RAFFAELLO PICCOLI

WITH A FOREWORD BY

H. WILDON CARR

JONATHAN CAPE

ELEVEN GOWER STREET, LONDON

1922

FOREWORD

This book is the account of the life and activity of one who is living and acting. Herodotus tells us the Greeks had a proverb which forbade them to pronounce any man happy before he is dead. We may certainly take his warning to this extent,—that we should refrain from attempting to fix a philosopher's thought so long as he continues to think. Benedetto Croce has, it is true, presented his Philosophy of Mind in such "questionable shape," that it gives the student the impression of finality, the feeling that a doctrine which throughout the history of philosophy has been struggling for expression has now at last come to light. But this appearance of finality is due to a certain artistic power which Croce possesses in an eminent degree, the power of reliving the past and making history interpret life. Beneath all his systematization there is the germ of a new life, a new life, which, will take form in new problems. While then we may say that no living philosopher has given so complete an appearance of finality to his doctrine as Croce has done in his Philosophy of Mind it is really the reflection of a work of art which serves only to conceal the living thought.

The publishers of this Introduction to the philosophy of Benedetto Croce by Dr. Raffaello Piccoli have courteously invited me to write this foreword inasmuch as I was the first to introduce this philosophy, otherwise than by translations, to the attention of English students. I do so very gladly. My own work was confined to the purely philosophical writings, my interest in them having been first aroused by the striking address on Æsthetic delivered by Croce to the International Congress of Philosophy at Heidelberg in 1908. When I wrote my book, the Philosophy of Mind consisted of three volumes, the Estetica, the Logica, and the Pratica, but before I had completed my account I read in Croce's Journal Critica the announcement of the forthcoming publication of the fourth volume on the Theory and History of the Writing of History. Croce had, it seemed to me, closed his book on Practice with the plain indication, not that he had solved every philosophical problem, nor that philosophy was not an external problem, but that he had given an exhaustive account of the stages or degrees in their order as moments of the developing life of the mind, and that outside these degrees there were no others. The new work did not, indeed, either negative or qualify this conclusion, but it bore evidence of the ceaseless activity of his mind. Are we then, because the philosophy of Croce is still developing, to refrain from the attempt to interpret it on the ground that any meaning we may find in it is indefinite and insecure? Certainly not, for a philosopher's thinking unfolds and develops like a living thing, it is not constructed like a building, nor does it rest on foundations which may be unsound.

Dr. Raffaello Piccoli, a professor in the University of Pisa, and the author of this book, was born in Naples, Croce's city, in 1886. He himself as a young student came under the personal spell of the philosopher he writes about, and grew up in the intellectual atmosphere which his philosophy was creating. To this great advantage he has added another, for first in Australia, and later in the Universities of England and America he has acquired a perfect command of our language and a thorough knowledge of our philosophy. He is specially qualified, therefore, to give a first-hand account of Croce's literary and philosophical activity, and the kind of influence it has had in forming the mind of Modern Italy.

The author has not confined himself to an exposition of the philosophy of Croce in its narrow and technical meaning, he has given us an account of the whole of his literary and historical activity. He has traced the origin of his philosophy in the circumstances of his parentage, early life and education, and has followed biographically the formation of his philosophical theories and the direction of his philosophical interest. He has shown how his general trend of thought, his literary tastes and historical studies without any professional spur, by the very nature and force of the problems with which they confronted him, led to philosophy as the dominant and culminating interest of life.

Philosophers and philosophies have had in our generation to undergo the trial of a fiery furnace. The Great War and the passions aroused by it and the estrangement between nations nurtured in the same Western culture have been a fierce test of principles. In regard to every great leader we ask first how he reacted to the conflicting emotions of the international struggle. Dr. Piccoli has dealt with this latest and crucial period of Croce's activity in a very sympathetic spirit. Croce's attitude at one time exposed him to an extreme unpopularity. This was largely the result of misunderstanding. He has come through the ordeal with enhanced reputation. This, at least, is the author's judgment—the judgment of one who himself fought and suffered severely in the War.

The two great achievements of Croce are in the domain of æsthetical and ethical theory. Dr. Piccoli shows us each doctrine in its historical origin and in its relation to contemporary philosophy. The first is a reaction against the intellectualism of Hegel. In its affirmation of intuition it is in rather striking agreement with the philosophy of Bergson, although as Croce's approach is from the side of art and literature, and not like Bergson's from the study of biological science, it rather supplements than elucidates Bergson's theory. The second is a reaction against the school of Karl Marx and its materialistic interpretation of history.

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

H. Wildon Carr

PREFACE

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

This plan had also a personal advantage, inasmuch as it did not compel me to a conscious revision of my own position in regard to those larger aspects of Croce's philosophy. But as soon as I began to think consistently of this book, the history of my own reactions to Croce's work came back to me so vividly that I found it impossible to set it aside; and I discovered that this supposed advantage was a delusion, towards which I had probably been drawn by a very human, very natural desire of avoiding the most obvious difficulties of my task.

As a young man, in my student days in Italy, I was a fervid and enthusiastic follower of Croce's ideas: one of the many who used to swear, as we were wont to say, in verba Crucis. To the generation who opened the eyes of their intellect in the dawn of the century, he had revealed what seemed to be the only safe path between the two precipices of a pseudo-scientific materialism on one hand, and of a mysticism on the other, which in all its many forms (traditionalism, modernism, pragmatism, intuitionism, æstheticism, super-humanism, futurism) could not be anything less than an abdication of thought for the sake of the emotions. And it should not be wondered at, if Croce's books, appearing at short intervals between 1900 and 1910, and building up what presented itself to us as a complete system of answers to all, or practically all, our most pressing spiritual questions, were received by us with deep gratitude but with very little constructive criticism. They covered such an enormous space on the map of European culture, that even for the most ambitious among us, they were very often the first introduction to entirely new fields of studies, and all we could do was to follow our guide in his voyages of rediscovery: to repeat within ourselves the strenuous experience of which each of those books was a report and a testimony.

