only, he could not solve it by Spaventa's methods, which were those of a rigorous and formal logician, of a philosopher with a theological background, but only through the elaboration of the materials of his own particular moral and intellectual experience. At a later stage, and when he had already independently arrived at a position much more similar to that of Spaventa, than he would ever have thought possible for him, the influence, if not of Spaventa himself, at least of that attitude towards philosophy which had been his, came back to him through his friend Giovanni Gentile, whose mental temperament was much more akin to that of the old Neapolitan thinker, than Croce's ever was. Croce's idealism was at this time limited to what he had unconsciously absorbed through De Sanctis' conception of art; but his theory of knowledge, not yet logically unfolded, was still oscillating between intellectualism and naturalism. He was decidedly anti-Hegelian, on the other hand, in his theory of history and in his general conception of the world.

A new interest: Marxism--Historical materialism--Criticism and interpretation: a new historical canon--Marxian economics as an application of the hypothetic method--The concepts of science and the economic principle--Science and practice--Marxism and morality.

We shall consider this phase of Croce's work from two distinct points of view--as a new individual experience, and as a stage in the development of his philosophy. For the first of them, we shall again leave the word to Croce himself: "That intercourse with the literature of Marxism, and the eagerness with which for some time I followed the socialistic press of Germany and Italy, stirred my whole being, and for the first time awakened in me a feeling of political enthusiasm, yielding a strange taste of newness to me: I was like a man who having fallen in love for the first time when no longer young, should observe in himself the mysterious process of the new passion. At that fire I burnt also my abstract moralism, and I learnt that the course of history has a right to drag and to crush the individual. As I had not been disposed in my family circle to any fanaticism, and not even to a liking for the current and conventional liberalism of Italian politics ... it seemed to me to breathe faith and hope in the vision of the rebirth of mankind redeemed by labour and in labour." This political enthusiasm did not last very long: it disappeared when that which was Croce's true nature, not practical but essentially theoretical, reasserted itself, by reducing this new experience into new conceptual forms; but without it, the whole of his philosophy of the practical activity would forever have been like a theory of vision in the mind of a blind man, or a theory of love in that of a keeper of the harem. Art, thought, mortality, had already appeared to him as aspects of his own life; to these, a new element was added now, not as a mere object of thought, but as a passionate and concrete experience.

The interpretation of the doctrine of historical materialism presented a number of difficulties deriving partly from the form in which the doctrine itself had originally appeared--not as a coherent theory, but as a series of pronouncements and observations scattered in a variety of writings, composed at a distance of years, and the aim of which was rather political and polemical than scientific; and partly from its association with remnants of old metaphysics, both in its originators and in their followers. In Marx and Engels, as well as practically in the whole literature of Marxism, the emphasis being laid on the substantive rather than on the adjective, historical materialism implied the adhesion to that metaphysical materialism which was one of the children of Hegelian metaphysics. What had been the Idea for Hegel, was the Economy of the new metaphysicians: the only reality, working beneath the surface of human consciousness, as an under-structure beneath a merely apparent and illusory superstructure. Given this conception, it is easy to understand why historical materialism appealed so strongly to positivists and evolutionists, who concealed a similar kind of metaphysics under their proclaimed contempt for philosophy. The old philosophies of history had attempted to reduce the sequence of history to a scheme of concepts, starting with God, or Providence, or the Hegelian Idea: the new unconscious metaphysicians substituted for the old concepts that of Economy, or of Matter, or of Development and Evolution, from which all the particular historical determinations could be deduced with not less certainty than from the old metaphysical entities. And from their predecessors they also borrowed those teleological tendencies which are implicit in all metaphysics, attributing a will and an end to their new God, be it called Progress or Matter, and trying to deduce the future course of history from the dialectic of the past. Hence the growth of a vast literature inquiring into the development of abstract sociological schemes or of economic forms reduced to characteristics of economic epochs, forcing the concrete materials of history into rigid conceptual frames; hence the na??ve faith in the deduction of social predeterminations, of which the most striking was the asserted necessity of the advent of socialism as the only logical outcome of capitalist society.

Croce, pursuing the analysis initiated by Labriola, began by dissociating what seemed to him to be the vital element in historical materialism, from any intrusion of either Hegelian or positivistic metaphysics. His criticism of historical materialism as a philosophy of history and, generally, of the possibility of constructing any philosophy of history, is the first resolute step towards an anti-metaphysical conception of philosophy. Whether by metaphysics is meant the knowledge of another world of real essences, of things in themselves, beyond the objects of our immediate experience, or the creation of abstract concepts duplicating and falsifying the complex world of life, the whole trend of Croce's thought will henceforward oppose any claim on the part of these spurious philosophies, mythological or pseudo-scientific, to furnish an adequate interpretation of reality. Vico's metaphysics of human ideas, which is no metaphysics at all, because it does not postulate the existence of any reality beyond that of the spirit of man, will more and more become the model of Croce's own philosophy. That immanentism which he considers as one of the spontaneous attitudes of his mind slowly extricates itself from the ruins of his own transcendental logic, and shows itself impervious to the allurements of both Platonism and Positivism, of the ancient and the new myth.

