an historical discoverer and the revolutions of the natural sciences
are steps in the progress of historical knowledge. The difference in
method between history and the natural sciences is not due to the
supposed difference between a higher and a lower reality (spirit and
nature), or to the fact that nature has no history; nature is perpetual
activity and change, that is, history, as much as the spirit, but the
progress of nature is less clearly perceptible and less interesting
to us than that of the human reality, and, therefore, an abbreviated
transcription is more apt to satisfy our needs in relation to the
knowledge of what we call nature than to that of the spirit. The
nature that has no history, and which is opposed in dualistic systems
of philosophy to the spirit of man, is not the actual, historical
reality of nature, but the empirical concepts of the natural sciences,
their classes, types and laws, conceived as an objective reality and
substituted for that reality. In this sense, nature is not a special
object, but only a method of treatment, as is proved by the fact
that that same method, applied to the so-called higher and spiritual
reality, by such sciences as psychology, sociology, or comparative
philology, creates the same kind of naturalistic categories in the
domain of the spirit. It is of nature in this sense that the idealist
denies the real existence, since the time when Bishop Berkeley
repudiated matter as a mere abstraction. And here again, the scientist
comes to the support of the idealist with his keen awareness of
the pragmatic character of his hypotheses on the ultimate physical
constituents of reality.

It is through this theory of the natural sciences that Croce succeeded
in eliminating naturalistic transcendence from his thought, and,
singularly enough, his first impulse in this direction came to him
from his Ã¦sthetic studies, through his criticism of literary genres,
of grammars, of the particular arts and of rhetorical forms. He saw
how through them "nature" introduces itself, as a construction of the
human spirit, in the pure spiritual world of art; and having denied
its reality in art, he proceeded to discover it everywhere not as
reality, but as an product of abstracting processes. This must not be
interpreted as meaning that the naturalistic method is an illegitimate
hybrid: it has its uses in its proper place, and not less in the
study of mind than in the study of nature. It is only by mistaking
its constructions or fictions for realities, that we can be tempted
to deduce from the natural sciences a philosophy of nature, or from
the applications of the naturalistic method to art and to the history
of man, an Ã¦sthetics or a philosophy of history. But the natural
sciences themselves are not responsible for the errors of philosophical
naturalism. That such errors should not be limited exclusively to
philosophers, but very often appear within the body of sciences like
biology or psychology or sociology, is easily explained by the fact
that no scientist is a pure scientist: but poor philosophy does not
become science simply because it finds place in scientific books.
The quarrel between vitalists and mechanicists, for one instance,
is a philosophical (or historical), not a scientific dispute: and
it reveals itself, ultimately, as the opposition not of conceivable
realities, but merely of different methods in the elaboration of the
historical datum. The coherent and clear-minded biologist is to-day
a mechanicist, not because mechanism is the essence of reality, but
because it is the postulate of his research. The vitalist, on the other
hand, is inevitably brought by the trend of his thought to abandon
science and to become more or less deliberately a philosopher. It is
enough to mention in this connection such names as Driesch or Bergson.

The fictitious or conventional character of mathematics is still
more apparent than that of the natural sciences; and we shall not
add anything to what we have said in the preceding chapter about the
abstract concept, the non-concrete universal, which is the distinctive
process of mathematical thought. The application of the mathematical
processes, through the empirical concepts, to the historical datum,
gives origin to what we have called the judgment of numeration (and
mensuration), and to the mathematical sciences of nature. All that has
been observed of the natural sciences in general is valid for these
also. Their truth is still only the truth of the intuitive, historical
datum of which the empirical concepts are practical elaborations; the
addition of a further practical elaboration, the abstract concept,
can add to their mnemonic or, as it is more often called, technical
efficiency, but not to the value of their original content. This
process, as the purely naturalistic one, can be applied to the human as
well as to the natural reality, but it is evident that its usefulness
decreases in the passage from the one to the other, following the same
standards that apply to the natural sciences in general, those of the
relative perceptibility and importance of the individual happening.
It is at its highest in physics or astronomy, less notable in biology
or economics; practically inexistent in psychology or sociology, the
two sciences that suffer not less from the delusions of misapplied
statistics than from the invasions of cheap philosophy. Croce's theory
of science, as we have already remarked, differs from the generally
accepted methodology of modern science only in its context, which
is usually agnostic in, the pure scientist, while, in Croce, it
consists in the affirmation of the pure concept, or of the autonomy of
philosophy: a proposition with which the scientist qua scientist has no
reason to quarrel. In both cases, the autonomy of scientific thought
is only relative, and the difference of context is a difference in
the determination of its limits. In both cases, scientific thought is
recognised as thoroughly legitimate only within limits. The cry of the
bankruptcy of science, of which we heard so much a few years ago, is as
meaningless for Croce as for the pure scientist; science cannot become
bankrupt except by over-stepping its logical limits, that is, by first
ceasing to be science and becoming the ape of philosophy.

[Footnote 1: See _Logica_, part ii, La filosofia, la storia, etc., pp.
171-269.]

VII. THE THEORY OF ERROR[1]

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

One of the most original developments of Croce's thought--a doctrine
that does not owe its validity only to its connection with the system,
since we can find it adumbrated already in such widely divergent
philosophies as those of Socrates and Thomas Aquinas, of Descartes
and Rosmini, but which in Croce's system acquires a new and wider
meaning--is the theory of the practical origin of theoretical error,
which we shall briefly discuss in this chapter.

From a strictly logical standpoint, every error is mere privation or
negativity, the opposite of the logical value which is truth, and
therefore inexistent outside the moment of opposition. As there are
not two values in Ã¦sthetics, the beautiful and the ugly, but one only,
beauty or expression, of which ugliness or non-expression is merely the
negative aspect, so in logic also there is but one value, thought or
truth, and error is non-thought, that which logically has no being or
reality. There is no thought which is not a thinking of truth.

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

And yet, after we have denied the logical existence of error, we are
still confronted with the mass of positive errors which we can more
or less easily identify in the course of history and in our daily
experience. Positive errors, that is, affirmations of knowing that
which we do not know, are real products of our activity: but since the
theoretical value, truth, is absent from them, they cannot be products
of the theoretical activity. They must therefore be products of the
only other form of spiritual activity, the practical. Ignorance or
obscurity or doubt are not errors; they are the inexhaustible matter to
which the spirit of man is perpetually giving form and reality. To be
aware of one's ignorance is in fact the first stage in the research of
truth, the _initÃ¬um sapientÃ¦_. Thought and truth are affirmation; the
positive error is an affirmation also, which simulates truth. We cannot
think an error, but we can pass from thought to action, by making a
false affirmation, a purely practical affirmation, which consists in
the act of producing sounds to which no thought corresponds, or, which
amounts to the same, only a thought without value, without coherence,
without truth. What we have qualified in its negative aspect as a
theoretical error manifests itself in its positive aspect as an act of
will, directed to a certain end, a practical act, and, as such, having
its own rationality, which is neither logical, nor moral, but purely
economic, consisting in the adequacy of that particular affirmation
to the individual purpose by which it has been prompted. Morality
requires that the thinking spirit should realize itself as truth; and
therefore the economic act which is error, though logically unreal,
though economically useful, finds inevitably its ultimate sanction in a
moral condemnation.

Though this doctrine may appear unfamiliar to the logician, yet we all
constantly depend on it in our analysis of error. We know that error is
due to the passions or interests of men, which cloud the intellect, and
the more an error is foreign to our own ways of thinking, the easier it
is for us to discover the practical motives which help us to explain
it away. That category of errors which goes under the name of national
prejudices, for instance, is transparent in its origins to every man
belonging to a nation other than the one in which a particular set
of such prejudices is commonly accepted. And other categories of
errors, social, professional, religious, and so on, are of the same
kind, affecting only certain classes of men, because of the passions
or interests or traditions which belong to them by reason of their
peculiar practical associations. In the field of politics, or in any
kind of heated discussion, this research of the practical motive is
even pushed to the extreme, and the bad faith of the adversary becomes
an obvious axiom. In such cases, the same passions being active on
both sides, the research of the practical motive is evidently not pure
and disinterested, but is itself moved by a practical motive, and
therefore likely to produce a new error, rather than a clear judgment.
Therefore, though rigorously speaking there is no difference between
the error which is a deliberate lie and that which is due to a more
or less justifiable weakness, and there is no error which is not in
bad faith, which is not due to a deliberate act of will, yet, from
an empirical standpoint we may distinguish between errors in bad and
in good faith, and recommend tolerance and indulgence for the latter
kind. But tolerance is not indifference. Croce went so far, in drawing
the consequences of his doctrine, as to justify the Holy Inquisition;
and in fact all our modern advocates of religious and political
tolerance have really shaken our faith in its methods, but not in its
principle, which is that of the moral responsibility of error. The Holy
Inquisition moreover was bound to clash with the freedom, which is not
the freedom of error but the freedom of truth, because it placed its
faith in a static, extrahuman truth, as against the veritas _filia
temporis_, the truth which is engendered and conditioned by history, by
the peculiar problems and intellectual climate of the age, and which is
the object of our modern faith; and therefore defeated its own end by
striking at the roots of the value for the upholding of which it had
been established.

Passing from the problem of the nature of error to that of the forms
actually assumed by philosophic error, Croce accepts Vico's definition
of error, as an improper combination of ideas, and therefore defines
such forms, by deducing the number of possible improper combinations
from his own conception of the legitimate forms of theoretical
activity. This phenomenology of error is one of the main tasks of
logic, while the refutation of particular philosophical errors is the
task of philosophy as a whole. We shall rapidly survey these general
forms, in which it will be easy for the reader to recognize the logical
(or illogical) structure of many particular errors criticised in the
preceding chapters.

The pure concept can be improperly combined with, or exchanged for,
the pure intuition (art), or the empirical and abstract concept (the
natural and mathematical sciences); or it can be improperly split
in its unity of intuition and concept (_a priori_ synthesis), and
arbitrarily put together again, either as a concept which simulates an
intuition or as an intuition which simulates a concept. Hence the five
fundamental forms of error: Ã¦stheticism, empiricism, mathematicism,
philosophism, and historicism or mythologism. To these must be added
other forms originated from combinations of the preceding ones:
dualism, scepticism, and mysticism.

We have dealt elsewhere with both Ã¦stheticism and empiricism. Of
the first, the most recent form is that which pretends to build a
philosophy of pure intuition or of pure experience, that is, of an
experience which, not being touched by any intellectual category,
is also pure intuition. Empiricism is practically all the current
philosophy of our times, from the positivism of Comte and Spencer
to the more modern types of the so-called philosophic elaboration of
scientific knowledge. Mathematicism is a rarer and more aristocratic
form of error: it does not consist in the application of the
mathematical method to the exposition of philosophical concepts,
which is a mere didactic expedient, more or less convenient, but
insufficient to characterize the quality of the concepts themselves;
its true exponents are those philosophers or mathematicians who
take mathematical fictions, such as the dimensions of space, for
realities, and proceed to speculate on such a foundation. The near
future seems to promise a great extension of this kind of philosophy,
through the prevailing interest in the theory of relativity, which
is fondly supposed to contain the germs of a revolution in thought.
Both empiricism and mathematicism lead to a dualistic conception of
reality, by opposing either the facts of scientific and historical
knowledge, that is, a collection of facts limited in space and time,
to an infinite reality beyond that knowledge, or our actual world of
space and time, to worlds, spaces and times mathematically conceivable,
but of which we have no experience. The passage from this dualism to
spiritualism and other kinds of superstition, which in our times seem
to be so closely associated with certain forms of pseudo-scientific
thought, is of the easiest. The naturalistic experiments by which
we attempt to peer into the mystery of the so-called unknown or
unknowable, hoping to detect the spirit itself as matter, however
subtle or light, and such theories as that of the identity of the
spiritual world with the four-dimensional space, are evidences of this
immediate connection between superstition and science, for which,
obviously, not science is responsible, and not ignorance even, but
a chain of more or less deliberate errors in each case reducible to
definite practical motives. From the point of view of the ethics of
intellect, there is no difference between the frank impostor who is
moved to speculate on other people's feelings only by greed, and the
scientist who makes his science minister to his own private feelings,
and is hardly, if at all, conscious of his fraud.

