itself every fact, every thought, all doing and all thinking, for they are one.

This notion is developed in the three hundred and odd pages of the Historiography. But here in the actual writing of his book, Croce shows how widely he differs from Gentile and the school of Absolutists proceeding from him and headed by De Ruggiero. Croce says somewhere that he is essentially a methodologist, and it is largely in Croce's sureness of vision, in his sense for what is in its place morally, æsthetically or logically, that the world as a living whole will find its advantage. For Croce the Spirit consists of certain eternal categories, of which History is one of these and is identical with philosophy: "Spirit which is the world is the Spirit which develops, and is therefore both one and diverse, an eternal solution and an eternal problem: philosophy is its self-consciousness, which is its history, or history which is its philosophy, each substantially identical with the other; consciousness is identical with self-consciousness, that is to say, both distinct from and one with it, as life and thought." He goes on to say that we are able to recognize ourselves in the thoughts of other men, which are also our thoughts.

What is the difference between contemporary and past history. Croce replies to this with one of his celebrated paradoxes involving the discovery of a truth by declaring simply that all history is contemporary history. He does not arrive at this position without a good deal of hatchet work in the brushwood of myth and allegory, and an exhaustive treatment of chronicle, which is defined as temporarily dead history. History is dead until it is lived again in thought, and every history becomes chronicle until it is revived in the historian's mind. This distinction is a formal distinction, that is to say, truly real. The opposite of what most of us were taught at college is the case: history comes first, then chronicle first the living being, then the corpse, which can be breathed upon by the Spirit and again filled with the

breath of life—with the life of history which is also the life of philosophy, since philosophy conditions the history of philosophy. For although philosophy always appears as the necessary antecedent of the history of philosophy, it must also always be understood as knowledge of the history of philosophy, since, as Gentile says, it must prepare and condition actual philosophy. He also meets the objection that we are here in the presence of a vicious circle, with the remark that closer reflection shows that this circle is not vicious, but as Rosmini, following Zabarella (of the XVth century), declared of others like it, solid. From this identity of philosophy and history, it is clear that we cannot distinguish between a historical and a systematic treatment of philosophy.

I remarked a little way back that Gentile had been the instigator of the views as to the identity of History and Philosophy expounded in this volume. But although this is perfectly true in general, yet Croce maintains that philosophy is the methodology of history, since it furnishes the explanation for the categories which constitute historical judgments, and is always in proportion to the philosophical capacity of the historian. It is to be understood that what is fundamental historically is not subject to chronological process. Gentile suggests that Croce does not himself altogether escape transcendentalism, for although he maintains that there is no fundamental or general philosophical problem, yet he himself cannot avoid distinguishing a secondary and episodic part from a principal and fundamental part (as in Nuovi Saggi, p. 104). Croce would certainly reply to this that such a distinction as he there makes has merely an episodic or didactic value. Gentile insists that the unity which forms the basis of philosophy and of history is philosophy and not historiography, the universal and not the, particular, in which the intellectual activity manifests itself. For Croce they would be convertible, for Gentile there is primacy of philosophy. Gentile talks of the real unity underlying the apparent

distinctions in the development of the concept of art as described by Croce. He holds that Croce's concept of art is developing as he criticizes the various distinctions, and that this development is the only problem of æsthetic, analogous to the only problem of philosophy in general.

II.

A great part of the Historiography is, as I have said, hatchet work among the brushwood. Thus of the philologists he remarks epigrammatically that they ingenuously believe themselves to have locked up History in their archives, like Scheherazade of the Arabian Nights Entertainment, and that they are really writing history when they pour the contents of one book into another. With the intention of defending their fortress, they have created an atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty in their conclusions, which they ingenuously believe to be for that reason peculiarly wise and satisfying. But this fear of pushing criticism as far as it will go in the search for truth is really lack of intelligence disguised as moderation which "chips off the edges from the antitheses which it fails to solve." Thought should always and everywhere be audacious; it should never fear itself.

Is this agnosticism of philological history remedied by grading subjects according to the criterion of values? Croce says, No, since history is always a history of values, and thus of thought, independent of and indifferent to feeling, which is essential in the sphere of poetry. But the personal element in this shape of feeling must be banished from true history. Not so, however, that imagination which is inseparable from the historical synthesis, the imagination of thought active with itself in determining a given concrete situation. In the search for historical truth all those feelings that may have been upsurging in our breasts but a short time before, must vanish before the light of truth attained by the historical judgment.

Is there anything to be said in favour of writers such as

Buckle and the Positivists, who wish to make history what they call scientific, a thing of weights and measures, or as they term it, of observation and experiment? No, for they would reduce history to its pale derivative, natural science. History being eternally contemporary, will yet eternally fail to satisfy us, because, as we construct it, new facts, a new situation, is elicited by our very treatment, asking a new solution.

With this refutation of the possibility of natural scientific history may be coupled the refutation of philological and poetical history. None of these forms can be destroyed, because they are errors, and therefore not facts. They are negative moments of the spirit in its dialectic. Error is not an evil, but an Ariel breathing everywhere and inciting to its own death, from which comes forth another error perhaps, yet even more beautiful and stimulating than the one that has given it birth and has by it been slain. The best example of this eternal formation of truth from error is our own personal history when dealing with historical material. We feel our sympathies and antipathies aroused by the narrative and by the behaviour of the different personages that cross and recross the scene: this is the poetical moment, which may be followed by a rhetorical moment reflecting our own practical tendencies; then may ensue a philological moment, if we are inclined to dwell upon the accuracy or the reverse of narrative. All these forms are in time superseded, and having done this, we reach "a new and more profound historical truth.”

An excellent example of the fruitfulness of hypercriticism is the application of it to the notion of a Universal History. Such a history would eventually lead to the madhouse, for were we to imagine all possible historical questions answered, others infinite would arise from these and we should enter upon a vertiginous path of progress to the infinite, which is "as wide as the road to hell, and if it does not lead there, certainly does lead to the madhouse." So we come back to the concrete, to that concentration upon one vital point which offers a definite

problem for solution and is contemporary history, whether it occurred to-day, last year, or prior to the birth of Buddha.

As regards the philosophical universal in its distinction from the above use of the term in ordinary parlance, history must be regarded as thought, thought of the universal in its concreteness, which is always determined in a particular manner. The notions of subject and predicate which appear in the historical judgment must give way to the notion of thought, in which “the true subject of history becomes the predicate and the true predicate the subject," the universal is determined in the judgment by individualization. Thus is destroyed the false dualism of truths of reason (philosophy) and of fact (history), contained in the distinction between knowing and understanding, supposed to occupy separate compartments of the mind, as though one should be able to know without understanding, or inversely. Thus is abolished the notion of universal history, and with it that of universal philosophy, in the sense of a closed system.

III.

Deterministic history is at first sight opposed to the so-called philosophy of history, but they are found inevitably to call forth one another, because the determinist must stop somewhere in his search for causes in order to make a beginning. This beginning is transcendental, whether it be found in the interplay of atoms or in the Unconscious or elsewhere. Call them what we will, they are conceived as external to the spirit, which is helpless before these apparently opaque entities. But what are these entities called facts which have incurred the displeasure of the philosophers from Aristotle to Kant? The answer is that as facts they do not exist at all. It is the spirit which makes the external facts in its search for causes, thus employing a procedure not different from that of natural science which analyses and classifies reality abstractly.

see?

Let us look these brute facts in the face and what do we

We see "the light of thought resplendent upon their