Impatience with a master who was not of the kind we had been accustomed to, who could not be easily digested, surpassed and disposed of, but had as much energy and courage, as light a step and as curious a mind, as the most gifted among his pupils, prompted a good deal of immature and capricious criticism, which was but a means for an arbitrary liberation. It was an amusing sight to see Croce assailed and, to the satisfaction of his critics, destroyed, with weapons that nobody could have provided but Croce himself, and a dwarf victoriously brandishing against the giant a toothpick for a sword. But there is no epic of thought without such comic interludes.

My own faith in Croce was not shaken until intercourse with one of the greatest critical minds of our day, and the representative of a totally different philosophical tradition, a mathematician and a philosopher, showed me the weakness of the foundations not of Croce's, but of my own idealism. And a long residence in England, where I became intimately acquainted with certain logical habits utterly unlike our Latin ways of thought, made me profoundly sceptical of the intellectual advantages of whatever dogmatism might have been in me. Yet I continued for a long time to keep as it were in separate compartments those that had seemed to me to be established truths in Croce's system, and speculations of a quite different order on problems which were forced upon me by my own experience of life and by contact with a new moral and cultural environment.

All this was in the happy days of peace. The war from its very beginning appeared to me, then living in one of the most purely intellectual centres of Europe, at one of the oldest Universities of England, as the catastrophe of our whole intellectual life. From the trials of the war I emerged with infinitely less faith in the value of our intellectual possessions than I ever had had before, and at the same time with the firm conviction that intelligence, more intelligence, a deeper, purer, more active, charitable, courageous and pervasive intelligence, is our only hope for the future.

It was with such a disposition that I took up this work, and read what Croce had been writing during the war. Three things, in the course of this new acquaintance with him, and while I was meditating and lecturing on him during my American peregrinations, became very clear to me. The first, that his thought is not a system in the ordinary sense of the word, but a method; that therefore it is impossible to sever parts of his philosophy from the main body, the truth of particular propositions being dependent upon an understanding of the whole.

The second, that in the last few years the progress of his thought has been so considerable that an attempt at giving a general exposition of his philosophy without any regard to the successive stages of growth, at describing as a static structure what is a dynamic process, would inevitably lead to the construction of a fanciful system, of an image totally different from the original.

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

The conclusion to be drawn from these considerations was obvious: first, that I had to give up my former plan, and this with no regret, as I ought to have remembered what Croce has taught again and again, that to the naïve philosophy of the specialist his own solutions of his particular problems, however childish they may appear from a higher standpoint, are perfectly adequate, that ready-made, formal solutions are no solutions at all, and the only truth is the one that we conquer by our own effort, under the impulse of our own need. And second, that, however conscious I was and am of my own limitations, I had to take a first step in the direction of constructive criticism by trying to retrace the history, the ideal biography, of the philosophy of Croce. With the exception of a little book written by Croce himself, there is very little help to be found for a work of this kind in the vast literature that has grown in the last twenty years, in Europe and in America, around his work. And I firmly believe that there is not one man in Europe or in America who is qualified to do that work of creative interpretation which ought to be at the same time a history and a criticism of Croce's philosophical activity: least of all, the professional philosopher, who has dealt all his life with the conceptual residuum of the problems of life, and has no direct experience of any of them. Croce, as this little book will try to show, has always come to the concept from the concrete, particular problem, and has occupied himself with such a variety of problems, going into them so deeply and so thoroughly, that a complete valuation of his work will never be possible to a single man, but will take place, will happen, in the history of the various disciplines, and in the general history of thought, for years and years to come. For the present, and as long as he will be alive and thinking, the only creative interpreter of Croce is Croce himself.

This book does not therefore intend to substitute itself, not even as a summary and a short cut for lazy minds, to the works of Croce. It is rather an introduction to those works, and at the same time the confession of one individual experience of that philosophy. It is an historical sketch, and implicitly a criticism, since our way of understanding a thought is our judgment of that thought (when not a judgment that that thought passes on us); a sketch which I think I can honestly write because so much of that philosophy has been the daily food of my intellectual life, my own history, for years. Before the war I should probably have been able to write it with less difficulty, with more complete adhesion; but the perspective of these few years will make it perhaps less passionate and more reflective. An explicit criticism of the whole philosophy of Croce it is not, and it does not attempt to be: the reader may find traces of my doubts and of my preoccupations in it, but I have humbly tried to give not more, and I hope not less, than what he has a right to expect from the title.

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

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

I trust that they will find in it what they need not less than we of an older generation needed it, and what I know they are thirsting for: an example of intellectual energy and of moral strength converging into a life of unremitting devotion to the service of that truth which is light and love and joy,—our only light against the menace of darkness.

Raffaello Piccoli.

