controversy, but it is a question whether Croce sufficientl recognises it.

It is important that in the doctrine of the moral wil the reality of freedom on the one hand and the unrealit of evil on the other-truths difficult to conciliate-an both vigorously maintained. If the view is paradoxica yet it is a valuable side of truth, brilliantly expounded.

In the first place, volition is the act founded on th given situation. You are responsible for the whole this, as material to be dealt with. You cannot say, intended so well, but the situation divorced my will fro my intention and made it bad.' Intention is coextensiv with will. If you have to act in ignorance, you mus accept your ignorance as part of the situation. You a aware of it; you take the responsibility of it, as yo take the responsibility of your next step upon an ic slope. Definite theoretical error, on the other hand, different thing from ignorance, does not exist. W catch our breath at the paradox. What it means is thi To think is to think truly; to think falsely is not t think, but to do some convenient action of another kin -to be careless or slovenly or to lie. The argumen applies to all ugliness, error, incoherence, and evil; demands a moment's attention. It rests on an assure truth, that in all negation there is an assertion of som positive factor which excludes the term denied. So it i then, with Croce, in error and evil. Both, not the latte only, are practical in their origin, and imply a positiv action which replaces or excludes what should have bee thought or done. A wife hands her husband in the dar the poisonous lotion in place of his medicine. (The exampl is not Croce's.) She thought it was the right bottle. Th act has its rational explanation from the agent's poin of view. The identification seemed to her sufficient. T pronounce it false cannot be the part of the agent at th time of acting; and the same applies to evil. To pro nounce the knowledge false or the action bad is a com ment made by one who is wiser or better. An error in then an act of slovenliness, of parti pris, of rebellion together with a comment or desire in the spectator There ought to have been here a genuine act of thought Thus Croce defends the Inquisition on the ground of the moral discipline essential to conscientious thinking. W

err only when we wish to err. It seems true that all error is due to one-sided emphasis. And this may well arise from indolence or bias, though surely, in the main, it is inherent in the finiteness of thought a point of view which Croce appears to neglect.

Thus theoretical ignorance can never be pleaded as turning a good intention into a bad volition. But the point of the paradox is partly broken by a distinction between the action and the event. Volition and action are one, but action and event are two; because the event includes the actions of innumerable beings other than any single agent. Though you may judge an action by ntention, therefore, you cannot judge it by success. If you judge morally in history, you must take care to udge not an event but an action.

The paradox above stated affects the reality of evil. freedom, as we said at starting, is the creative work of he spirit as it transforms a given situation by the solution f the problem which it offers. But in every situation e are beset by innumerable solicitations, and we cannot o justice to them all. We may fail by passive acceptnce, or by caprice, which are at bottom the same thing. he respect in which we fail, our passivity or non-will, that we let go or let be, is evil, the evil which is the adow of good and its condition. Now, as we saw, evil, ke error, cannot be such for the agent. His act, de eto, is a fulfilment of his want, and, for him, has its stification. Only in the comment of the better man, rhaps in that of the agent after the fact, 'Would it ere otherwise!' does it reveal itself as evil. This gives Croce's meaning when he says that as real, as a sitive fact, it is not evil. It is only explicitly evil hen and where its badness is revealed; but then and ere it is no longer real. It is ipso facto rejected and ercome. Its positive poisonous reaction, we may think,

inadequately recognised.

From these ideas we are led to his 'dialectical opnism,' which translates into terms of good and evil the

ndamental idea of reality

eing and not-being,' in which the negative is continually sorbed, to the enrichment of the positive. These conptions are familiar; but in Croce's hands they are bordinated to the reservation we mentioned at starting,

as 'becoming,' as a struggle of

Vol. 231.-No. 459.

that all transcendence, we might almost say all totali is repudiated. The reality is itself a progress and progress to infinity, though the attainment of the end Croce is aware of the fate of Tantalus *-is not infinit deferred, but is continuously achieved. Cosmic adva is necessary and demonstrated.

'From the cosmic point of view, at which we now pl ourselves, reality shows itself as a continuous growing u itself; nor is a real regress ever conceivable, because e being that which is not, is unreal, and that which is is alw and only the good. The real is always rational, and rational is always real. Cosmic progress, then, is itself & the object of affirmation, not problematic but apodictic.'t

'The work of the spirit is not finished and never will finished. Our yearning for something higher is not in v The very yearning, the infinity of our desire, is proof of infinity of that progress. The plant dreams of the anim the animal of man, man of superman; for this, too, i reality, if it be reality that with every historical movem man surpasses himself. The time will come when the gr deeds and the great works now our memory and our bo will be forgotten, as we have forgotten the works the deeds, no less great, of those beings of supreme ger who created what we call human life, and seem to us I to have been savages of the lowest grade, almost m monkeys. They will be forgotten, for the document of I gress is in forgetting.'