Of the other two forms of philosophic error, philosophism, consisting
in the abuse of the purely logical element, and therefore in an
usurpation on the part of philosophy against either history or science,
tending to the formation of a philosophy of history and of a philosophy
of nature, is less common now than in times of more active and original
speculation. The most conspicuous examples are to be met with among
Germany's classical thinkers; and we have already hinted at the
connection between one particular logical error, the undue extension
of the dialectic process to the distinctions of the concept, and to
the empirical concept, which is the basis of Hegel's philosophies of
history and nature. Both these sciences attempt an _a priori_ deduction
of the individual and of the empirical, a process which is in itself
absurd and contradictory. They duplicate history and science with a
series of concepts, which, unless they are the same which constitute
history and science (in which case we have history and we have science,
and not a philosophy of history or of nature), are necessarily empty
of any concrete determinations. But though Croce points to philosophy
of history and philosophy of nature as to the two typical instances
of philosophism, yet he is ready to acknowledge that a good deal
of thought that has gone under those names in the past has had a
large influence in moulding many of our historical and philosophical
conceptions, and, in the case of the second one, in helping us to
realize the unity and spirituality of nature, and to recognize in the
history of nature the same principles operating in the history of man.
Croce's idealism, in fact, does not divide nature from the spirit
except in the logical sense which has been made clear in the preceding
chapter; it does not relegate nature in an unknowable sphere beyond
the reach of human minds. It unifies spirit and nature, but _a parte
subjecti_, and not _a parte objecti_, and reduces nature to the spirit,
rather than the spirit to nature; which is the only process that makes
such a unification intelligible and significant.

The last of the five fundamental forms of philosophic error consists
in the arbitrary separation of the subject from its predicate, of
history from philosophy, and in the consequent position of the subject
as predicate, that is, of a mere representation as a concept. This
may sound rather abstruse, but can immediately be made clear by adding
that what Croce has in mind in this definition is the production of
myths. This error he therefore calls either historicism (from the
logical process by which it is produced), or mythologism (from the
form which it commonly assumes). A myth is to him not a mere poetic
or Ã¦sthetic imagination, but necessarily includes an affirmation or
logical judgment. It differs also from allegory, in which the relation
established between a poetic fiction and a concept is always more
or less openly declared to be arbitrary, and the two terms are not
confused with each other. In a myth, on the contrary, the poetic
fiction assumes the actual function of the concept, transforming both
philosophy and history into a fable or legend. Errors of this class
are frequent in every system of philosophy, when the thinker, either
consciously and deliberately, as in the case of Plato, or unwittingly,
as in Kant's _Ding an sich_ or in Schopenhauer's _Will_, fills the
gaps of his real speculation with a mere image. But mythologism is
more generally the form of religious error, since there is no religion
without a logical affirmation embodied in a myth. If myth and religion
coincide, as the distinction between myth and philosophy is that of
error and truth, of a false and a true philosophy, we must conclude
that religion as truth is one with philosophy, or, as Croce expresses
it, that the true religion is philosophy; and this appears to Croce to
be the conclusion of all ancient and modern thought in regard to the
history of religions. Philosophies have sprung up in all times from
the soil of religious thought, and more or less completely resolved in
themselves, and logically clarified, the obscure substance of myth.
This is Croce's clear-cut, unequivocal solution of the problem of the
relations between philosophy and religion: there is no place reserved
anywhere in his system for an either internal or external revelation
other than that perpetual revelation of truth, which is at the same
time history and philosophy.

From the possible combinations of these five fundamental forms
of error, three more complex ones are derived: dualism, when two
contradictory methods, one logically legitimate and the other
illegitimate, or both equally false, are brought together, and
considered to be both philosophically valid; scepticism, when the
mind, in the presence of confusion and error, asserts the mystery of
reality, which is the problem itself, but denies its own power to
deal with it; and finally, mysticism, when even that last semblance
of thought, by which the sceptic affirms that there is a mystery, is
abandoned, and the immediate actuality of life is regarded to be the
only truth. Dualism leads inevitably to the conception of a double
reality, and we have already seen how the whole of Croce's speculation
continually tends towards the logical unification of dualities, as with
spirit and nature, value and fact. Every philosophical problem seems
to present itself to his mind as involved in a dualistic difficulty;
every solution becomes satisfactory to him only when the last shreds
of dualism are eliminated from it. While scepticism is a logical error
(the affirmation of a purely negative position), it contains within
itself one of the essential moments of every progress in thought, the
scepsis, or philosophical doubt, which is the negation of an error,
and therefore the germ of every true affirmation. As for mysticism,
we have dealt with it elsewhere as being one of the untenable aspects
of logical scepticism; we may add that, if it ever obeyed the laws of
internal coherence, we should not even be able to discuss it, since its
only conceivable expression would be an ecstatic silence.

The same character of necessity that invests these forms of the logical
error is present also in the false solutions of other philosophical
problems, and we need only refer the reader to our discussion of
Ã¦sthetic theories. In both cases, not only the number, but also the
logical succession, of the necessary forms of error, depends on the
number of possible arbitrary combinations of the spiritual forms,
or concepts of reality. But infinite, on the other hand, are the
individual forms of error, as infinite are the individual forms of
truth: the problems are always historically conditioned and variable,
and so are also the solutions and the false solutions, determined by
feelings, passions, and interests.

From error to truth, there is no gradual ascent. The passage is
described by Croce as a kind of spiritual conversion: the erring
spirit, fleeing from the light, must convert itself in a researching
spirit, eager for light; pride must yield to humility; the narrow love
for one's abstract individuality, widen and lift itself to an austere
love, to an utter devotion to that which is above the individual,
becoming Bruno's _eroico furore_, Spinoza's _amor Dei intellectualis_.
In this act of love and enthusiasm, the spirit becomes pure thought and
attains the truth, or, rather, transforms itself into truth. And the
possession of truth is at the same time possession of its contrary, of
error transformed into truth; to possess a concept is to possess it in
the fulness of its relations, and therefore to possess, in the same
act, all the ways in which that concept, for instance, of the Ã¦sthetic
activity, is at the same time the concept of hedonism, intellectualism,
empiricism, and so on. The two kinds of knowledge, that of truth and
of its contrary, are inseparable: the concept is at the same time
affirmation and negation.

From this absolute possession of truth, we may distinguish a stage
of research, which is not yet thought, but only the operation of the
practical will creating certain conditions for thought. Seen in the
light of this process, the series of errors through which a mind goes,
when guided by a will to gather its materials and prepare itself to
think, transforms itself into a series of attempts or hypotheses. An
error is an error when there is a will to err; the hypothesis, however,
into which the error is transmuted by the new will is not yet truth,
and becomes truth only in the act of its verification; but it is no
longer an error, because it does not affirm itself as truth, but only
as a means or help for the conquest of truth.

From this double consideration of the nature of error, first, as error
which is conquered and comprehended by truth, and then as attempt or
hypotheses in the service of truth, Croce derives the identification of
the history of error with the history of truth, or philosophy. But not
in the sense in which Hegel had considered the successive apparition of
the various philosophical categories and of the various forms of error,
seeing in them a kind of gradual revelation of his own philosophy. To
Croce such a conception of the progress of philosophy is unacceptable.
Philosophy as an abstract category, as one of the forms of the
spiritual activity, has no origin in time, is not limited to the men we
call philosophers, but acts in every moment of the life of the spirit
on the material offered by history, which it contributes to create, and
does not, therefore, progress any more than the categories of art or of
morality. But it progresses in its concreteness, as art and the whole
of life do; because life is development, and development is progress.
Every affirmation of reality is conditioned by reality and conditions
a new reality, which in its turn is, in its progress, the condition of
a new thought and a new philosophy. In this perpetual cycle, though
individual errors are conquered, no form of error can be definitely
abolished; but they constantly reappear, because of the intrinsic
necessity of their structure, and when they reappear not as wilful
errors, but as attempts and hypotheses, they have their appointed
function in the progress of truth and reality. To this constancy of
error corresponds a constancy of truth: truth is not attained once and
for ever, but is true in the act of its affirmation, and in proportion
to its adequacy to the particular problem, to the individual conditions
of fact, which necessarily include, at every given moment, the whole
history of the past. Thus, from a different angle, Croce's theory of
error reaches the same conclusion as his general theory of logic,
the identity of philosophy and history; and philosophy appears as a
perpetual development, a history that never can repeat itself, since
every affirmation of the truth transforms itself into a new element of
reality, into one of the conditions determining every new problem and
every new solution.

[Footnote 1: See _Logica_, part iii, "Le forme degli errori," etc., pp.
271-421.]

VIII. THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY[1]

Philosophical introspection--Affirmation of the practical activity--The
category of feeling--The theoretical activity as the antecedent of the
practical--Identity of intention and volition--Identity of volition and
action--The practical judgment: philosophy and psychology --The problem
of free will: liberty and necessity--Croce's solution in the context of
his philosophy--The practical value: good and evil--The unreality of
evil, and the function of ideals--The sanction of evil--The volition
and the passions--The empirical individuality--Development and progress.

The reality of the practical activity as distinct from the theoretical
activity, of will as distinct from knowledge, can never be proved
through the naturalistic method of psychology, by merely pointing
to a class of facts--actions--different from another class of
facts--thoughts. The so-called action manifests itself, at a closer
analysis, as infinitely complex and rich in purely theoretical
elements; the so-called thought, as partly at least a work of the
human will. The concrete life of the spirit is always both practical
and theoretical, and the distinction we are looking for is an ideal
distinction, to be ascertained by the method of philosophical, not
psychological, introspection; by the direct witness of consciousness,
and by the deduction of its function in the concept of the spirit,
or of reality, as a whole. The complete affirmation of a form, or
grade, of spiritual activity is the philosophy of that form, and of
its relations with the others; in this case, the philosophy of the
practical, or of will. It is hardly necessary, at this stage of our
exposition, to observe that the philosophy of the practical will not
be practical philosophy, a collection of rules for the attainment of
the useful and the good, any more than the philosophy of art is a
collection of Ã¦sthetic precepts: it will be a purely formal science, a
universal concept, the content of which is the infinite wealth of the
individual determinations of the will, the history of the practical
activity.

In the following chapter we shall deal more particularly with the two
forms of the practical activity, economic and ethic, corresponding
to the two forms of the theoretical, Ã¦sthetic and logic. Here we
shall consider the undifferentiated practical activity, first, in its
relations, and then, in its internal dialectic. The contents of this
chapter are, therefore, intended as applying both to economics and
ethics, to the useful and to the good.

There are two typical forms of scepticism regarding the practical
activity. The first denies that it is a spiritual activity, by
denying that man is conscious of his will, in the process of willing;
consciousness comes only after, and is not consciousness of the will,
but of our representation of the will. Therefore, the will is nature,
and consciousness, or spiritual activity, is only our thought. The
second does not exclude the will from consciousness, but affirms that
there is no real distinction between will and thought. The first
doctrine is evidently founded on a confusion between reflected and
intrinsic consciousness; and maintains something that is always true
of reflected consciousness, not in relation to the will only, but to
every form of spiritual activity; carried to its extreme consequences,
it would banish consciousness from the whole life of human mind, since
every act of consciousness would always be consciousness of something
else, and never of itself. Against this view, Croce insists on the
concept of an intrinsic consciousness, which accompanies every act of
the spirit: the consciousness of the creative artist, for instance,
which is certainly other than that of the critic, but not less real.
The will may be regarded as nature, only when apprehended by the
theoretical activity; as every other act of the spirit becomes nature,
outside its immediate actuality, when consciously reflected upon. The
second form of sceptism, identifying thought and will, cannot maintain
itself in its purity, because of the difficulties involved by the
denial of what seems to be the immediate evidence of consciousness; it,
therefore, qualifies itself by recognizing that the will is thought,
but of a particular kind, thought impressing itself on nature, or
realizing itself in action: which is but an indirect way of admitting
the autonomy of the practical activity.