Northampton, Mass., June-October, 1931.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

I.The Beginnings

II.Early Environment

III.The Origins of his Thought

PART FIRST

From Philology to Philosophy (1893-1899)

I.History as Art

II.On Literary Criticism

III.History and Economics

PART SECOND

The Philosophy of Mind (1900-1910)

I.The Growth of the System

II.Intuition and Expression

III.The Concept of Art

IV.Criticism and Technique

V.The Pure Concept

VI.The Forms of Knowledge

VII.The Theory of Error

VIII.The Practical Activity

IX.Economics and Ethics

X.The Laws

PART THIRD

Philosophy as History (1911-1921)

I.Works and Days

II.The Theory of History

III.Criticism and History

IV.Veritas filta temporis

Bibliographical Note

Index

BENEDETTO CROCE

INTRODUCTION

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

I. The Beginnings

Benedetto Croce was born in 1866, in a small town in the Italian province of Aquila, the only son of an old-fashioned, Catholic, and conservative Neapolitan family. His grandfather had been a high magistrate, untouched by the new liberal currents in his devotion to the old régime and to the Bourbon dynasty then reigning in Naples. His father followed the traditional maxim of the "good people" of Naples: that an honest man must take care of his family and of his business, and keep away from the intrigues of political life. His mother was a woman of culture and taste, such as the old type of education for women, which is now as completely forgotten as if it had never existed, used to produce. Bertrando Spaventa, the philosopher, and Silvio Spaventa, a statesman who had brought to his enthusiasm for the national cause all the traditions of his Neapolitan conservatism, were her brothers: both of them, however, estranged from Croce's family because of their political ideas.

The child grew in this greyish, subdued atmosphere, in which the only touches of colour were added by his own passion for books of history and romance, and by the visits to the beautiful old churches to which he accompanied his mother. To the circumstances of his childhood, Croce attributes the relative delay in the development of his political feelings and ideals, for a long time submerged by his interests in literature and erudition. But because every fault brings with itself some compensation, he also owed to them his critical attitude towards partisan political legends, his impatience towards the rhetoric of liberalism, his vehement dislike of great emphatic words, and of any kind of pomp and ceremony, together with a power to appreciate what is useful and effectual in the actions of men, wherever it may come from.

As a boy, he went to a Catholic "collegio" or boarding school, and in this too his experience differed from that of the majority of his contemporaries. The insistence on lay education imparted by the State, and the preference for the day school, which allows the family to supplement the work of the school, in fact, to take care of the moral and social side of education, as distinct from the purely intellectual one, are characteristics of the new Italian methods, obviously in keeping with the general tendencies of the age. I remember that to myself as a boy it was inexplicable why anybody should be sent to a "collegio" unless he were an orphan or an unmanageable scamp. But Croce seems to have enjoyed his experience, to which he was submitted merely in accordance with the habits of his family; and even now he praises the system for breeding in him those feelings of loyalty and honour, which are the result of life in common with boys of one's own age, and of the necessity of adapting oneself to a variety of dispositions and temperaments.

Classical secondary education in Italy roughly corresponds in its scope, even to-day, to that which is imparted in Anglo-Saxon countries by secondary schools and liberal colleges. It is supposed to end the "formative" phase of education, and to lead to the higher phase in the Universities, which is, whether cultural or professional, of a highly specialized and "informative" kind. It is the direct outcome of the humanistic tradition, and rather more so in the clerical schools, like the one which Croce attended, than in the public ones. By the time he was ready for the University, he must have had a good knowledge of the classics, as a general background to a mainly literary and historical culture, in which the elements of scientific knowledge, and a good deal of mathematics, had also their place.

The religion which played such an important part in his family and school life was probably little more than a habit with him: a set of answers to certain fundamental problems which, accepted on the authority of parents and teachers, released his mind for the pursuit of his favourite studies. And yet, there is no doubt that we can find traces of this religious education in all his work: a personal experience of the catholic catechism and of catholic morality brings a spirit in contact with some of the great ideas and of the great realities of life in a much more intimate and profound way than the purely intellectual apprehensions of the same ideas and realities ever will. It creates habits of mind and moral tastes which will still be recognizable even after the individual mind to which they belong has undergone the most radical changes. In a philosopher, in particular, it forms a kind of personal background to thought, similar to that which modern philosophy actually has in its own history: it reproduces in the youth of one man that religious phase which corresponds to the youth of a civilization, and is the source of the intellectual development of a more conscious age. At intervals during his adolescence, Croce's faith intensified itself into passing aspirations towards a life of devotion, until it quietly vanished, so to speak, from his consciousness, through no great dramatic crisis, but merely in consequence of a course of lessons on the philosophy of religion, which were intended to strengthen it and make it more resistant to criticism, during the last years of his secondary education. At about the same time, having come under the influence of both Carducci and De Sanctis, he began to write, and contributed his first articles to a literary weekly, the Fanfulla della Domenica, which represented the most vigorous and advanced tendencies of the day.

In 1883, in the earthquake of Casamicciola, in the island of Ischia near Naples, Croce lost both his parents and his only sister, he himself remaining buried for several hours under the ruins, and broken in several parts of his body. The years immediately following were the "saddest and darkest" of his life, and he spent them in Rome in the house of his uncle Silvio Spaventa, which was one of the most conspicuous political and intellectual centres of the capital of the new kingdom. Spaventa was one of the leaders of the Right, or Conservative party, which had been thrown out of office by the Left, or Liberal party, a few years before; by him and by his friends the young Croce was strengthened in his mistrust of the prevailing ideas and methods, which he heard bitterly and sarcastically criticised by men of great culture and of profound political honesty. While his temperament and the shadow of his grief kept him away from the brilliant social life of the Roman jeunesse dorée his relations with the men of a party which had little hope of ever coming back to power prevented him from taking any part in active political life, in sharp contrast with the habits of the majority of Italian university students, to whom politics are what the major sports are to Anglo-Saxon students. He divided his time between the University and the great Roman libraries, among which the one he loved best was the Casanatense, in those years still served by Dominican monks, a typical old monastic library, its benches provided with old-fashioned inkhorns, sandboxes with golden sand, and goose-quills. Anyone seeing him there, buried among his ancient and curious books, and not suspecting the deep perpetual dissatisfaction and unhappiness which accompanied him in a work which seemed to be but a work of love, would have prophesied for him the life of one of those ascetics of erudition, intoxicated by the romantic dust of the past, who still haunt the solemn halls and the dark corridors of the libraries of the old world.