Man does not seek a God external to himself and alm a despot, who commands and benefits him capriciously; does he aspire to an immortality of insipid ease; but he se for that God which he has in himself, and aspires to t activity which is both life and death.' §

It is characteristic of Croce that the positive acco of the ethical will is brief. The universal is the ob of the whole philosophy of the spirit; and there is noth special to reveal when you come upon it in moral ph sophy. You may call it the whole, life, freedom, progr There is no prerogative insistence on the social origin moral content. The social situation is a situation 1 another; each has its requirements. He is clear t

happiness is activity, and that to will the good, that is, to will activity, and to be happy, are the same thing.

Two more points must be noted before we leave the philosophy of practice. First, that nature as it is, not the abstract physical nature of science, participates in evolution, and therefore is conscious. And secondly, that, whereas at first knowledge seemed the condition precedent of practice, it is now clear that practice, the creation of reality, is no less the condition of knowledge. Reality is an eternal circle between the two. To some students this will seem ominous. They will reflect that 'Certainly hitherto we have found everywhere that an unresting ircle of this kind [between thought and will] is the mark of appearance.'t To this question we must return.

In attempting to appreciate the system which has een thus imperfectly sketched, it will be necessary to ursue a point of view on which Croce himself has laid reat stress, as his essential difference from Hegel. Our bject is not to criticise historically his reading of that inker's ideas, but to illustrate his position by comarison with a substantial truth which emerges from egel's teaching, as from that of many great philosohers before him.

The point in question is the nature of reality as a hole, and of the criterion by which philosophy can ppreciate it; in other words, the unity implied in exrience, and the principle of metaphysic.

We may approach it thus. Croce has developed, in essay which is the logical keystone of his philosophy,‡ undamental objection to the course of Hegel's dialectic. points out, what is an obvious fact, that there is a in difference between the relation to each other of sitive terms and their negations, such as being and t-being, true and false, and that of conceptions both which are positive, and which are consistent with each her, though distinct, such as truth and beauty, which cording to his system are separate phases of the spirit. w Hegel's dialectic, the process by which in his logic progress arises through the conciliation of opposites

'Practice,' Tr., p. 302.

+ Bradley, "Appearance and Reality,' p. 474. 'Saggio sullo Hegel.'

in more complete ideas, treats both these types of cor nexion alike-that of positive and negative terms, an that of terms both positive, but distinguished from eac other-as degrees in a logical progression. This identica treatment Croce holds to be irrational. He confines th

principle of advance by absorption of negations-dialect proper to such cases as the progression from bein through not-being to becoming, or from truth throug falsehood to a richer truth. The unity in distinction positive phases of the spirit, as of beauty with truth with goodness, seems to him to be of a different orde These terms do not appear to him to be abstraction and the movement from one to the other he treats as circle or an alternation, there being no internal contr diction within each to suggest a transition to a high totality. We judge from his attitude that he does no recognise the simple and fundamental principle of th reasoning. I quote from a master of logic—

"The opposition between the real, in that fragmenta character in which the mind possesses it, and the true reali felt within the mind, is the moving cause of that unre which sets up the dialectical process.' 'The datum felt insufficient, and as such is denied. But in and throug this denial the reality produces that supplement which wa required to complete the datum, and which very supplemen forefelt in the mind, was the active base of the dissatisfactio and the consequent negation. The important point is that, o this second view, both sides of the correlation are positive, an one is not the mere denial of the other.'*

The coincidentia oppositorum, the advance by contra dictions, is for Croce, so far as we can see, a metho of which no rationale need be offered, and which restricted, in harmony with its paradoxical appearanc to abstract terms and their negations. But in trut there is a sound and universal rationale. It is the la of implication, ex pede Herculem. You incur contra diction in affirming a partial datum as such, becaus of the immanence of the whole. This is the criterion coherence and comprehensiveness together are the tes of wholeness, that is, of reality. In remarkable passage Croce refuses to find within such an experience as beaut

Bradley, Principles of Logic,' 381-2. Italics the present writer's.