But do the theoretical and the practical activity exhaust the whole of
the spirit of man? There is at least one more psychological category
which clamours for admission within the precincts of philosophy, that
of feeling or sentiment. For Croce, feeling as a form of spiritual
activity does not exist: the corresponding psychological class covers
a number of heterogeneous facts, which cannot be reduced to a single
concept. Its function in philosophy has always been that of serving
as a temporary term for that which philosophy had not yet hilly
determined and understood; in Ã¦sthetics, for the intuitive character
of art, against the fallacies of hedonism and intellectualism; in the
theory of history for the individual and concrete element of history,
or even for the subjective historical judgment, against positivism
and sociologism; in logic, for the pure concept against the empirical
and abstract. Its function in the philosophy of the practical is of
the same order: feeling or sentiment are among the names by which the
peculiarity of the practical activity first began to be recognized,
being labels for classes of psychological facts in which the moment of
will is more important than that of reason, practice more essential
than theory. But the psychological facts thus classified resolve
themselves ultimately either into acts of knowledge or of will; and
the witness of direct consciousness does not find feeling or sentiment
within itself as a distinct form of spiritual activity. Obviously,
this exclusion does not imply that Croce denies the existence of the
empirical groups of facts gathered in those classes; it means only
that he has reduced those facts to the immediate data of consciousness
of which they consist, and divested them of that mysterious halo, the
halo of ignorance or of deliberate error, with which an appeal to
sentimental reasons is sure to be accompanied when introduced into a
philosophical discussion. When we hear, for instance, that philosophy
and science belong to the sphere of reason, and religion to that of
sentiment, since there is no sentiment which is not either reason or
will, we at once understand that what is meant is that the speaker is
willing to believe, for practical motives, what his reason tells him
to be untrue; and we know also that this error contains, sometimes at
least, an element of truth, which is the affirmation of a truer reason
than the one employed by a certain type of philosophy, by a rationalism
which treats the human spirit as a thing of abstract logic. The error
consists in the putting of one's will in the place of one's reason;
the germinal truth, in the attempt to make one's reason wider, more
comprehensive. It is, therefore, one of those positions in which it is
a sin against the spirit to acquiesce, but which are the beginning of
wisdom in the man of good faith.

The practical activity presupposes the theoretical activity: no
will is conceivable without knowledge, and our will is such as our
knowledge is. But this presupposition is of an ideal and not of a
temporal order: the mind in its concreteness, at every moment of its
life, is both practical and theoretical. The a particular kind of
knowledge which conditions our will is neither the purely intuitive
nor the abstractly logical one, but the historical or perceptive, or
concretely logical knowledge, which is at the same time a knowledge
of things and of the relations of things, constantly changing with
the perpetual development of the world around us, and, therefore,
constantly re-creating and renovating itself as the antecedent of
every particular volition. No other theoretical fact precedes the act
of will: the so-called practical judgments or practical concepts,
which some thinkers consider as a necessary intermediate step between
the historical judgment and the volition, are nothing but classes
of historical judgments relating to volitions in the past, mental
formations similar to the rhetorical categories in the domain of art,
and, therefore, do not really precede but follow the actual volitions.
In the process of willing, the recognition of a certain action as good
or useful, that is, as belonging to one of the practical categories,
and, therefore, desirable, is not an act that precedes the volition,
but is the volition itself. The qualification of an action as useful
or good is not distinguishable from the volition except when it comes
after the action, and is then a reflection on the act itself, not
different in kind from any other historical judgment.

The conclusion to be drawn from these premises is that, in relation to
every particular situation, intention and volition coincide; or, that
what we call intention, the abstract volition, the imaginary volition,
opposed to the concrete and real one, is not a moment of the will
at all, and the only volition is the one that is determined by the
concrete situation, the real and concrete volition. The distinction
between intention and volition has in all times been the fertile
ground for the growth of all kinds of hypocrisy, as it is easy to
connect in one's mind a certain concrete volition, which is evil, with
an imaginary intention of good; and the doctrine that justifies the
means for the sake of the end is but a variety of this process. The
identification of intention and volition is, therefore, not merely a
matter of good logic; it is the necessary foundation of a realistic
doctrine of the will, which cannot will anything but itself, and can
never be abstracted from its real basis, from the actual determinations
of the moment of reality by which it is conditioned.

Once the concrete character of volition has been recognized, there
remains no difficulty in the way of further identifying volition and
action. The relation between the two is analogous to the relation
between intuition and expression in Ã¦sthetics: there is no volition
which is not also an action, and vice versa. Volition and action are
not two distinct phases of one process, but two different ways of
looking at the same reality: the same fact which is, from the point
of view of the spirit, a volition, is, naturalistically speaking, an
action: we are in the presence of one more aspect of the old dualism
of spirit and nature. And here again the duality vanishes when we
observe that there is not a single act of will which does not manifest
itself in a physical movement, however imperceptible, and that on
the other hand there is no physical action, not even the so-called
instinctive or habitual ones, which are not either direct or indirect
products of the will. A That which is independent of the will is not
the action itself, but the success of the action,--what Croce calls a
happening. The volition coincides with the action, which is the work of
the individual, and not with the happening, which is collaboration or
contrast of wills, the work not of the individual, but of the whole. No
action ever realizes itself entirely in the happening, and no action,
however hindered in its realization, is ever entirely without influence
on the happening. The measure of the adequacy of the historical
judgment preceding the action to the particular situation is given in
some degree by the relation between the action and the happening; but
it is impossible, and it is in fact never done, though we may affirm
our inclination to do it, to derive the value of an action, of the
actual, concrete volition, from its success. When we praise a practical
hero for his success, we imply that his success was not accidental,
not a mere happening, but entirely due to acts of his will; if the
praise is misplaced, the error is not in the theory, on which we all
implicitly agree, but in our knowledge and judgment of the facts of his
life. And when we rise from the consideration of purely economical to
that of ethical values, the importance of success gradually diminishes,
because we fix our attention more to the spiritual reality, to the
quality of the individual soul, and less to the material concomitants.
The great majority of mankind's moral heroes would be utter failures
from the standpoint of success, granted that it should be possible to
speak of such a contradiction in terms as moral success, a phrase in
which a true spiritual value, morality, is applied to a mere material
abstraction.

The practical judgment, which is, as we have already seen, nothing
but a particular kind of historical judgment, is a reflection on the
action and not on the happening; and we shall not repeat here what
has been said elsewhere of the relation between fact and value: the
practical value is the action itself, and cannot be deduced or derived
from standards, principles, ideals, which are but combinations of
preÃ«xistent judgments. The practical judgment, economic or moral, is
a philosophical judgment in the sense in which every other judgment
is also philosophical. A philosophy of the practical activity, not
in the technical sense in which we speak of treatises and schools
of philosophy, but in that universal sense in which every man is a
philosopher, as he is a poet, is therefore the necessary condition of
the practical judgment. But this philosophy is fundamentally distinct
from the psychological or naturalistic elaboration of the facts of
the will, though at times it may have been materially connected with
it. A psychologically descriptive science of the practical activity
is, however, as legitimate in its own field as all other natural
sciences; it constitutes a practical rhetoric which has as glorious a
tradition as the rhetoric of literature, from Theophrastus to Spinoza
and Descartes. It creates its classes or types of actions, the value
of which is similar to that of all other empirical concepts, and by
giving them a categorical form, it transforms them into maxims, rules,
and precepts. As long as these types and precepts are taken for what
they are, no harm can come from them; we all make similar formations
as helps to our individual conduct, and find them more than helpful,
necessary. But when they are taken as philosophy, then we have the
usual results of this kind of logical confusion: either the empirical
concepts, under a rigorous analysis, lose their consistency, and types
or rules which were useful instruments for the treatment of particular
problems are discarded for philosophical concepts, which are immaterial
to the discussion, or they are treated as philosophical concepts, and
invested with the character of universality and necessity which belongs
to the latter. Of the first process, we shall give as an example the
man who maintains that war is necessary and eternal; which is true, if
by war we mean the perpetual conflict and struggle which is the life of
reality (a philosophical concept), but which is at least a gratuitous
assertion, when it is said of that particular kind of war which is
waged between state and state, with arms and armies. Of the second, the
moralist who identifies morality with a particular system or set of
precepts, or the philosopher who turns his philosophy into a special
pleading for his cause or party. Turning now from the discussion of
the relations between the practical and the theoretical activity, to
consider the intrinsic problems of the will, and the most complex and
difficult of all, that of the freedom of the will, we shall find that
Croce's solution, though reached by a totally different method, is
very similar to the one offered by Bergson. Both Croce and Bergson
refuse to take sides in the quarrel between free-will and determinism,
but transfer it to a higher or deeper ground where the contrasting
terms acquire more significant, and no longer opposite, meanings.
Bergson accomplishes his abolition of the dilemma through a masterful
psychological analysis of the immediate data of consciousness, Croce
comes to the same result by applying to this problem his logic of the
distinctions of the concept, which we have already seen so often at
work. Every act of the will is determined, in the sense that it is
conditioned by a given situation, and varies with the varying of the
situation; it is free, inasmuch as it is something new and different,
which was not given in the situation, and without which there would
be no change, no growth, no development. Necessity and freedom, which
so often appear as antagonistic views of the same fact, are both
present, though distinct, in the volition, which is the unity of the
two, being at once determined and free. The volition is thus regarded
as a practical _a priori_ synthesis, the autonomous creative act of
the practical mind, as the intuition is the Ã¦sthetic, and the concept
the logical _a priori_ synthesis; the spirit never realizes itself
except by acting, and it never acts except under given conditions of
place and time. But as these conditions are nothing but what we have
called happenings, which in their turn are complex results of single
volitions, the concept of the freedom of the spirit coincides with that
of its activity.

This solution is the one that we were obviously led to expect from
the whole context of Croce's philosophy, a solution in keeping
with his logic and with his general theory of knowledge. A similar
parallelism we can observe in respect to the other solutions of the
problem of the will: determinism is connected with a mechanistic
materialism, as indeterminism with one form or other of mythicism.
The doctrine of the double causality, which admits of a double series
of facts, some subject to a mechanical necessity, others free and
creative--a solution which is probably the most commonly accepted
to-day--corresponds to the logical dualism of nature and spirit. This
last one can be considered as an approximation to the abolition of the
dilemma, as proposed by both Croce and Bergson, when we contrast it
with the strictly deterministic position, though it still preserves
the opposition of fact and value, of experience and philosophy, of
reality and spirit. In the new conception of the will, necessity and
freedom stand in the same relation as all these other dualities in
Croce's system; and the emphasis is laid, as usual, on the second term,
through which only we can understand the first. The agreement between
Croce and Bergson in this particular instance points to a closer
similarity between their respective philosophies than is apparent to
a casual observer. That external reality which seems to confront the
spirit as a separate existence, and which Bergson considers as the
product of a purely mechanical, practical intellect, corresponds to
what Croce defines as the naturalistic, not theoretical, but practical,
elaboration of reality; and in Bergson's intuition and _Ã©lan vital_,
Croce's concept of reality as spiritual activity is mythically
adumbrated.