But the great event of his University life, the one which awakened him from the torpor of mere erudition, and set before him a new goal and a higher hope, was the lessons on moral philosophy which he heard from Antonio Labriola. Croce himself has described this new, decisive experience: "Those lessons came unexpectedly to meet my harrowing need of rebuilding for myself in a rational form a faith in life, and in the aims and duties of life; I had lost the guidance of a religious doctrine, and at the same time I was feeling the obscure danger of materialistic theories, whether sensistic or associationistic, about which I had no illusions at all, as I clearly perceived in them the substantial negation of morality itself, resolved into a more or less disguised egotism. Herbart's ethics taught by Labriola restored in my mind the majesty of the ideal, of that which has to be as opposed to that which is, and mysterious in its opposition, but because of this same mysteriousness, absolute and uncompromising."[1] Labriola's influence on Croce was not limited to the classroom; the professor and the student became friends, and Croce enjoyed the benefit of his wonderful gifts as a conversationalist, on which even more than on his academic activity, or on his published work, his fame rests. He seems to have been an awakener of souls, an intellectual stimulant in the fashion of the Greek philosophers, a breaker of new paths and a spiritual guide such as a younger generation had in the mathematician Vailati.

The mind of the young scholar is henceforth constantly occupied by meditations on the concepts of pleasure and duty, of purity and impurity, of actions prompted by the attraction of the pure, moral idea, and of actions which result in apparent moral effects through psychic associations, through habits, through the impulse of the passions. It is easy to discover the dependence of such meditations on the early religious education of Croce; they are the link, in fact, between his religion and his philosophy, since we find them, at a more mature and elaborate stage, reflected in the third volume of his Philosophy of Mind, which, to the eyes of its author, has still an almost autobiographical aspect, entirely concealed from the reader by its didascalic form.

The plan of life that he sketched for himself about this time, was a distinctly disillusioned and pessimistic one: on one hand, he would pursue his erudite and literary work, partly because of his natural inclination towards it, and partly because one has anyhow to do something in this world; and he would, on the other hand, fulfil his moral duties to the best of his capacity, conceiving them to be above all duties of compassion. In later years he criticised this view as a purely selfish one, since "the true and high compassion is that which one practices by setting the whole of one's self in harmony with the ends of reality, and by compelling others too to move towards those ends, and a kind heart makes itself truly and seriously kind only through an ever broader and deeper understanding."[2]

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.

Practically all the production of the years between 1886 and 1892 is concerned with one aspect or another of the history of Naples. Through his researches on the Neapolitan theatres, on Neapolitan life in the eighteenth century, and on the literature of the seventeenth century, he acquired an intimate and exhaustive knowledge of the minutest literary, political, social and archæological details of that life of his own city, which was the immediate historical background of his own life. Towards the end of this period, this complex activity crystallized itself into two rather ambitious enterprises: the editing of a Biblioteca letteraria napoletana, for the publication of texts and documents of Neapolitan literature; and of a periodical, Napoli Nobilissima, which in the fifteen years of its existence collected an enormous amount of material for the history and archæology of Naples, and to which Croce himself contributed the essays of his Storie e leggende napoletane.

We have here a Croce, who, though not a professor, was yet truly a specialist: one of that great host of local and municipal historians which are to be met with in even the least important Italian towns. And undoubtedly this kind of activity offered him, as he willingly acknowledges, not only an outlet for his youthful imagination, in the reconstruction 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.

He visited, always as a scholar, not only Spain, but France and England and Germany, constantly widening the range of his excursions in libraries and archives. But the more he acquired of the knowledge of individual facts, the deeper he felt the futility and vacuity of their purely material accumulation. There was no end, apparently, to the labor of research and erudition, unless a guiding and limiting principle should be found: by the mere piling up of historical information, however minute and exact, it would be forever impossible to decipher the secret of the past. No amount of erudition would ever make history. It is no wonder that to a mind which already had been preoccupied with religious and moral problems, the problem of its own work should present itself with the same intensity and in the same shape as a moral experience. He began to feel a satiety and distaste for that which he had once thought would be the labour of his whole life, and a yearning for a more satisfying, more intimate form of activity. He felt a vague attraction towards a new type of history, moral history, in relation to which all his previous researches appeared as a kind of amorphous and unconscious preparation. He planned a book on the psychological and spiritual history of Italy from the Renaissance to our own times, and he undertook a series of studies on the relations between Spain and Italy, to be followed by similar work in regard to the other nations of Europe, as necessary to a full understanding of his main theme.

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.

The problem which he had to solve for himself was, indeed, not an historical, or philological, or archæological one, but a purely philosophical one: the problem of the nature of history and of science. We know with what religious awe Croce regarded the professional philosophers at the time; and certainly nothing could have been more painful to the young and modest scholar than the thought of stepping beyond the limits of his own specialty, and invading a ground so powerfully occupied and defended. But Croce discovered through his own experience that you cannot reject a problem, once it is forced upon you by the facts of your own life, and that philosophus fit with the same kind of necessity with which poeta nascitur. It is from this point that we can observe the transformation of the young scholar into a philosopher; his philosophical career will appear to us as a continued effort towards the solution of that first problem, and of all the problems which followed in its train. The last answer to it is in Croce's theory of the identity of history and philosophy; and the dependence of this theory on the first impulse from which the whole of his philosophy arose is clearly visible in the desire which he has again and again expressed and partly fulfilled in his latest writings, of going back from abstract and formal philosophy to the philosophy of particular facts or history: storia pensata; "since this is the meaning of the identity of philosophy and history, that we philosophize whenever we think, whatever may be the subject or form of our thought."[3] The philosophy of Croce, which begins with the raw material of history, presenting itself as a dense, impenetrable mass, ends in a new conception of history, which is permeated in all its parts by the vivifying breath of thought.

