and Germany. Any single month of the Thirty Yea War, or even the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, co more lives than the whole course of the Inquisiti The victims of the Holy Office were far outnumber by those who were boiled, roasted or pincered to dea during the 17th-century epidemic of witch-mania such educated countries as Germany, North Brita or New England. If the exaggeration of Catholicis did in some degree stifle thought in Spain, the sa may be said of the arid and interminable discussic on doctrinal formulæ in Lutheran Germany. T literary and artistic bloom of Spain belong to the ve age when the Inquisition was running riot. It w perhaps, only one of several factors in Spain's intellectu decline, such as stupid kings, idle people, bureaucra government and incompetent finance. Spain had suffer from one or more of these before, and it was unlik that so brilliant a combination as that of Ferdinand a Isabella would be repeated. To sum up, Spain suffered from a surfeit of adventu to which her enormous coast-line, facing all four poi of the compass, tempted her. The strength of nation was drained seawards. Racial intolerance a ingrained particularism aggravated the evil. Cast claimed the exhausting monoply of America, but visit of Columbus had been an accident for which was scarcely ready. The separation of Portugal prov a grave misfortune. Her industrious population, once agricultural and nautical, would have formed invaluable reserve for the martial manhood of Cast while Brazil would not have broken the continuity Spanish America. Adventure from the first star agriculture. Soldiers, sailors and settlers left the inla provinces to idlers, who would neither sow nor reap, a whose pride was in their indolence. EDWARD ARMSTRONG Art. 6.—THE PHILOSOPHY OF BENEDETTO CROCE. 1. Filosofia come Scienza dello Spirito. By Benedetto Croce. Bari: Laterza e Figli. I. Estetica come Scienza dell' Espressione e Linguistica: IL Logica come Scienza del Concetto Puro. Seconda III. Filosofia della Pratica, Economica ed Etica. 1909. 2. Saggi Filosofici. By Benedetto Croce. Same publishers. I. Problemi di Estetica e Contributi alla Storia dell' Estetica Italiana. 1910. II. La Filosofia di Giambattista Vico. 1911. Transl. 8. Translations of Croce's Works. By Douglas Ainslie. Macmillan. I. Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept. 1917. II. Philosophy of the Practical, Economic and Ethic. 1913. III. What is living and what is dead of the Philosophy of Hegel. 1915. Encyclopædia of the Philosophical Sciences. Vol. I, containing The Task of Logic. By Benedetto Croce. Macmillan, 1913. The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce. and History. By H. Wildon Carr. The problem of Art SYMMETRICAL philosophical system, which proclaims as ts principle a perfectly spiritual realm of being, realising tself through a continuous conflict of good and evil, in which good is necessarily triumphant and progressive, ffers much that is attractive to thoughtful men to-day. When we further note that it promises a complete beration from metaphysical and theological dogma, and lirects our serious attention to the fullest and truest nterpretation of actual life and history, rather than to roblems of the Absolute or, in any sense, of another world, its attractiveness is probably intensified. But yet our curiosity will be aroused as to the definitio of that province which is to be thus excluded from contemplation. In general terms like these we may describe the firs impression produced by Croce's philosophy. Signor Croc is a senator of the kingdom of Italy, whose philosophica writings, together with his copious contributions t literary criticism, have attained a remarkable popularit in his own country. And he hardly needs to-day a introduction to English readers, to whom his principa systematic works are accessible in readable translation while Mr Carr's lucid study offers a valuable synopsis his thought. Croce's speculation is plainly animated by a doubl intellectual motive, to affirm spirituality and to den transcendence. Subject to this latter condition, we fin him applying and developing with extreme resolution an acuteness those effective conceptions which a spiritu monism has at command. There is no reality, he teache but the one spirit. It lives in finite individuals, in th main, such as ourselves; their minds are its consciousness their philosophy is its self-consciousness; their action its history. Reality is its progress; a necessary bu creative evolution in which contradictions, evoked by th spirit's activity, are for ever being resolved by its con structive thought and will. The spirit is a universa which has its life and being in the individual; what real is always this concrete life; abstractions are alway fictitious. Freedom is the volition of the individua mind, identified at once with a given historical situation which is the necessary basis of its action, and with th thinking will which re-creates that necessary datum int novelty. The