If activity is freedom, then freedom coincides with the value of
activity. If we use the words good and evil, not with any special
ethical connotation, but as the general terms of practical value and
non-value, good and evil are activity and non-activity, freedom and
absence of freedom. Evil, like all other purely negative values, is
unreal. This does not mean that the actions that we call evil have no
real existence, any more than the unreality of ugliness or falsehood
imply the non-existence of bad poetry or of logical errors; bad poetry
and logical errors have no Ã¦sthetic or logical reality, but they are
products of the practical spirit, directed towards the satisfaction of
practical ends; and every real action, inasmuch as it is an action,
considered in itself as adequate to its particular end, is good. It
is only by substituting to that end another end, that the first end
may appear as evil, and the second as good; but if this substitution
takes place before the action, then the action is inevitably directed
towards the second end, and therefore again, it is not evil, but good.
It is through a psychological delusion that we imagine ourselves in
a position in which we see the good, and yet do the evil: what we do
is that which appears to us as the most desirable end, and therefore
as good. The intention, outside the actual volition, is, as we have
seen, unreal; if it were real, it would realize itself as an action,
and be one with it. The negative practical judgments, whether economic
or ethic, are judgments which affirm the reality of a certain action,
and therefore its value, at the same time comparing that value with a
different one, which has not been realized in that particular instance.
The negative moral judgment usually consists in the affirmation of a
purely economic value contrasted with an ethical value which is absent
from the action which is the subject of the judgment.

The doctrine of the unreality of evil has always been regarded with
deep mistrust by the practical moralist; but that mistrust is utterly
unjustified by the doctrine itself. For practical purposes it may be
convenient to consider life as intrinsically evil, and to oppose to
it a set of ideals, or abstract moral values to which we must strive
to conform our actions; in fact, every one of us is constantly doing
something of the kind, and finding in those ideals a help and an
inspiration. But shall our ideals lose their value when we understand
that they have no separate, transcendent reality? That every action
carries its own value within itself, and that therefore unless we
constantly realize those ideals in our concrete and individual
actions, in every one of our actions, the ideals themselves will be
but empty shadows? Every ideal, however high and comprehensive, is
but an empirical concept derived from a class of actions in which we
have recognised a moral value; moral standards have the same character
as Ã¦sthetic standards, and are useful and active only as long as
we understand their nature. But the creation of moral values is a
constantly renovated, spontaneous, original activity, in the same sense
in which art and poetry are. We can be directed, both in our activity
and in our judgment, by standards and ideals; that is, standards
and ideals may help us to put ourselves in a position practically
favourable to the creation or judgment of Ã¦sthetic or moral values.
But the actual creation, as the actual judgment, takes place, both
in art and morality, so to speak, at the risk of our whole life: it
is a new activity, in a situation which cannot be identical with any
previous situation, and to which no rule will ever give us the key.

While on one hand our sense of responsibility is rather heightened
than diminished by Croce's conception of value, if we look at the
same doctrine from another angle, it tells us that there is no evil
where there is no consciousness of evil; that evil becomes something
positive, acquires an independent existence, only when it is reflected
in a higher plane of consciousness. The only conceivable sanction of
the evil that we have willed is in the will that, tending towards a
better end, apprehends its former volition as inadequate and therefore
evil; but until that light has shown itself to the spirit, all other
sanctions are meaningless. This is the foundation of the Christian
doctrine of repentance, of the uses of remorse, or grace; and the
individual intimate quality of moral values was first proclaimed by the
voice that said: _nolite iudicare_. If the Kingdom of Heaven is not
within you, it is not to be found anywhere else.

We can consider the actual volition as intrinsically good, if we also
approach it from the point of view of the multiplicity of possible
volitions--impulses, passions, desires--striving to realize themselves
at every moment of our life. Every single volition is the result of
a struggle from which it emerges after having conquered all the other
possible volitions. When, in this struggle, the single volition does
not assert itself fully, we become the prey of that multiplicity,
willing a volition which is not the one that we ought to will, and that
in a way we feel we will; hence a will that is divided against itself,
an action which is not positive but negative, not a true action, but
a kind of passivity. When the single volition conquers the passions,
when one impulse or desire becomes the will, all the other possible
volitions lose their actual value, multiplicity gives way to unity,
passivity to action, evil to good, death to life.

The passions can be empirically regarded as habits of the will, as
inclinations towards one or another category of actions; by a further
empirical elaboration, we can divide them into the various classes of
virtues and vices, virtues being the passions or habits of rational
actions, and vices the contrary ones. Individuality or personality,
as an empirical concept, is nothing but a complex of more or less
lasting habits, some natural and some acquired, or, more rigorously,
the historical situation of the universal spirit in every instant of
time, and therefore that complex of habits which historical conditions
have produced. These habits are the material out of which we mould our
life, and the first duty of every individual consists in exploring
his own dispositions, in establishing what attitudes the progress of
reality has deposited in him, at the moment of his birth and in the
course of his individual life--to acquire a consciousness of what in
religious terms we might call his vocation or mission; it is impossible
for anyone to act except on the basis of his preÃ«xisting personal
habits of will. But temperament, or the empirical individuality, is
not yet character, or virtue; and the respect that we owe to it, as
the necessary condition of our action, must not be confused with the
ultra-modern tendency which expresses itself in the cry for the rights
of the individual temperament and for the free development of the
passions. The individual has the duty of seeking his own self, but
also that of cultivating himself in the light of reason; his empirical
individuality is a mere datum, and his life is his own work. An
education aiming only at the expression of individual idiosyncrasies
(as so much of our modern education, at least in theory, is) is no
education at all. The ideal is rather to be sought in such a perfect
fulfilment of one's individual mission, however humble, that it should
at the same time fulfil the universal mission of man.

The law of life is in the unity that conquers the multiplicity, in the
will asserting itself above the passions. The reality is perpetual
development, an infinite possibility transforming itself into an
infinite actuality, gathering itself at every instant from the multiple
into the one, only to disrupt itself again and produce a new unity.
Multiplicity, contradiction, evil, non-being, on one side, and unity,
coherence, good, being, on the other, are unthinkable outside the
synthesis of life, which is activity, becoming, evolution. This concept
of becoming or evolution is the one that modern thought has substituted
for that of an immobile reality and of a transcendent divinity. And in
Croce it becomes wide enough to embrace Hegel's speculative dialectic
on one side, and the naturalistic evolutionism of the scientist on
the other. The dialectic of will is the dialectic of reality, both
spiritual and natural--or rather only and always spiritual, since
nature cannot be distinguished from the spirit as a concrete reality of
another order, but only as an abstraction of the practical intellect.
What we call life in nature is consciousness in the spirit, and the
history of nature is not qualitatively different from the history of
man. The whole course of history cannot be regarded otherwise than as
a continuous progress, a perpetual triumph of life over death; and its
rationality, which we call Fate or Providence, is not the work of a
transcendent Intelligence, but is a Providence realizing itself in die
individual, working not outside or above, but within history itself.
The mystery of which we are all conscious is not a part of reality, but
only the presentment of future realizations, the infinity of evolution.
The God transcendent, the empirical immortality, are mere figures and
myths for the God living in nature and in the spirit of man, for the
spirit of man, for the spiritual activity, which is life and death in
one.

[Footnote 1: See _Filosofia della Pratica_, part i, "L'attivitÃ  pratica
in generale," pp. 1-209.]

IX. ECONOMICS AND ETHICS[1]

The distinctions of the practical activity--The autonomy of ethics:
utilitarianism--The autonomy of the economic form: abstract
moralism--Relations of the ethical to the economic form--Pleasure
and duty, happiness and virtue--Importance of the economic
principle--Philosophy and the science of economics--The ethical
principle; material ethics--Ethical formalism; the universality of the
principle--The object of the ethical will--Croce as a moralist.

The preceding chapter deals with the practical activity in general,
with the general concept of will or action. We must now introduce in
that concept a distinction analogous to that by which the theoretical
activity has appeared to us first as the knowledge of die individual or
intuition, then as the knowledge of the universal or concept. But here,
again, we shall not employ the merely descriptive and psychological
method, nor yet attempt to deduce this distinction from the analogy
between the theoretical and the practical activity; we shall appeal
once more to the immediate test of consciousness, which in fact reveals
two distinct forms of the will, the economic and the ethic. Economic
activity is the one that wills and realizes only that which relates to
the conditions of fact in which the individual finds himself; ethical
activity, the one that wills and realizes that which, though related to
those conditions, at the same time in some way transcends them. To one
correspond individual, to the other, universal ends; on one is based
the judgment on the coherence of the action in itself, on its adequacy
to its individual end; on the other, the judgment on its adequacy to
universal ends, which transcend the individual. If we recognise only
the ethical form, we perceive very soon that it implies the other
one, which we intended to exclude, since our action, though universal
in its meaning, must always be something concrete and individually
determined. We do not realize morality in the universal, but always a
given moral volition, not the abstract virtues, but the concrete works.
Although a moral action is not only our individual pleasure, yet it
must be that, too, or we should never be able to realize it. On the
other hand, the mere economic action, the satisfaction of our immediate
pleasure, though it satisfies us in relation to our individual end, yet
it leaves constantly unsatisfied that which we are beside and beyond
our individual determinations, our deepest and truest being. And this
dissatisfaction will last until we succeed in lifting ourselves above
the infinite succession of individual ends, and in inserting in them a
universal value. This passage or conversion from the purely economic to
the ethic, from pleasure to duty, is designed by Croce as the conquest
of that peace which is not of a fabulous future, but of the present
and real; in every instant is eternity, to him who knows how to reach
it. Our actions will be always new, because always new problems are put
before us by the course of reality; but in them, if we accomplish them
with a pure heart, seeking in them what lifts them above themselves,
we shall each time possess the Whole. Such is the character of the
moral action; which satisfies us not as individuals but as men, and
as individuals only because the individual is a man, and as men only
through the medium of individual satisfaction.

The denial of the autonomy of the ethical form, the attempt to reduce
the ethic to the economic, the morally good to the individually
useful, is the substance of the many theories that go under the name
of utilitarianism. But this reduction of the practical activity to
a single principle clashes in every instant of our life against the
distinction between mere pleasure and duty, between the useful and the
honest action, between the things that have a price and those that
have none, between actions which have a moral motive and those that
have only a utilitarian one. The utilitarians themselves, unable to
pass over the distinction, have tried to explain it away as a purely
quantitative one, defining morality as the utility of the greater
number or as the interest or egotism of the race; but it is clear that
these so-called quantitative distinctions are really qualitative ones:
the utility of the greater number is no longer individual utility or
immediate pleasure, the egotism of the race is no longer egotism, but
a value which transcends the individual. A further attempt in the same
direction consists in considering morality as born from the association
between certain acts which are means to a pleasure, and that pleasure
itself: a savage fights to defend his personal liberty or his life, a
civilized man, forgetting that the tribe, or the city, or the state,
are but means to preserve his life and his property, defends them for
themselves, and allows himself to be deprived of both his property and
his life for love of his country. But only through stupidity is it
possible to mistake the means for the end, and, therefore, this theory
actually reduces morality to what is practically irrational, a product
of confusion and illusion; that is, to the contrary of the practical
activity, which is, in its own sphere, rationality and wisdom. The mere
enunciation of this theory, if true, ought to produce the dissolution
of those false associations, and, therefore, the destruction of
morality; if morality subsists, this is due to its rational character,
which associationism has not succeeded in disproving. The last refuge
of utilitarianism is in theology and mystery: the utility of moral
actions is not of this world, but derived from the conception of
another world in which God punishes or rewards us for our conduct on
earth. But this kind of utilitarianism puts itself outside the field
of philosophy, by emptying the symbols of religion of their moral
content, which is their only logical justification.