I may add here, since it will be very hard to 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 (which in Italy is a life-office) 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.

II. Early Environment

Benedetto Croce was thirty-four years old in nineteen hundred: his education (if it is possible to set a term to the education of a philosopher) is therefore the work of the last quarter of the 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 (the Roman idea, the Christian idea, the main principles, æsthetic and moral, of the Renaissance), 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 Encyclopédie 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 faults of Italian culture during this period are therefore the faults of the other European cultures which Italy had to assimilate: at a time when Italy was most in need of cultural help from without, she found that, for reasons infinitely complex and totally different from those which had caused her own exhaustion, the other nations of Europe were also spiritually exhausted. And yet it cannot be said that from these very faults Italy did not draw some useful lessons. The so-called historical method, which completely disregarded the great forces of history, and made of the least significant historical datum a Ding an sich in which the mind of the scholar seemed to find its ultimate object, proved in the end to be a salutary discipline as against the facile and enthusiastic generalizations of the historians of the Risorgimento. Positivism, however barbarous and uncouth in itself, was a powerful weapon for the destruction of the last remnants of a more or less mythological metaphysics, and in that sense it afforded an example of intellectual honesty; and at the same time it awakened the consciousness of the continuity of natural and spiritual life, announcing, though in a hasty and imperfect synthesis, what every philosophy of the future will have to be. And about the middle of the period which we are now considering, the only real contribution of Germany to European thought in the second half of the century became known in Italy with the advent of Marxism, in which we found a new conception of history, in so far adequate to the true spirit and conditions of the times, as it afforded to blind social forces, striving for political expression, an interpretation of their needs and a rationalized programme of action.

The analogies between this general cultural 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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic 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 mediæval 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, Giosuè 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.

Francesco de Sanctis was not a philosopher in the strict meaning of the word; yet, among all the European critics of the nineteenth century, he is the only one from whose works it is possible to derive a consistent line of æsthetical thought. His education had been partly philosophical, of old Italian and modern German philosophy; and partly grammatical and rhetorical, in those literary doctrines of the old school which embodied a secular experience, and in comparison with which the modern science of literature is ineffably shallow and puerile. It was through a philosophical elaboration of those doctrines, and through a criticism of the intellectualistic æsthetics of Hegel and his followers, for whom art was the sensuous clothing of the concept, that De Sanctis, guided by an unerring taste and by a unique power for discerning the essential and vital element in poetry, came to his conception of form as not an a priori, a thing by itself and different from the content, but something that is generated by the content itself when active in the mind of the artist. This is the principle which he had constantly in mind in approaching the concrete works of poetry, and which enabled him to analyze and reproduce the terms of the spiritual experiences of which they are an expression. Thus his Essays and his History of Italian Literature, though in a sense the purest and most genuine kind of literary criticism, are at the same time a complete spiritual history of a people, as it reveals itself in its literary manifestations, such as no other country possesses. The immediate influence of his work was not as great as it ought to have been: the generation of philologists who immediately followed him was unable to see in him more than a brilliant exponent of what was then contemptuously called æsthetic criticism, and could never forgive him for his apparent lack of method, due to the circumstances of his life as an exile and a politician. It was only unwittingly, and through the intermediary of a German disciple of De Sanctis, Gaspary, who wrote a standard handbook of Italian literature, that they came to accept the greatest part of his interpretations, and followed the main directions of his thought in their own researches.

Giosuè Carducci was a disciple of Parini and Alfieri, of Foscolo and Leopardi, and in a sense of all that lineage of Italian poets, beginning with Dante and Petrarch, for whom poetry was not less an arduous discipline for the attainment of a certain standard of formal beauty, set down once and forever by the poets of the classical tradition, than a moral and political function in the life of the nation. As his predecessors had been, he was not only a poet, but also a student and historian of literature, of literature as the only field in which that life had truly realized itself. But though his contributions to the study of Italian literature were many and important, and the knowledge and taste which were the instruments of his art made of him an exquisite critic of poetry, yet what even in his historical and critical prose attracts us most is his lyrical imagination, his poetry. And his poetry, on the other hand, is mainly the poetry of the history and of the historical and poetical landscape of Italy,—of an Italy which was to him not merely one among the nations of Europe, but the heir of Greece and of Rome, the cradle of western civilization; not a land and a community limited in space and in time, or not that only, but an ideal of beauty, of freedom, of right, of a full and harmonious life, which was Italian, as it had been Greek and Roman, because it was universally human. In his early works, the contrast between this ideal and the actual conditions of Italy in his times found expression in a strain of invective and satire, from which the poet lifted but rarely his soul to the contemplation of the great deeds and thoughts of the past; of a past which in some cases was very recent, as some of the men of the French Revolution and of the Risorgimento were among his favourite heroes. But later, and especially in his Odi Barbare, for which he adapted a new technique from the metres of ancient Greece, while he added many personal notes to his lyre, his historical inspiration became higher and deeper and purer, and Italy had in his poetry that which she had lacked in all the course of her literature, a true epos, though in a lyrical form, of her secular life, from the fabulous kings and priests of Etruria to that most legendary of all her heroes, Garibaldi.

The influence of Carducci, not a purely literary, but a moral and political one, on the generation to which Croce belongs, can hardly be overestimated; and Croce himself calls his own generation carducciana And the two other great poets that Italy has produced after him, D'Annunzio and Pascoli, were both disciples of Carducci at the beginning of their careers. But the formation of their personalities, so widely divergent in their later developments, is contemporaneous with what we have called the education of Croce, and therefore outside the scope of this rapid review of the circumstances under which that education took place. The growth of the erotic-heroic poetry of D'Annunzio and that of the idyllic-humanitarian poetry of Pascoli are no longer among those circumstances but rather products of the same environment.