Purged of its unessential philosophical associations, historical materialism appeared to Croce as nothing more than a new canon or criterion of historical interpretation, fixing the attention of the historian on a mass of new data, the importance of which had not been recognized before. It was neither a new philosophy nor a new method: it could not be legitimately employed to draw conclusions on the relations between economic facts and the other facts of history, nor to reduce history itself to the operation of a few abstract laws. It was a tendency of historical thought, coinciding with the manifestation of certain objective conditions of society and their reflexes in political thought, by which the economic element in social facts acquired a stronger relief than it had ever had in the consciousness of man. And it seemed to point, both for the historian and for the philosopher, towards the existence of a fundamental principle or form of human activity--economic activity, about the nature of which, and its relation with ??sthetic, logic, and moral activity, very little had been thought and written, besides what is contained in the introductions to all classical manuals of political economy. While still insisting that history is art, that is, the representation of individual happenings, Croce was thus implicitly brought to admit of the importance of philosophy, that is, of the study of the fundamental forms or categories of human activity, for the historian. His conception of history was undergoing a transformation in a direction similar to that towards which his conception of philosophy was moving.

It is clear that Croce was infinitely more interested in what Marx had actually accomplished, than in what he had intended to do. In Marx's own mind, the analysis of the conditions of capitalist society led inevitably to the conclusion that a passage from capitalism to socialism was predetermined by the structure of capitalist society itself. It is well known that the prevision assumed what claimed to be a strictly scientific character in the formulation of the law of the fall in the rate of profits: the gradual decrease of surplus-values accompanying the increase in technical improvements, and automatically re-establishing the equivalence of labour and value. Croce offered a very convincing criticism of this law on Marx's own grounds, by showing that it rested on a confusion between technical and economic facts, thus affording a remarkable example of Marx's uncertainty of his own method. It was clear that in this particular case Marx had been carried away by his desire to reduce the metaphysical implications of his economic sociology to the status of an historical law. And Croce's criticism was evidently intended both to deprive Marx's historical determinism of one of its most powerful instruments, and to confirm his own view of the method which gave validity and importance to such economic speculations as Marx's were.

Marxian economics stood thus interpreted as comparative sociological economics, and by the definition Croce also defined the scope of sociological science, and the nature of the logical processes which it could legitimately employ. It was a considerable advance in the study of scientific concepts, as distinct from purely speculative concepts. But he still believed at the time, misled by the economists' discussions on the nature of the economic principle, that pure economics and the philosophy of economics practically coincided; and as he had maintained the legitimacy of Marx's method against the criticisms of the pure, or scientific, economists, he defended pure economics against Marx and his school, as the general science of the economic datum. But he was soon to understand that his own point of view and that of the pure economists were widely divergent, and that the methods of pure economics are in fact scientific and not philosophical. In later years, when he came to regard the science of economics as an empirical and mathematical science, Marxian economics appeared to him merely as a special branch of economic casuistry, employing methods fundamentally identical with those of pure economics: a relationship which could be illustrated by a comparison with the parallel of non-Euclidean and classical geometry. Although he did not reach this final position at the time, there is no doubt that his experience of the actual scientific processes of economics freed him from his allegiance to Herbartian logic, in which science and philosophy were still formally undifferentiated, and led him gradually to the distinction between the scientific and the speculative concept, of which the relation established between Marxian and pure economics is a tentative prefiguration.

But the most essential gain of his economic studies was in the direction of the affirmation of the merely practical, or economic, principle, as one of the irreducible forms of human activity, raising the concept of the Useful to the same level at which those of the Beautiful, the True, and the Good had been kept by the whole European philosophical tradition since Plato. He was here actually elaborating not a scientific, but a speculative concept, though his approach to it was always by means of the discussion of particular problems, the solution of which implied a definite view of the relations between the economic principle on one side, and respectively on the other side, the intellectual and the moral principle.

As regards the possibility of inferring practical programmes from scientific principles, he objected that neither the desirable nor the practicable are science. Science may be a legitimate means of simplifying problems, making it possible to distinguish in them what can be scientifically ascertained from what can only be partially known; in the case of the Marxian law of the fall in the rate of profits, for instance, if such a law were proved to be scientifically correct, it could be said, under certain conditions that the end of capitalist society was a scientific certainty, though it would remain doubtful what would follow it. But logic is not life, and the appraisement of social programmes is a matter of empirical observations and of practical convictions. The unconquerable indetermination of social facts brings forth that element of dating in the actions of practical 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 a limited and metaphorical sense, which was not a criticism of socialism itself, but of the bad logic of certain Socialists: the Marxian programme as such, Croce recognized as one of the noblest and boldest, and also one of those which obtain the greatest support from the objective conditions of existing society. Having already denied the dependence of intellectual truth on economic fact, by criticising the metaphysics of historical materialism, he thus asserted now the autonomy of the economic from the logical principle.

PART SECOND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

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