The converse form of error, which consists in eliminating the economic
moment from the concept of practical activity, is criticised by Croce
as abstract moralism. The economic moment has been regarded as purely
technical, that is, as the theoretical moment that precedes action,
action itself being always and only ethical; but some sort of knowledge
precedes every action, and the distinction between the useful and
the good cannot be reduced to that between knowledge and will; we
can consider the useful as the means and the good as the end, only
by forgetting that there is as much difference between knowing the
useful and willing the useful, as between knowing the good and willing
the good. The useful has also been identified with the egotistic and
immoral; but the merely useful is amoral, and not immoral, in the same
sense in which the pure intuition is alogical, and not either logical
or illogical. The imagination of the poet cannot be submitted to the
logical judgment, any more than the immediate pleasure of the child,
or any action which precedes the awakening of the moral consciousness.
And besides, the useful is so far from being immoral, that there is no
moral action which is not also useful, as there is no logical truth
which can express itself except through language. Finally, the useful
has been defined as an inferior form of practical consciousness; but
what this definition actually accomplishes is to recognise, though
imperfectly, the true distinction, which is a relation of higher and
lower only in the metaphorical sense in which these adjectives can be
employed for the relation between the intuition and the concept.

Economics and ethics are the double grade of the practical activity:
it is possible to conceive of actions having no moral value, and yet
economically effective, but not of moral actions which should not
at the same time be useful, or economic. Morality lives concretely
in utility, as the universal in the individual, the eternal in the
contingent. But we can never sufficiently emphasize the true character
of the distinction, which, taken as a purely abstract and psychological
one, might justify the persistence of morally indifferent actions
within the moral consciousness. The moral consciousness, once it
is awakened, invests the whole life of the practical mind, as the
logical consciousness does for the theoretical mind, and it abolishes
that condition of innocence, in which the purely economic is not
yet subject to the moral judgment, in the same way as perception
and reflection destroy our naÃ¯ve belief in the reality of purely
poetical imaginations. On the other hand, there are no actions which
are economically ally indifferent, or, as they are generally called,
disinterested; morality requires that the individual should transform
a universal interest into his individual one, make of morality itself
his personal utility, but it cannot ask for the abolition of all
interests, which would mean the abolition of morality as well. The
value of a moral action is in direct proportion with the passion
and fervour with which we identify our individual ends with ends
transcending our empirical individuality.

In the light of this distinction, the old oppositions of pleasure and
duty, of happiness and virtue, lose a good deal of their rigour and
sharpness. Pleasure as the positive economic activity or feeling can
never be in real contrast with duty as the positive moral activity:
a moral action brings with itself its own satisfaction or pleasure,
and if it brings pain also, either the good action was not entirely
good, not willed with all our heart, or it was accompanied by a new
practical problem, which has yet to be solved. Similarly, happiness is
not necessarily virtue, but there is no virtue which is not happiness;
the sorrows of the virtuous are not intrinsic to morality, being but
the limits of human activity, which the good share with the wicked.
We all can transform our limits into sorrows, by our restlessness
and unreasonableness; or, through resignation, our sorrows in limits
and conditions of activity. Asceticism, which regards pleasure and
happiness as essentially immoral, is the extreme form of moral
abstractism; by destroying the economic category, it deprives morality
of its reality and concreteness. It is, in fact, in the practical
sphere, the counterpart of mysticism in the theoretical, which makes
thought impossible by dissociating it from expression.

The recognition of the autonomy of the economic moment as one of the
fundamental forms of spiritual activity, and the study of its relations
with morality, appears to me as Croce's most important contribution to
modern thought. We have seen what light the problems of the ethical
will receive, when they are seen in their unity and distinction with
the facts of the economic, or individual, will. We shall see in the
next chapter what a vast field of human activity, comprising the
whole political life of mankind, reveals a new rationality, once it
is regarded as a legitimate product of the human mind, to be judged
according to its own standards and values, and not to standards and
values belonging to a different order of facts. Croce's discovery of
the will of the individual as the first grade, the elementary form of
the practical spirit, is analogous to Vico's discovery of the purely
intuitive activity as the first grade of knowledge; and it establishes
between economics and ethics, between politics and morality, the same
relation as between Ã¦sthetic and logical values. The Ã¦sthetically true
is the adequately expressive, as the economically good is the useful;
but in both cases, we can never repeat it sufficiently, once the
logical and the moral consciousness are awakened, neither the Ã¦sthetic
can be apprehended otherwise than as logically true or untrue, nor the
economic otherwise than as morally good or bad. The standards which
are illegitimate when applied to art as art, to politics as politics,
become rational again in the all pervading light of truth and morality.
The predecessors of Croce in this line of his speculation are, on
one side, the political writers who, from Aristotle to Machiavelli,
attempted to define the relations between politics and morality; on the
other side, the economists, who, by isolating a type of value, which
was not an Ã¦sthetic, intellectual, or ethical value, and which could
not be identified with the reverse of the ethical value, or egotism,
had prepared the ground for the establishment of a philosophy of
economics. As a matter of actual, historical derivation, it was from
his study of Marxism, from his meditations on contemporary economic
science, that Croce drew, as we saw in one of the first chapters of
this book, his conception of economic value as one of the universal
values.

After what has been said of the general relationship between philosophy
and science, it will not be difficult to determine the place that
_economic science_ occupies in Croce's thought, in relation to his
_philosophy of economics_. Economics as a philosophical science
is that branch of philosophy, the object of which is the economic
activity in its universality, the determination of the concept of
volition or action as the volition or action of the individual, that
is, as the predicate of the economic judgment or judgment of utility.
The economic judgment, in its turn, is but a form of historical
judgment, and, therefore, the concrete form of the philosophy of
economics is economic history, the history of the spirit of man as it
realizes itself in the individual action or volition. Between that
philosophy and that history, there is no place, as we know, for any
intermediate form of knowledge, but only for the practical (empirical
or abstract) elaboration, of the economic datum. This is what the
science of economics actually is: an applied mathematical science,
founded on empirical concepts. The postulates and types of economic
science are among the most perfect examples of conscious fictions,
beginning with the fundamental one of the _homo Åconomicus_: they
are empirical concepts by which the economic reality is simplified to
such an extent that it becomes possible to submit it to mathematical
calculation, and thereby to recognise promptly its necessary aspects
and consequences. Economic science partakes, therefore, of the rigour
and absoluteness of mathematics, which is obtained, as we know,
only by sacrificing the concreteness of its object. Its laws are
arbitrary and tautological, consisting, like all scientific laws, in
the definition of those characteristics of reality which have been
abstracted to form its postulates or empirical concepts; but it is
only through the acceptance of such definitions that it succeeds
in dominating, ordering, describing, and classifying the mass and
variety of economic facts and, most important of all, in treating them
quantitively. It has, in fact, the same structure as another science
with which it has been frequently compared, and which is here assumed
as typical of the proceedings of applied mathematics--mechanics. I
believe that very few economists would quarrel to-day with Croce's
characterization of economic science, since its mathematical character
is now universally recognised; but Croce proves conclusively that even
in its non-mathematical phases, economics has always been a purely
quantitative science. Volition and action are assumed in it in their
indistinction; and moral facts being volitions and actions as well as
the economic facts, they can also be included in the economic calculus,
because from a merely abstract point of view there is no way of
differentiating them from the latter.

Between the philosophy and the science of economics there is
neither agreement nor disagreement, but a total heterogeneity, and,
therefore, a reciprocal tolerance. It is only when one invades the
field, or adopts the methods, of the other, that conflict and error
arise. Economics as a science may then deny the legitimacy of the
philosophical study of the economic moment; or it may attribute a
universal value to its empirical concepts (as it has happened again
and again in the disputes between free-traders and protectionists, or
as it constantly happens when economic laws are referred to as endowed
with a character of absolute necessity); or, finally it may transform
its fictions into realities, attributing for instance to the concrete
human being, and to the exclusion of any other quality, the qualities
it has abstracted for the creation of its homo Åconomicus. But, in
all such cases, though we may meet these errors among the economists,
they are not scientific errors but logical errors; or rather, they are
poor science only because they are bad philosophy. The true function of
the abstract economic schemes is that of an instrument in the hands of
the historical and sociological observer, who needs many other similar
instruments, if he wants to gain a concrete and direct knowledge of
actual historical and social conditions.

It is now time for us to return, from this discussion of the two
different elaborations of the economic datum, to a closer consideration
of the second form of the practical activity, or of the ethical
principle. In the same way as the empirical concepts of economic
science are insufficient to exhaust the infinite wealth of the economic
principle, no single action or group of single actions can define the
ethical principle, which is universal, and therefore merely formal. By
identifying the principle with a series, however vast, of particular
determinations, that is, by substituting a material ethics for a formal
one, we fall back inevitably into utilitarianism, since the volition of
a single object or class of objects is not a volition of the universal
but of the particular, not an ethical but an economic act. Even the
highest forms of moral ideals, such as benevolence, love, altruism,
humanitarianism, etc., once they are apprehended materially, and not
as mere verbal approximations to the formal ethical principle, acquire
a contingent and utilitarian character, and are apt to come in actual
conflict with the truly moral will. The same criticism applies, and
with greater force, to institutionalized ideals, such as the family,
the state, the social organism, the interest of the race, etc.;
none of them can be the object of the moral will without exceptions
and restrictions, that is, without losing in the act of the will
its institutional character, and appearing as one of the particular
conditions under which the particular moral volition takes place.
The religious principles themselves are subject to this reduction
from the ethical to the economic, when, as in the case of theological
utilitarianism, they are taken as empirical limitations, as particular
objects, of the ethical will. The material ethical principles are in
fact analogous to those material Ã¦sthetic principles which we have
criticised as rhetorical; they constitute a rhetoric of the virtues not
less deadly to the creative moral will than the rhetoric of the arts is
to the creative intuition.

The ethical principle must be formal, but not formalistic, and
therefore Croce is not satisfied with any of the so-called universal
laws or categorical imperatives, or with any of the many formulas
which attempt to define the moral actions through one constant
determination which ought to be present in each of them. Such formulas
are mere symbols or metaphors, and can be used as the equivalents of
the ethical principle, as some of the categories of material ethics
can be used; but their danger consists in giving the illusion of
possessing the true principle, while what we are given is an empty
and tautological one, which will again give way to purely empirical
determinations and therefore to utilitarianism. This empty formalism,
or absolute indetermination, of the ethical principle, corresponds to
two conceptions of philosophy, which Croce respectively calls partial
and discontinuous. According to the first, man may know a portion of
reality, but never reality as a whole; as regards morality, he may hear
the voice of his own conscience, but never grasp with his intellect
the content of the moral law. According to the second, he may know the
reason of morality, but not within the sphere of ethics, whose task
consists only in establishing the moral law and deducing the moral
precepts; the problem of the essence of morality belongs to another
science, metaphysics. The reader who has followed us to this point
knows that Croce's philosophy is neither partial nor discontinuous;
that he does not admit of any limits to human thought, nor of any
division in the body of philosophy. The whole of philosophy is already
included for him in the first philosophical proposition, and though it
may didactically be useful to divide the problems of philosophy in
groups, or even to deal separately with the particular philosophical
science on one hand, and with general philosophy or metaphysics on the
other, yet truth does not belong to the distinctions outside their
unity, to the parts outside the whole, to the segments outside the
circle. It is this totality and continuity of Croce's philosophy that
makes Croce's ethical principle a form, but not an empty one; a form
which is full in a philosophical and universal sense, which is at the
same time content, and universal as content not less than as form. He
has defined the ethical principle, not, tautologically, as a universal
form, but as the volition of the universal: a definition which is
at the same time the distinction of the ethical from the economical
form, or volition of the individual. We may here recall, to test once
more the coherence of Croce's thought, and to make this definition
clearer, his definition of the concept as knowledge of the universal;
by it the concept is distinguished from the intuition, or knowledge of
the individual, and the logical principle is seen as unidentifiable
either with an abstract logical form or with any particular system
of philosophy. The concept is real only in the infinite individual
determinations of actual thought, as the ethical principle in the
infinite concrete volitions of the human spirit sub specie universalis.