III. The Origins of His Thought

There are philosophers for whom it is possible, and relatively easy, to trace the roots of their 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," (he tells us in his autobiographical notes), "that they, as specialists, should possess that abstruse science, of whose sacred curtain I had hardly lifted a few folds, and I did not know that in a few years I should with wonder and irritation discover that most of them did not possess anything, not even that very little which I, merely by my good will to understand, had succeeded in acquiring."[4] 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.

But this intimate and vital contact with the past never leads him to that attitude of reaction, which our forefathers typified in the laudator temporis acti, and which even to-day is so abundantly exemplified by the scholar who, having laboriously climbed the heights of the thought of one man or of one epoch, feels himself in the possession of final truth, and smiles contemptuously on the childishness of the moderns. He is as much on his guard against the idols of the school as against the idols of the market place. His relation to the great thinkers of the past is not one of blind discipleship, but of critical collaboration. The favourite process of his own thought might be defined as one of historical integration.

By emphasizing one aspect or another of Croce's philosophy, it is possible, however, to connect him more particularly with one or another philosopher. The name that is most frequently pronounced in this connection is that of Hegel, probably because Hegel stands, in the mind of the positivist and of the pragmatist, for a certain type of thought, much more ancient than Hegel himself and practically coextensive with the history of philosophy, rather than for what Hegelianism actually is. The facile critic of Croce, who condemns and rejects him as a Hegelian, would probably find it very hard to define the actual points of contact between the two thinkers; but we know that the word "Hegelian" is more a term of abuse, in such cases, than the expression of a critical judgment. Croce himself has defined his attitude towards Hegel, and generally towards the philosophers of the past, in the conclusion of his examination of Hegel's thought: "I am, and I believe one has to be, Hegelian; but in the same sense in which any man who to-day has a philosophical mind and culture, is and feels himself, at the same time, Eleatic, Heraclitean, Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Sceptic, Neoplatonic, Christian, Buddhist, Cartesian, Spinozian, Leibnitzian, Vichian, Kantian, and so on. That is, in the sense that no thinker, and no historical movement of thought, can have passed without fruit, without leaving behind an element of truth, which is an either conscious or unconscious part of living and modern thought. A Hegelian, in the meaning of a servile and bigoted follower, professing to accept every word of the master, or of a religious sectarian, who considers dissension as a sin, no sane person wants to be, and no more I. Hegel has discovered, as others have done, one phase of truth; and this phase one has to recognize and defend: this is all. If this shall not take place now, it matters little. 'The Idea is not in haste,' as Hegel was wont to say. To the same content of truth we shall come, some day, through a different road, and, if we shall not have availed ourselves of his direct help, looking back on the history of thought we shall have to proclaim him, with many an expression of wonder, a forerunner."[5]

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 mediæval theology, in direct relation with the mediæval 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 mediæval 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 mediæval 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 mediæval 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.

Both in Bruno and Campanella, inert remnants of the ancient and mediæval logic are still part of the structure in which their new intuitions try to express themselves; but such remnants are to be met with even in much later philosophers, and constantly reappear, as blind spots in the active process of thought, in the whole history of European philosophy down to our days. What is significant of each thinker, what marks him as the legitimate interpreter of the deepest spiritual life of his times, is not his system as a whole, but the particular new intuition on which in each case the system is founded: in Bruno, the conception of an infinite universe, and of the infinite life of God in the universe; in Campanella, the affirmation of the value of human experience and human consciousness, to which God is present per tactum intrinsecum, intrinsically, and in which knowing and being coincide.

The two main directions of modern thought, or rather of all human thought, are thus represented in the naturalism of Bruno and in the spiritualism of Campanella, at the conclusion of the Renaissance, respectively prefiguring the pantheism of Spinoza and the rationalism of Descartes, that is, the two systems through which similar conceptions became active and effective in all subsequent developments of European philosophy. And it is useful to recall 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.

In Bruno and Campanella we find an interest in certain problems of thought, which we may call either religious or, more technically, ontological: the problems of the relations of being and knowing. In Vico, who is infinitely nearer to Croce in intellectual temper, the centre of interest is shifted. Vico is apparently satisfied with Catholicism as a religion; and he spends all his efforts in creating a philosophy out of the purely humanistic and historical side of Renaissance culture. And yet, long before Kant's Prolegomena, he foresees the necessity of the new metaphysics being the metaphysics, as he says, of human ideas, and his theory of knowledge is founded on a principle which bears an external resemblance to certain aspects of pragmatism, but is in reality of a quite different, and much deeper, character: that of the interchangeability of the factum with the verum, of that which we make with that which we know. It was a commonplace of the schools that perfect science is to be found in God only who is the author of all things: Vico transfers this logical formula from God to man, and applies it, in the first stage of his thought, to mathematics, which appears to him as of man's own making, in a narrow and abstract sense, and later to the whole world of history and human thought and action, which, in a much truer and broader sense, is made by man.

Vico was brought to this second and final form of his theory of knowledge by his studies on the history of law, of religion, of language and poetry: his 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 (though this aspect is undoubtedly also present in his mind), but rather, through "the unity of the human spirit that informs and gives life to this world of nations," of an ideal and eternal history of mankind, a philosophy of the human mind.

A contemporary and an antagonist of Descartes, Vico is one of the last among European philosophers to embrace practically the whole range of contemporary culture. But while Descartes lays the foundations of his theory of knowledge on the certainty of mathematical method, mistrusting the imperfection and vagueness of any other form of science, Vico is enabled by his intimate contact with rhetoric and history, with that philology which had been the soul of the intellectual life of the Renaissance, and which through the erudition of his century was preparing the historical consciousness of the following one, to anticipate the general principles of idealistic philosophy and, on the theories of art, of language, of law, of religion, as well as on a large number of particular historical problems, the general development of subsequent European thought.