great positive experiences, Beauty, Truth Pleasure, and Goodness, carry with them respectivel their opposites, Ugliness, Error, Pain, and Evil, which in accordance with the law of reality, are at once neces sary to their being, and perpetually absorbed into it self-completion. Handling uncompromisingly conceptions so com prehensive, a philosopher of acute genius and ver considerable learning, a master, moreover, of a vivid an pleasing literary style, he holds an effective position in th modern world. He offers, it would seem, the advantage of monism without mysticism, and of positivism without realism. The physical realist, the pluralist, the pragmatist, have as short a shrift from Croce as they might have had from Hegel. Neither determinist nor indeterminist can stand up against the doctrine of a freedom which arises as the transformation of a necessity. Neither optimist nor pessimist has a chance in face of the idea of a good to which actual evil is at once essential and subordinate. At every point the more commonplace formulæ are exterminated by the criticism of a thinker who wields Hegel's dialectic to the destruction of what is abstract and one-sided. And yet, on the other hand, he is resolute in affirming that it must not and does not carry him a single step towards any Absolute or any being beyond the human world; not a single step beyond the methodological ideas which plain historical data demand for their elucidation. The system which he offers is simple and symmetrical. The whole of reality lies in the connected activities of the spirit. The whole of philosophy lies in the methodical analysis of these activities, each by itself, though forming, taken together, a connected circle of ideas. There is no single reality in the sense of a supreme experience; there is no unique or central problem of philosophy as such; that is to say, there is no metaphysic and no criterion of the real. We shall have to determine as best we can whether on these terms there is a universe. The forms or activities of the spirit are two only, knowledge and will. Knowledge is prima facie presupposed by will, but not will by knowledge. Knowledge s the condition of action; will cannot be blind. Each of chese divisions, necessarily and symmetrically, falls into wo subordinate shapes, related to each other as individual to universal. For knowledge first appears as imagery or 'intuition.' We are apt, indeed, to suppose that knowledge begins with sense-perception. But there is something which Croce likes to think of as earlier than this; prior cerainly in a logical sense, and also, it is clear, to some extent in temporal succession. He gives a striking decription of the instant of pure intuition, the living of he sensation, before reflection and volition ensue upon it with lightning rapidity.* This is the pure work o imagination-the image-making power-in presentin before the mind the particulars which form its world It is mere vision or apprehension, without affirmatio of real or unreal. And it is the essence of æsthetic in tuition. Further-this is one, perhaps the greatest, Croce's paradoxes-indistinguishably from this come the beginning of language, which ab initio is one wit the aesthetic experience. For all intuition is expression and is essentially inward, whether its medium be colou musical sound, or any other type of sense-quality, again, what we call articulate speech. Only, if we insis in thinking of language in terms of speech, we are t identify it with speech in its full unanalysed concrete ness, as the self-complete sentence in its continuous son or cry, with its individual accompaniment of dramati look and gesture. All this expression of the soul is on thing with the aesthetic intuition; it is man's primar utterance of what his world is to him; we may call his natural lyric. This intuition, the primary form knowledge, in itself and in its purity, coincides with th province of æsthetic experience, with all that belongs t fine art and to beauty. For this primitive feature remains the essential cha racter of art, however elaborated and intellectualise Just as, for the theorist of modern impressionism, th æsthetic vision never forfeits the singleness of the pr mary appreciation, so for Croce the expressionist, th intuition, though it may grow from an interjection int a five-act tragedy, will never be more than an imagina tive presentation, free from any distinction between wha is real and what is not. The sayings of Polonius remai images of Polonius' personality; they are not philoso phical affirmations in their own right. Indeed we hav been mistaken, so Croce will tell us,† if we have looke for art and beauty among the loftiest summits of philo sophy. Their strength is rather in their humbleness they belong to the birthday of the spiritual life. 'Poetr is "the maternal language of the human race"; th first men were by nature sublime poets."'The poeti *Fulmineamente,' Saggi i, 484. tEsthetic,' Tr., p. 381. Esthetic,' Tr., p. 43. The borrowed phrases are from Vico. |