The universal which is the object of the ethical volition is not
something that we shall need to define at this point of our exposition,
since the whole of Croce's philosophy is nothing but a definition of
the universal. The universal is mind or the spirit; it is reality, as
unity of will and thought; it is life grasped in its depth as that
same unity; it is freedom, since a reality thus conceived is perpetual
development, creation, progress. Man, in willing the universal, turns
from his individuality to that which transcends it, to the spirit,
or reality, or life, or freedom, not as abstract ideals, but as they
realize themselves in his individual action. The volition of the
individual, of one's individual existence, is necessarily the first
step; there is no man, however deeply moral, who does not begin by
affirming his own individual life; without this affirmation, he would
never be able to transcend it and to deny it. But he who should limit
himself to this affirmation, and accept as a place of rest what is only
the beginning of his development, would find himself in contradiction
with his real, intimate self. He must will not only his individual
self, but that self also, which being the same in all selves is their
common Father. It is thus that he promotes the realization of reality,
lives the full life, and makes his heart beat with the heart of the
universe: _Cor cordium_. The moral individual is conscious that he
is working for the Whole. Every action which is in accord with the
ethical duty is in accord with Life, and would be contrary to duty and
immoral, if instead of promoting life, it should depress and mortify
it. The most humble moral action resolves itself into this volition
of the spirit in its universality. The soul of a simple and ignorant
man wholly devoted to his modest duty is in perfect unison with that of
the philosopher whose mind receives within itself the universal spirit.
What one does, the other thinks; and both reach by different roads
their full satisfaction in an act of life, in a fecund embrace with
reality.

It is in pages like the ones from which we have extracted this
enthusiastic definition of morality, that the true quality of Croce's
philosophy is best perceived. But what is here affirmed as a principle
lives as an ever present spirit in innumerable able discussions of
particular moral problems in his _Filosofia della Pratica_, in his
moral essays, in his literary criticism (there is no living literary
critic who has a keener perception of moral values than this implacable
enemy of moralism), in the whole of his work. It is this moral
enthusiasm, together with his capacity to see clear and deep, his
catholic tolerance for all forms of beauty and truth and goodness,
however distant from his tastes and inclinations, and his courageous,
outspoken intolerance for all hypocrisies, compromises, half-truths,
wilful errors, that has given Croce, in the last twenty years, in
Italy, a right to moral as well as intellectual leadership. He is the
true heir of an infinitely complex moral tradition, and placed high
enough to do justice to all its elements, though apparently contrasting
with each other. But when recognizing the symbolical and practical
value of the various positive ethical systems that appear to him as
gradual approximations to the full concreteness and universality of the
ethical principle, he emphasizes the connection of his own ethics with
one of those elements in preference to every other, with the religious
and Christian element, for which morality is already what it is for
the philosopher, the love and will of the universal spirit. There is
no truth of ethics which for him cannot be expressed in the words that
we have learned as children from our traditional religion. Between the
religious man and the philosopher, between religion and philosophy,
there is no enmity, but continuity and development; in the affirmation
of the ethical principle, which is the crucial test of every philosophy
as of every religion, the substantial identity of religion and
philosophy is finally established.

[Footnote 1: _See Filosofia della Pratica_, part ii, "L'attivitÃ
pratica nelle tue forme speciali," pp. 211-319.]

X. THE LAWS[1]

Economic society as an empirical concept--The philosophical concept
of society--Sociology, philosophy of law and political science--The
definition of law--Laws and customs--The laws, the natural laws and the
practical principles--Mutability of the laws: the _jus naturale_--The
function of the laws--Legalism: the Jesuit and the Puritan--The
legislative activity as a generically economic activity--The juridical
activity--Law and language.

One of the fundamental empirical concepts of the science of economics
is that of economic society, which is formed by abstracting certain
classes of economic relationships from the mass of relationships of
all kinds among which the life of the individual realizes itself. Any
treatise of economics can be considered as a definition of economic
society; and we know how those definitions are apt to vary according
to the choice of the groups of facts studied, and the method employed,
by different schools of economists. The economic society of the
Marxian is not the economic society of the classical economist; the
Catholic economist, differing from both, will include in his treatment
the consideration of certain ethical relations which give a greater
complexity to his scheme. It would be possible to study the economics
of the individual in perfect isolation from all other human beings,
limiting the elements of this particular form of society to one man,
and that portion of nature from which he draws his food, his clothing,
his shelter; on the other hand, the whole of mankind and the whole of
nature may enter into a single, all-including, economic body. We may
even study animal species, in their relations within themselves, or
with man, or with other animal species, or with nature at large, from
an economic standpoint (symbiosis and parasitism are facts bearing a
close resemblance with human economy)--and thus form an infinite number
of new economic societies. Each of these empirical concepts can be
varied _ad infinitum_, by the mere inclusion or exclusion of certain
classes of relationships.

The empirical, non-rigorous character of the concept of economic
society is self-evident; and it can therefore be usefully employed to
prove by analogy the similar character of the concept of society as
manufactured by jurists, sociologists, and political scientists. It
is against such fictions that philosophy reacts by building a concept
of the isolated individual, that is, of the individual isolated from
the particular classes of relationships which enter into the formation
of particular empirical concepts of society; but it does this only to
plunge the individual again in the midst of that infinite multiplicity,
which is one aspect, and an essential one, of reality, Society as a
philosophical concept cannot be identified with any form of economic
or political society; of such, as mere abstractions, no philosophical
treatment is possible. Society is that real multiplicity, without which
we should have neither knowledge nor action, neither art nor thought,
neither utility nor morality; and from society in this sense, the
individual cannot be isolated, without reducing him, in his turn, to a
merely abstract concept.

The sociologist, the jurist, the political scientist use their
concepts of society for their purposes, which are, in the sense which
is now familiar to our reader, scientific purposes. But very often
they lose sight of the character of these concepts, and treat these
instruments of classification and description as substitutes for
the actual reality which they are, by reason of their abstractness,
utterly unable to reproduce. The sociologist talks of the collective
mind, and of collective representations, as if they had a reality
outside the thought and action of the individual; the jurist builds a
philosophy of law, in which society is opposed to the individual as
a being to another being, and law, as a product of society, at every
point transcends the individual will. The political scientist deals
with the community, or the association, or the State, as with concepts
of which it were possible to give a philosophical definition, valid
for all times, and from which the rules of perfect government could be
rigorously deduced. Of these types of philosophical degenerations of
legitimate scientific thought, it can be roughly said that, because of
the peculiar cultural development of the various nations of Europe, the
first belongs more particularly to England and France, the second to
Italy and Germany; though they are all more or less common in European
culture as a whole. As an Italian, Croce was particularly interested in
the second, the philosophical degeneration of juridical thought, and
therefore his particular treatment of the economic facts underlying
the problems of political society naturally took the shape of an
inquiry into the nature of law. But it ought not to be difficult for
the English or American reader, for whom these problems are not part
of a practically inexistent philosophy of law, but of a long tradition
of political science and theory of government, to translate Croce's
thought into terms of his own cultural experience.

A law is an act of will, whose content is a series or class of actions.
This definition excludes from the concept of law any empirical
social determination; it includes within it all laws which are
merely individual, the laws that the individual lays down to and for
himself, the rules of conduct and programs of life and action, which
the individual follows of his own accord. It may be objected that
individual laws differ from social and political laws, because the
latter are coercive and constrictive, while the former are not. There
is no law, however, that is truly coercive; the individual is always
free either to observe or not to observe the law. What a law does is to
offer a choice or alternative, and this is as true of individual as of
social laws. We may disregard our own rules of conduct or programs of
action, and suffer from doing so, and inflict a punishment on ourselves
for having done so; or we may alter our individual laws as social laws
are altered when they no longer respond to the need of a community,
and are either violently overthrown by rebellion or quietly allowed to
fall into desuetude through non-observance, or modified by the proper
organs of legislation. But the importance of the concept of individual
laws lies in the fact that the so-called social laws have no reality
outside the individual: in order to observe a law it is necessary to
make it one's own, and to rebel against a law is to expel it from one's
personality, of which it was, or tried to become, a part. The only real
laws are, therefore, individual laws.

If the criterion of sanction or coercion is insufficient to draw a
distinction between individual and social laws, we can still less
use it to divide the social laws into customs or unwritten laws, and
political and juridical laws. Both customs and laws carry with them
sanctions, though of a different order, or, to put it in more precise
terms, both offer a choice between probable consequences to the free
individual will. This distinction, like every other subdivision of the
laws (civil, penal, national, international, laws and by-laws, etc.),
is a purely empirical one. But the concept of law comprehends these and
many more in which the jurists have no interest, such as the literary
or artistic laws (that a tragedy should have five acts, or, as at one
time in England, that a novel should fill three volumes), or the rules
of religious life, or the precepts of chivalry, down to the statutes
of a criminal gang and to Balzac's _droit parisien_. In fact, the
empirical distinctions of the laws are coextensive with the empirical
concepts of society, and partake of the same characteristics: to the
preceding examples of laws correspond respectively the republic of
letters, a monastery, the order of knighthood, a band of robbers, and
_le beau monde_. But the only reality, both of the society and of the
law, is the individual assent.

The laws have one point in common with the so-called natural laws;
both are concerned with empirical concepts, or classes. But while the
natural laws are mere indicative statements of fact, the laws can
always be translated from the indicative to the imperative; that is,
they contain a volitive element which is absent from the natural laws.
The volitive element is present, on the other hand, in the practical
principles which have some time received the names of moral or economic
laws, and which can be converted into such imperatives as Will the
universal, or, in particular, Will the good, the useful, the true, the
beautiful. But these principles are concerned with the universal, that
is, with the spirit of man in the necessary forms of its activity, not
with a particular product of the spirit, a class or type of actions, as
do laws in the strict meaning of the word. This distinction between the
practical principles and the laws opens the way to the recognition of a
very important character of the laws: while the practical principles,
because of their universality, have no limits and no exceptions
(and we have already seen that a morally indifferent action is a
contradiction in terms), the laws can never exhaust the universal, and
therefore will always leave outside themselves a margin of actions,
not included in any of the classes to which they refer, and therefore
legally indifferent. In more technical language, we may express the
same idea by saying that all laws, whether imperative or prohibitive
or permissive (a law, according to the ancient formula, _aut iubet aut
vetat aut permittit_), can be reduced to permissive laws: an order is
always at the same time a prohibition, and both orders and prohibitions
implicitly permit all actions which are not contemplated by the law.

Moreover, while the practical principles are immutable, always capable
of giving form to the most varied historical material, the laws are in
perpetual flux and change. The particular modes of change, whether by
evolution or revolution, do not concern the philosopher, for whom all
can be reduced to a angle one: the free will producing a new law under
new conditions. Against the perpetual mutability of the laws, due to
the contingent and historical character of their content, clashes the
concept of an Eternal Code, or Law of Nature (_jus naturale_), which
presumes to determine the content and form of the laws, according to
abstract reason, once and forever. This conception is due to an error
with which we are now familiar, consisting in the transformation of
empirical concepts into principals of universal validity. But from
this particular error, as from all errors, we must distinguish certain
elements of actual and concrete thought which have been historically
associated with it. In the attempts to establish a Law of Nature, we
shall then recognise either new concrete legislative programs, the
new laws appearing as natural and rational by contrast with the old
ones, or an attempt to deduce from, and through, juridical concepts,
the principles of a philosophy of the practical. The principle of
nationality, fighting for realization against the old dynastic law,
appears to its defenders as a typical natural right; and Rousseau,
when deducing the principles of the _jus naturale_, warns us that
he is not dealing with historical truths, but with hypothetical and
conventional reasonings, that is, with principles which transcend every
particular determination and have not a positive, but an ideal value.
We no longer speak of a Law of Nature, but the error which gave rise
to that conception is still vigorous in current social and political
discussions; every attempt to change legal conditions is always
advocated or resisted by an appeal either to natural rights, which are
but arbitrary rationalizations of historical contingencies, or to
abstract reasons, principles, or ideas, of which the particular laws
or institutions are assumed to be the final and necessary expression.
But rationality, morality, and naturality, in the sense in which
these qualities are predicated of one or another type of laws and
institutions, do not belong to any particular historical determination
more than to another; they belong only to the spirit of man and to the
concrete values that it realizes among the ever-changing conditions of
history.