At a later stage in our exposition, we shall examine in greater detail the indebtedness of Croce to Vico, especially as regards the theory of art and language; but the similarities of circumstance and of temperament between the two philosophers are already apparent. Both Vico and Croce came to philosophy through erudition and philology; and in Croce as well as in Vico, the fundamental philosophic attitude, their theory of knowledge, their idealism (what in the case of Croce has been called his Hegelism), is the intrinsic and necessary logic of the same humanistic tradition, the natural outcome of the centering of their intellectual interests on the history of the human spirit rather than on the mathematical or natural sciences. It is only after Descartes and Vico, and through the independent progress of scientific thought in the last two centuries (during the Renaissance, science is constantly in contact with philology, and there is no scientist who is not also a humanist)—that the two divergent attitudes of mind which we have seen exemplified in Bruno and Campanella, naturalism and spiritualism, are finally divorced from each other, and respectively linked with the scientific or with the historical aspect of modern European culture. Rationalism, intellectualism, positivism, pragmatism, on one side, are the more and more rarefied logics of science, in its progressive estrangement from the humanities; and because of the increasing prestige of scientific thought, we see them making constant inroads even in the fields of the historical and philological disciplines. Idealism, on the other side, represents in its many forms the central tradition of European culture, and is heir to the religious thought of the Middle Ages as well as to the humanism of the Renaissance; but in many of its exponents, and to my mind, even in some aspects of Croce's philosophy, it suffers from that same condition of things which is the cause of the poverty and narrowness of the so-called scientific philosophies: from that inability to grasp both nature and the spirit of man, the world of science and the world of history, which is a characteristic of our times. The recurrence of the realistic position, after every great affirmation of idealistic philosophy, is certainly not the mere recurrence of error, the obstinate permanence of human folly after the pronouncements of wisdom, but rather the restatement of a logical exigency which cannot be entirely satisfied and disposed of by any of the idealistic solutions of the problem of reality. Idealism and realism in modern philosophy are two distinct and divergent elaborations of different fields of modern culture: that unity of the intellectual vision, which is perfect, within its accepted limitations, in mediæval philosophy, and which is never entirely lost sight of in the thought of the Renaissance, is the goal towards which both realism and idealism continually tend, but which will not be reached by either, until the disiecta membra of our intellectual consciousness will be brought together through a higher synthesis than the one from which they fell apart at the end of the Renaissance.

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

(1893-1899)

I. HISTORY AS ART

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

Croce's first philosophical essay is a short memoir, La Storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell' Arte, which he read to the Accademia Pontaniana of Naples in March, 1893. In his autobiographical notes, Croce tells us that this memoir was sketched by him one evening in February or March of the same year, "after a whole day of intense meditation."[1] But the reader cannot help feeling that those few pages are very far from being an improvisation; and this, not only because of the ease with which the author finds his way among the literature of his subject, but especially because one realizes that only a discipline so constant and so severe as to become a kind of second nature could give him that sure grasp of the essentials of his problem, which he shows from the very beginning of his speculation. The majority of historians and philologists, when they turn their attention to what Croce calls the logic of their discipline, are apt to trust themselves exclusively to their immediate experience of their work, and to disregard the very obvious fact that an inquiry into the general principles of a certain branch of knowledge is, and cannot be anything but, philosophy: they are therefore either unwilling or unable to follow the implications of that logic on to their ultimate consequences, as this operation would inevitably lead them away from their own safe and solid ground into a discussion of unfamiliar concepts and ideas. They seem to perceive but dimly that the problems of that logic have been intimately connected with the whole development of philosophical thought from the Sophists to our day; and therefore even when they go back to philosophical authorities in their treatment of these problems, when they quote Plato or Aristotle, or Leibnitz or Hegel, they are content with mere fragments, arbitrarily understood, unconnected with the general body of thought from which they derive their meaning. The result is, at best, a futile rediscovery of truths and truisms which have their place in the history of thought, but are meaningless in their modern context. An examination of the greatest part of the methodological literature of the last fifty years, both in Europe and in America, would easily bear out this contention: that it is hard to find a more shallow and imcompetent philosophy than that of the average historian and critic.

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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic 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 æsthetics is already virtually present in these few pages about art and the Beautiful.

"Art is an activity aiming at the production of the Beautiful."[2] A purely psychological doctrine of æsthetics, which considers not art as an activity, but the objects of art as a collection of stimuli, a doctrine of æsthetic appreciation rather than of æsthetic creation, of the land that has flourished in Germany and in England during the last twenty years, especially in the field of the graphic and plastic arts, will therefore be incapable of even grasping that which is the specific subject of æsthetics. But Croce does not lose his time in attacking the psychologists. The error of their ways has its philosophical expression in Sensualism and in Formalism, which he summarily dismisses together with Rationalism or Abstract Idealism: the Beautiful as pleasure, the Beautiful as a system of formal relations, the Beautiful as abstractly one with the Good and the True. The fourth solution of the problem of the Beautiful, which he accepts, is that of the Concrete Idealism of Hegel and Hartmann: the Beautiful as expression, as the sensuous manifestation of the ideal. But Croce was guided by his Latin moderation (and probably also helped by his, at the time, insufficient understanding of German Idealism) to give to this formula not the intellectualistic interpretation which rightly belongs to it, but the very simple meaning of an adequate and efficacious representation of reality. The difference between this conception of Art—as an activity aiming at the representation of reality—and the one that we shall find in Croce's later elaborations of his æsthetic theory, does not lie in the conception itself, but in its context of general thought. Here he is still working under the common-sense assumption of a double reality, of being and of thought, and this explains why he still speaks of form and content, and why he still admits of a category of Beauty of nature side by side with artistic Beauty. Later, the relation between form and content will transform itself into that of the æsthetic activity with the other forms of spiritual activity; but even such a momentous change in the foundations of his theory does but slightly impair the substantial truth of the words in which he first expressed it: "An object is either beautiful or ugly according to the category through which we perceive it. Art is a category of apperception, and in art, the whole of natural and human reality—which is either beautiful or ugly according to its various aspects—becomes beautiful because it is perceived as reality in general, which we want to see fully expressed. Every character, or action, or object, entering into the world of art, loses, artistically speaking, the qualifications it has in real life, and is judged only inasmuch as art represents it with more or less perfection. Caliban is a monster in reality, but no longer a monster as an artistic creation."[3] As to natural Beauty, Croce observes that it is not inanimate, as Hegel and his followers would have it, but animated by the spirit of the beholder, and its contemplation is therefore a kind of artistic creation:[4] but this observation, in which the later doctrine is present in germ, is set forth timidly in a note, and remains for the moment sterile and as if incapable able of yielding its obvious logical results. If it were admitted that history is a representation of reality, its inclusion in the concept of art would be obvious. But the adverse contention is that history is a scientific study of reality, or to use Bernheim's definition, the science of the development of men in their activity as social beings. Croce's answer is that history is not a science, because history is constantly concerned with the exposition of particular facts, and not with the formation of concepts, which is the proper sphere of science. There may be a science or philosophy of history, investigating the philosophical problems connected with the facts of history, but such a science or philosophy, which cannot be distinguished as a separate organism from the philosophy of reality as a whole, is not history. History does not elaborate concepts, but reproduces reality in its concreteness: it is therefore not science but art.

Sociology, on the other hand, which renounces the concreteness of history in the quest for the general laws of human development, is neither art nor science. When compared with the concepts or laws of science, the laws of sociology appear as vague and empty generalizations, and sometimes as mere pseudo-scientific enunciations of contemporary social and political ideologies. The sociology which Croce had in mind in his criticism was, in substance, because of the fallacy of its logical premises, either inferior science or poor philosophy; but because of the 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 æsthetics 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."[5]

This distinction is the old Platonic one between logos and mythos; a distinction that appears in one form or another in practically every system of philosophy, but the true import of which has never been completely grasped before Vico. From Vico Croce quotes in this connection the following passage: "Metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, the poetical faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses; metaphysics lifts itself above the universal, the poetical faculty must plunge itself in the particulars."[6] This quotation shows how decisive was Vico's influence in the determination of the main theses of Croce's æsthetics: of which we already find here the three fundamental ones, that is, the recognition of art, or the æsthetic activity, as one of the fundamental forms of knowledge; the distinction of the æsthetic activity from, and its opposition to, the logical activity; and, finally, the exclusion of any other form of knowledge besides the æsthetic and the logical, which exhausts the whole of man's theoretical activity.

The rest of this particular discussion is not as fruitful or as interesting. Having included history in the concept of art, Croce proceeds to draw a distinction between art in the strict sense, which is a representation of imaginary or merely possible reality, and history, which represents that portion of reality which has actually happened. His final definition of history is: "That kind of artistic production the object of which is to represent that which has really happened."[7] The value of this definition is what we might call a value of reaction against the pseudo-scientific sociology of his day: it consists in the emphasis laid on the concreteness and individuality of historical processes, against the void schematism of general laws. But by introducing the distinction between the possible and the real, Croce had in fact recognized the presence of a conceptual element in history—a conceptual element totally different from the concepts of the sciences, which were all that he could then see outside the æsthetic activity in human knowledge. In a preface to a reprint of his early philosophical essays, written twenty-five years later, Croce explained the conditions which prevented him from perceiving the new problem at once, in a page of admirable self-criticism: "Why did I not perceive it? Because I was full of the first truth which I had found, and for the moment I did not feel any other need: I had violently rejected the weight of sensism and sociologism, and I could breathe. And in my culture at that time the impulses towards that other need were lacking; because neither my scholastic logic nor Labriola's Herbartism opened my mind to a distinction between the concepts of the sciences and the speculative concept; and De Sanctis, entirely given to the criticism of poetry, gave little attention to logical problems. The authority of my first masters of philosophy induced me, in regard to the problems which I had not experienced in myself, to content myself with temporary formulas and solutions, which attracted me through some aspects of truth, and to be satisfied with an imagination of the Ideal above the real, and of the world of Concepts above the world of representations. By this separation, by this collocation in the Empyrean, it seemed to me that I could better attest my reverence for concepts and ideals, which positivists and evolutionists were dragging in the mud, or lowering to the status of superstitions and hallucinations. Now, running again through my pages, it is not possible for me to think those transcendental doctrines again, not because I thought them in the past, and what is past is past, but, on the contrary, because I did not truly think them even then, but only received them or imagined them, so that what I can think now is only the way in which, then, I was brought to imagine them, and to believe that I thought them."[8]

II. ON LITERARY CRITICISM

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

At the end of the following year (1894), Croce interrupted again the steady flow of his erudite production with the publication of a little book, La Critica Letteraria: questioni teoriche, which was the outcome of a discussion he had had during the summer with a friend, a professor of philosophy. As the net result of his first philosophical effort had been the conquest of a clearer conception of art, it was natural that he should proceed to investigate the relations between history and the subject-matter of history in that field in which he felt he had already been able to find some light. The general problem of the nature of history, of which he had seen but one aspect, was set aside for the moment, giving way to a close examination of the methods of historical thought in the study of literature.