A law, being a volition of a class of actions, and therefore of an
abstraction, is in itself an abstract or unreal volition. What we
actually will is not the law, but the single, individual action
under the law: the reality of the law is only in its execution. In
the individual execution, however, what realizes itself is not the
law, but the practical principle, economic or ethic, of which both
the observance and the non-observance of the law are particular
determinations; the individual practical problems can never be foreseen
seen by the law, which is by its nature general and abstract. What is
then, it may be asked, the use of the laws? Croce's answer is that the
laws are helps to the real volition, in the same way as the empirical
and abstract concepts, though not real knowledge themselves, are helps
to knowledge. In order to determine ourselves to the single action,
it is useful to begin by fixing our attention to the class of which
that single is an element; in order to know either the individual,
or the universal, it is useful to create, between the universal and
the individual, classes and types, general concepts, or, as Croce
calls them, relatively constant variables, through which the process
of actual knowledge is made easier and quicker. We cannot think the
pseudo-concepts, but they help us to think; we cannot will the laws,
but they help us to will. The concept of law is akin to that of plan
or design; in practice, a plan or design, and its execution, are one
and the same thing, as we act by constantly changing our design,
because reality, which is the foundation of our action, is in perpetual
change. But this unreality of the plan, as distinct from the concrete
individual action, does not deprive the plan itself of its practical
uses, which are universally recognized, and which are identical with
the uses of law.

When we identify the empirical laws with the universal practical
principles, economic or ethic, we fall into "legalism," which can be
defined as the belief that universal principles can be definitely
embodied in a limited number of laws, and that, on the other hand,
these laws partake of the character of absoluteness which belongs to
those principles. It is especially in the treatment of ethics that
this confusion has caused its worst effects. The two outstanding types
of legalists are the Jesuit, who admits of the morally indifferent,
the justification through the intention, the pious fraud, and other
practical means for the purely literal observance of the law, supposed
to be a sufficient satisfaction of the moral obligation, and the
Puritan, who maintains that the unchangeable letter of the law is the
only, and always certain, guide of the moral consciousness. Both Jesuit
and Puritan, or to give them the names they assumed in a historical
controversy, both Molinist and Jansenist, have often been in practice
much better than their theories; but we are here interested only in
their theoretical pronouncements, which, though apparently contrasting,
yet combine in substituting the letter for the spirit, and in drying
up, in the name of morality, the living springs of moral activity.
And in both cases, moral legalism is associated with theological
utilitarianism; it is, in fact, but another aspect of the same error.

The will that wills classes of actions, the legislative activity, is
either moral or merely economic, and can therefore be judged as either
moral or immoral, economic or anti-economic. But as the laws are will
in the abstract, our judgment of the laws will also be an abstract
judgment. To pronounce a concrete judgment, we must turn to the moment
of the execution of the law, to the individual practical action, in
which the law realizes itself. In this sphere, it is vain to dispute
whether a law is essentially economic or moral: the economic or moral
character of the law is not determined by the abstract intention of the
legislator, but by the manner of its execution, by the quality of the
individual executor. The punishment which a law assigns for a category
of crimes may be intended by the legislator either to deter or to
emend the criminal; but in the man who abstains from that particular
kind of crime, the law is an economic one if the abstention is entirely
due to the fear of the punishment, it is a moral one if it coincides
with a sincere abhorrence of the crime. No law, therefore, can be said
to be intrinsically moral, and if we want to define the legislative
activity in its full extension, we must define it as generically
practical or merely economic.

The same definition obviously applies to the will that executes the
law, as distinct from the will that formulates it: the juridical
activity, as Croce names it, is also generically practical or
merely economic, and as such united to and distinct from the moral
activity. As the juridical activity, however, does not partake
of the abstractness of the legislative, but is as concrete and
determined as the economic activity, there is actually no possibility
of distinguishing the one from the other; the juridical activity
is therefore identical with the economic activity. This is Croce's
original solution of the fundamental problem of the philosophy of
law; a solution which is closely connected with his recognition of a
utilitarian practical category, distinct from but not opposed to the
moral category, and with his reduction of all laws to individual laws.
The reader must recall what has been said elsewhere of the relations
between economic and moral values; and he will then understand in what
sense it can be said that Croce's theory of law is an answer to the
secular disputes on the relations between law and morality, between
positive and ideal law, historical law and the Law of Nature. And he
will also be able to perceive the difference between the reduction of
the juridical to the mere economic activity, which, as we know, is
also the form through which only morality realizes itself, and the
theories of law as the pure embodiment of force and of the positive,
established right as the only conceivable right, which are nothing but
the counterpart of moral utilitarianism in the field of law. Croce's
theory of law is, as all the rest of his philosophy is, a purely formal
doctrine; not intended to defend one type of laws and institutions
against any other, but attempting to furnish a conception of law, as an
individual, perpetually new activity of the spirit of man, of which all
laws and institutions, all phases and tendencies of political history,
appear as concrete historical manifestations.

The philosophy of law has often had recourse to the philosophy of
language for analogies by which its own problems could be clarified. A
doctrinaire view of the juridical and political problem, for which the
origin of law and society is to be found in an abstract convention,
and which therefore tends to build up, by new conventions, a model
legislation, or an Eternal Code, shows its real nature when related to
the corresponding conception of language as a collection of signs, a
purely symbolical organism, which can be so perfected by reason as to
become an absolute, universal language, embodying in its signs every
conceivable type of logical operations: a universal language, which
should also be a universal symbolic logic. Sharply opposed to the
doctrinaire, the traditionalist views certain types of positive laws
and institutions as endowed with a character of necessity which puts
them above the reach of the individual judgment of man; and as he fails
to discover the ever present creative activity, by which man constructs
his juridical and political world, he also withdraws from the human
spirit the power to create its own language, and makes of words a
divine institution. Equally remote from the sociological as from the
theological concept, which are the extreme theoretical forms of popular
errors, Croce establishes between law and language an analogy by which
both manifest their intrinsic creative and human character. The reality
of law is the individual juridical or economic activity, as the reality
of language is the concrete intuitive activity. Law is the will of the
individual, as language is the knowledge of the individual. Grammars
and dictionaries are the codes of language, mere abstractions from the
actual living flux of the creative expression, as the written laws and
codes are but the grammars of law, mere abstractions from the actual
living flux of political history. Language is not logic, and yet the
logical thought cannot realize itself except through language; law
is not morality, and yet the ethical activity cannot live except by
incorporating itself in laws and institutions, and in the execution of
laws, the concrete, individual life of institutions, that is, in the
juridical and economic activity.

Thus, the end of this exposition of Croce's system, the doctrine of
language with which the system opens links itself intimately with this
doctrine of law, with which it closes. And both as regards language
and as regards law, the last word is, of necessity, a new implicit
affirmation of the identity of the philosophical with the historical
method. The true history of a language is not a history of abstract
grammatical schemes, but the history of the poetry and literature
in which that language has realized itself, a history of individual
expressions; the true history of law is one with the social and
political history of a people, which is, and cannot be but the history
of its practical activity in its effective, individual realization,
that is, juridical and economic history.

[Footnote 1: See _Filosofia della Pratica_, part iii, "Le Leggi," pp.
321-407.]

PART THIRD PHILOSOPHY AS HISTORY (1911-1921)

I. WORKS AND DAYS

A retrospective view of the system--Germs of development--The return to
history--Croce's attitude during the war--Essays on the great poets.

To the reader of the three volumes of the _Filosofia dello Spirito_,
which were published before 1910, the whole of Croce's thought appeared
as a solidly constructed system, in which the four grades or forms
of spiritual activity were studied in their intrinsic essence, and
presented in their relations as completing the cycle of living reality,
in contrast with that reality which the mind postulates outside its
living self, and which the system reduces to a complex practical
product of the mind, a collection of material helps subservient to the
essential forms of its activity. Knowledge and action, reciprocally
implicated, are the substance of reality; and both knowledge and
action, rising, the first, from the intuition to the concept, the
second, from the economic to the ethical will, attain the universal,
all-including values which we express by the words Beautiful, True,
Useful and Good, but only and in so far as they realize themselves
in the concrete and individual. A universal more universal than that
which is present in the individual act is inexistent, or exists only
as an impotent abstraction renouncing the concreteness and reality of
the individual, and therefore also that true universality which has
no being outside this action, this thought, this life. The soul of
the system, slowly extricating itself from the traces of naturalism
or intellectualism, which are still visible in the _Estetica_, is the
logic of the pure concept, which resolves in the concrete universal the
dualisms of nature and spirit, of fact and value, of life and thought,
and, finally, of history and philosophy. But while this logic can be
seen at work in all the parts of the system, and is, in fact, the form
towards which all Croce's thoughts seem to have constantly tended from
the time of his earliest philosophical essays, yet, to an attentive
eye, it is possible to discover the successive stages by which it
actually incorporated itself in the system. In particular, we have been
able to point to the effects of the later meditations on the philosophy
of will, on one side, on a more intimate understanding of the pure
intuition as the lyrical intuition, on the other, on the identification
of the definition with the individual judgment, and thereby on the
relations between history and philosophy. On the whole it can be said
that two apparently contrasting directions were at work within the
system itself: one reflecting Croce's mental need for clear and fine
distinctions, the other, that deep consciousness of the unity of the
real, without which all distinctions tend to solidify themselves into
dead abstractions.

If we imagine two students of Croce's philosophy, endowed with
antagonistic philosophical temperaments, the one a dialectician,
the other a mystic, we can easily conceive them as the founders of
two diametrically opposed schools of thought. The first would have
emphasized the rigorous distinctions, the formal character, the
intellectual precision of the system; he might have retained the
identification of philosophy and history, but to him these words would
have stood only for the names of two formal disciplines, and not for
the concrete life of the human spirit which is present in them. The
second would have passed lightly over the distinctions, and probably
considered them as partaking of the same unreality which belongs to
scientific or legal abstractions; and by obliterating the logical
processes without which the mind of man is unable to grasp and to
express itself, he would have taken refuge in an ineffable, though
not necessarily silent, contemplation of the underlying unity. This
hypothesis is not a criticism of Croce's philosophy; it is merely the
indication of the fact that, when the system appeared as completed,
new problems, and therefore new errors or new truths, were bound to
grow out of the elements of the system itself. And nobody was more
conscious of this fact than Croce himself, who concluded his volume on
the _Filosofia della Pratica_ by expressly warning his readers of the
inexhaustibility of thought, which is one with the infinity of reality
and of life. No philosophical system is final, because life itself
has no end. Every system of philosophy, being conditioned by life,
can do no more than solve a group of problems historically given, and
prepare the conditions for new problems and new systems. Of his own
work in relation to his readers, he conceived as of nothing more than
an instrument of work.

In these last few chapters we shall see Croce himself at work on
the new problems generated by his own system, trying "more rigidly
to eliminate the last remnants of naturalism, and to put a stronger
accent on the spiritual unity,"[1] yet constantly defending his
conception of the spirit as the unity of distinctions, especially
against the mystical tendencies of the new actual idealism. While
never, in the course of his whole life, has he limited his activity to
mere systematic thinking, during the last eleven years he has shown
a more marked tendency to return from a philosophy, which is all a
meditation of the formal problems of history, to those concrete works
of history, by which he was started on his philosophical career; to
return to them, however, with a mind in which the original uncertainty
and obscurity has given place to a definite consciousness of the nature
and purpose of history. The passage from the more philosophical to the
more historical stage is marked by the publication of a fourth volume
of the _Filosofia dello Spirito_, in which, under the title of _Teoria
e Storia della Storiografia_, he collected a number of essays written
between 1912 and 1913, containing an elaboration of the theory of
history already expounded in the _Logica_. This volume does not form
a new part of the system, but rather the natural conclusion of the
whole work, since the problem which it discusses is the one towards
which tended all his former inquiries into the forms of the spirit,
into their concrete life which is development and history, and the
consciousness of which is historical thought. But before proceeding to
analyze this final form of Croce's theory of history, we shall give a
rapid account of the rest of his intellectual activity from 1910 onward.

As during the preceding eight years, the _Critica_ continues to this
day to be the main organ of Croce's work and influence, and in the
Critica the greatest part of his writings are still published for
the first time. The general features of the Critica have remained
practically unchanged, except that his series of essays on the Italian
literature of the last fifty years (which he collected in 1914-15 in
the four volumes of _La Letteratura della Nuova Italia_) has been
followed by studies on Italian historiography from the beginning of the
nineteenth century to our day (since 1914), by essays on some of the
greatest European poets (since 1917), by notes on modern Italian and
foreign literature (since 1917), and by the Frammenti di Etica (since
1913), containing discussions of particular problems of contemporary
morality. But practically all the reviews and essays published in
the Critica and elsewhere are now being collected in the edition of
his complete works, of which a full list will be found at the end of
this volume. In 1912, for the inauguration of the Rice Institute in
Houston, Texas, he wrote his _Breviario di Estetica_, which we have
partly utilized in our exposition of his Ã¦sthetic doctrine, and which
he reprinted in 1920 in his _Nuovi Saggi di Estetica_, which also
contains his most significant philosophical essays of the last four or
five years. His _Contributo alla critica di me stesso_ ("Contribution
to the Criticism of Myself") was written in April, 1915, on the eve of
Italy's entrance into the war, and is the best essay in existence on
the development of his thought.

Of Croce's attitude during the war we shall say but a few words. He
was one of the very few European philosophers or scholars who did not
transform themselves into improvised statesmen, or into passionate
defenders of national prejudices and proclaimers of national hatreds.
Differing from the Germanized philologist, who was the type prevailing
in most universities before the war, in that he had not waited for
the war to become aware of the many weaknesses and imperfections
of modern German culture, while on the other hand he had lived for
years in true and intimate contact with the great spirits of German
Romanticism, he resisted with all his power the universal tendency of
the time to make of the contingent issues of the war a criterion of
intellectual truth and of scientific conduct. At the same time, his
temper and education reacted violently against the false ideologies of
the war, the superstructure of verbal ideals with which on all sides
cunning statesmen and naÃ¯ve philosophers attempted to veil the true
nature of the conflict. Against these, he reasserted his conception
of the political life and struggles of states as manifestations of
the economic, amoral or pre-moral, activity, and of life itself as a
perpetual struggle, finding its reason and its rest in the struggle
itself. The theory of the state as justice appeared to him merely as
a theoretical error, the fortune of which lay in the opportunity it
afforded to give a convenient mask of morality to particular interests,
either of individuals or of states. The intrinsic morality of the
war he conceived as resting on its tragic reality, as reflected in
a severely historical thought, to which it appears as a moment of
that historical fate which crushes and destroys states as well as
individuals, to create from their ruins always new forms of life.

It is needless to say that for a time at least Croce shared with
Bertrand Russell and with Romain Rolland, two thinkers in many respects
very distant from him, and yet as impervious as he was to the rhetoric
of the war, the privilege of a vast unpopularity. Looking back now on
his writings which were later collected in the volume _Pagine sulla
guerra_, it is possible to discover among them many attitudes which
were justified and useful only as a reaction against the current
fallacies of the time; and also to realize that the man who speaks to
us through them is not always and only a pure philosopher, but a man
with a given complex of moral and political tastes and passions. But
this is, in a way, as it should be; in the same way, between Croce the
philosopher of Ã¦sthetics and Croce the critic of poetry, there is a
difference which is inherent in the nature of the two different forms
of intellectual activity; the philosopher is a man of understanding,
the critic a man of tastes and passions. In both cases, his ideal
has always been to make the critic or the moralist worthy of the
philosopher, his particular comprehension of history adequate to his
concept of the universal. To say that the equation is never perfect,
is only another way of saying that every particular historical problem
continually raises new problems of thought, and that Croce's thought
finds therefore in itself the motives of its own development, the
springs of its own life. Where passion and reason ultimately coincide,
the roots of the development are taken away, and death takes the place
of life.

Yet, notwithstanding these limitations, I know of no man whose thought
on the war is on the whole more acceptable to those among us who lived
through the war not as spectators, looking on it as on a vast moral
abstraction, but as humble actors, in the midst of its human reality. A
sense of collaboration between one side and the other, of being, here
as there, employed in a common task, whose meaning was much deeper
than any that had been offered to us by the national rhetoricians,--a
collaboration which happened to take the aspect of a struggle, and
imposed duties antagonistic, but of the same nature--was probably the
most usual frame of mind among the soldiers who could think; and it
existed, subconsciously, even among the unthinking ones, provided that
their duties were of a definite, concrete kind, touched them in the
deepest chords of their beings, involved the fundamental issues of life
and death. To the man who consciously faces death, there is no comfort
in wilful error; only this realization of an end that transcends all
particular ideals, because it is the end of life itself, can be worthy
of that price. You cannot willingly die for fourteen points any more
than for one point, but death which is loathsome in the drama of mere
circumstance, however adorned with brilliant rhetoric, is no longer
death but an act of life in the tragedy in which the hero is conscious
of his fate. There was no war, probably, that was ever more full than
the last one of what might be called the material of tragedy; but what
have the official celebrators done with it, they who have not feared
to desecrate, in all our countries, one at least of the concrete,
individual tragedies, in order to make of it an empty symbol, to
transform an unknown hero into abstract heroism? In some of Croce's
pages, there is a more concrete realization of the ideal tragedy of
the war than in any poem or oration that I have seen to this day.

The last years of the war found Croce at work on some of the greatest
poetical spirits of modern Europe, Ariosto, Goethe, Corneille,
Shakespeare, bringing to the understanding of their work, to this task
of concrete history, the deep consciousness of the nature of poetry,
and of the relations of poetry with life, acquired in twenty years of
philosophical meditations. Even his functions as Minister of Public
Education during the last two years did not distract him entirely from
his studies, and this year of the sixth centenary of Dante's death
was celebrated by him with the publication of _La Poesia di Dante_,
which will certainly remain as the most lasting monument raised to the
memory of the poet on this occasion. This troubled peace cannot make
him deviate from the path of his appointed labour any more than the war
could; in peace as in war, his duty is his daily task, here and to-day,
and his confidence in the morality and usefulness of that work which is
his work is as little shaken by the prophets of despair in peace, as
it was by the messiahs of the promised land who were so loud above the
turmoil of war. He is probably now noting with a smile that the same
men who talked of the war to end all wars, are now very busy preventing
our civilization from dying away; that is, building a peace in the
abstract, with programs and words, as they fought a war which was not
the war, but a phantasm of their imagination.

[Footnote 1: _Contributo_, p. 74.]

II. THE THEORY OF HISTORY

Two meanings of the word history--History as contemporary history--
History and chronicle--The spirit as history--Philology, and
philological history--Poetical and rhetorical history--Universal
history--The universality of history: history and philosophy--The
unity of thought--Philosophy as methodology--The positivity of
history--The humanity of history--Distinctions and divisions--The
history of nature.

There are two meanings to the word history, in English as well as in
other European languages; on one hand it denotes the actual doing, the
immediacy of life, on the other, the thinking that seems to follow
the doing, the consciousness of life. In a rough, approximate way, we
speak of men who make history, and of other men who think or write
history--though we are all perfectly aware of the fact that we cannot
make history without first thinking history, that the action, in other
words, follows a judgment of the situation, which is an elementary form
of historical thought, and is accompanied by its own consciousness,
which is its immediate history. In this sense, the action cannot be
materially severed from its history: the distinction between the two
is a purely formal and ideal one. And again, the thinking of history,
in the second meaning of the word, consists in making present to our
spirit, in re-living, an action or group of actions, which thus
become as actual an experience as any practical doing, a fragment
of our own life, and, ultimately, the consciousness of our own
individual experience. Thus the two meanings which stand out as sharply
contrasting when we objectify and solidify them, as an external,
chronological series of happenings, and as a formal discipline
attempting to give, in innumerable books, a description and as it were
a verbal duplicate of that series, once we examine them in the light
of our consciousness, reveal themselves merely as different aspects or
moments of the same spiritual process.

Croce's latest writings on history may be puzzling to the average
reader because this ambiguity cannot be overcome by him unless he is
willing to penetrate to the heart of Croce's doctrine, in which the
word history acquires a more pregnant and fundamental meaning. In
many of us there is a tendency to balk at any attempt at filling old
words with deeper and more precise connotations; but philosophy is
not a matter of words. A new thought will in any case alter the whole
physiognomy of our vocabulary, and to stand up for the old meanings
is as much as to refuse to think, or rather, to refuse to live. For
history as a formal discipline, for the actual writing of history,
Croce uses the word Historiography; but in his _Teoria e Storia
della Storiografia_ (Theory and History of the writing of History),
history still means both the doing and the thinking, life and the
consciousness of life, though not in the abstract distinction in which
these meanings are generally apprehended. In Croce the distinction is
also unity, and there is no doing which is not also a thinking, no life
which is not also the consciousness of life, no consciousness which is
not also the consciousness of itself. The ambiguity, some traces of
which could still be seen in the _Logica_, entirely disappears in this
fourth volume of the system, at least for the reader who has followed
the whole development of Croce's thought.

We call contemporary history the history that is being made, rather
loosely including in it a more or less extended stretch of time up
to the actual present. But contemporary history rigorously ought
to be only history in the actual making, the immediate present and
the consciousness of the immediate present. All history, however,
is contemporary history in this rigorous and precise sense; it is a
condition of all history that it should live, be present in the mind
of the historian; all history springs directly from present life,
since only an interest of our present life can induce us to inquire
into the past, which, by being made history, is no longer a past but
a present. If, Croce says, "contemporaneity is not the characteristic
of one class of histories (as it is held to be, and with good reasons,
in an empirical classification), but the intrinsic character of all
history, the relation between history and life must be conceived of
as a relation of unity: not certainly in the sense of an abstract
identity, but in that of a synthetic unity, which implies both the
unity and the distinction of the terms. To speak of a history, of
which we do not possess the documents, will then seem as absurd as
to speak of the existence of a certain thing, of which we should at
the same time affirm that one of the essential conditions for its
existence is lacking. A history without relation with the document
would be an inverifiable history; and since the reality of history
lies in this verifiability, and the historical narrative in which it
realizes itself is an historical narrative only in so far as it is the
critical exposition of the document, a history of that kind, without
meaning and without truth, would be inexistent as history. How could
ever a history of painting be composed by a man who should not see and
enjoy the works of which he intends to describe critically the origin
and development? How, a history of philosophy, without the works, or
at least the fragments of the works of the philosophers? How, the
history of a feeling or a custom, for instance, of Christian humility
or of chivalresque honour, without the capacity to re-live, or rather,
without actually re-living those particular states of mind? On the
other hand, having established the indissoluble connection of life
and thought in history, the doubts that have been advanced about the
certainty and utility of history suddenly and totally disappear, and
it becomes almost impossible to understand them. How could that ever
be uncertain, which is a present product of our spirit? How could a
knowledge be useless, which solves a problem rising from the womb of
life?"[1]

If history is thus regarded not as an object but as an activity, not as
the irrevocable past but as the living present, the difference between
history and chronicle, which is one of the puzzles of historical
thought, becomes an important and significant distinction. We are used
to think that the original form of historical writing is the chronicle,
and history a later and maturer development. Now if history is the
consciousness of a present, it follows that history is contemporary
with the event; that, therefore, the most meagre chronicle, in the mind
of its writer, moved by the actuality of the facts which he records,
is already a history in the full sense of the word. And the records of
the past, whether appearing to us, from a literary point of view, as