BENEDETTO CROCE.*
IT is not too much to say that at this moment France and Italy have taken thelead in the work of constructivespeculation, and it is pleasant to note that we in England are recognizing the fact. Bergson has come to his own with us, and we may predict that the brilliant work of Henri Poincar6 will soon meet with due recognition on this side of the Channel. Our philosophical mathematicians have long looked to Italy, and we have now no less than three translated volumes of Ciroce's work. Croce is, indeed, a remarkable figure in the world to-day. Comparatively young, for he is not yet fifty, he has won a position of philosophical dictatorship in his own country. Ho is the nearest modern approach to a polymath, for he is a profound student and an acute critic of literature and art, a good historian, an economist, man of science, a publicist, as well as a philosopher. As philosopher he is perhaps the most widely learned of our day in the documents of his subject. Few phases of specula- tion, however obscure and distant, are unknown to him, and he alone seems qualified to write that authoritative history of philosophy which the world has long needed. But his learning is the least part of his gifts. He has a mind of immense scope and penetration, a style easy and perspicuous and with something of Latin grace, and a remarkable sanity and balance. He has a deadly power of destructive criticism, but alone of the moderns he has attempted to build up a complete system of thought in the fearless old fashion, and there is a grandeur about his reach even when we question the correctness of his grasp. He starts from homely things, from the ordinary consciousness, like all great thinkers, and gives a masterly analysis of the meanings which lurk behind our everyday observation. He is never captious or flighty, and he has a unique gift of sifting out what seems to him to be the truth in other systems and using it to illustrate his own processes. It is too early yet to try to estimate Croce's contribution to thought, for he is still contributing; but his work, so far as it has gone, is a most stimulating mental discipline.
Mr. Douglas Ainslie is to be warmly congratulated on his translation of the Philosophy of the Practical, which is marked by singular clearness and force. Croce's English dress is as well-fitting and appropriate as Bergson's, which is to say a good deal. Some four years ago he translated the Aesthetic, the first part of Croce's Philosophy of the Spirit. The second part is the Logic, of which we have not yet an English version, and the third part is the volume now before us. Croce, it will be remembered, postulates two activities in human life, the theoretic and the practical. The theoretic has two grades—the aesthetic, which is intuitive knowledge and deals with the phenomenon, and the logical, which is concep- tual knowledge and deals with the nonmenon. So with the practical activity, which has for its first grade the useful or economic activity, which wills the phenomenon, and for its second grade the moral activity, which wills the noutnenon. In the Aesthetic Croce laid down the doctrine that there could be no distinction between matter and form; the aesthetic intuition when fully realized in the soul of the artist was complete also in expression, and all that remained was to communicate it to the external world. In the same way he holds that volition and action are indivisible, that the one is inconceivable with- out the other, and that a will which is not realized in deed is an imperfect will, not an imperfect execution. The mistake has arisen, he says, from confusing "action" with "event."
The volition of the individual is, as it were, the contribution that he brings to the volition of all the other beings in the universe, event the aggregate of all the wills and the answer to all the questions." This is not the place to analyse his closely reasoned treatment of the whole metaphysic of the will and the question of determinism and freedom. Like Bergson, he regards the dilemma of free-will and necessity as a false one owing to the use of obscure terms, which on a higher level of thought can be transcended. His treat- ment of the problem of evil, too, is highly suggestive, bnt these discussions do not lend themselves to a ready summary. The latter part of the book is occupied with Croce's orientation under his scheme of the two practical forms • (1) Philosophy of the Practsaa: Economic and /Chia. By Benedetto Croce. Translated by Douglas Ainslie. London: Macmillan and co. E12.. not.]-- (2) The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. By Benedetto Croce. Translated by B. G. Coll=gwood- London; Upward Latimer. [1.0s. 6d. nag
of economics and ethics. Very clearly and subtly he delimits their respective spheres, and he is eager to distin- guish what he calls the philosophy of economy from economic science. The latter is essentially a quantitative discipline, an applied mathematic, and he is anxious to maintain the rigour of its abstraction. He has very little love for the philosophic and historical school in economics, to whom he would say, "Spare yourselves the trouble of philosophizing. Calculate, and do not think." But he protests equally against those who Would take for reality or final truth "the fictions excogitated for the establishment of the calculus." The empirical results of economics can never be regarded as universal truths:—
" When we undertake to demonstrate that wealth is destroyed by protection, the demonstration is efficacious only if the wealth, said to be destroyed, is precisely that of which it was desired to assure the increase by protection ; but nothing has been proved if it be a different quality of wealth that it may be desirable to acquire, even with the lose and destruction of the other. For example, a people may find it advantageous from a political and military pouit of view to maintain in its territories the cultivation of grain or the construction of ships, even if that were to coat more than to provide itself with grain and ships from abroad; in this case we should. strictly speaking, talk, not of the destruc- tion of wealth, but rather of the acquisition of wealth (presumed national security), paid for with dear grain and dear naval con- struotion. When the empirical idea of free trade was raised to the dignity of laws of nature, there was a rebellion against the economists, by which it was made clear that those laws of nature were laws, not absolute, but empirical, that is to say, historical and contingent facts, and that the economists who propounded them as absolute were not at all men of science, but politicians."
The ethical section is no less illuminating. We would quote, as a proof of Croce's robust sanity, a few sentences from his philippic against " anti-moralism "
"It thinks to celebrate strength, health, and freedom, but on the contrary exalts servitude to unbridled passions, the apparent health of the invalid, and the apparent strength of the maniac. Morality, far from being a pedantic fiction or the consolation of the impotent, is good blood against bad blood."
Giambattista Vico, the Italian philosopher of the early eighteenth century, had many affinities with Signor Croce. Like him he was a universal scholar, who gave to the world not only a metaphysic and a theory of knowledge, but new theories on art, literature, and history. Vico baa special claims on the attention of readers of to-day. He was curiously original and modern in his outlook, and there may be found in him the kind of metaphysical mathematics which is fashionable to-day, and the distinction between the true and the demonstrable which is one of the props of our modern philosophy of religion. Croce's study of the old Neapolitan thinker, which has been admirably translated by Mr. It. G. Collingwood, is valuable not only as a fine piece of philosophical biography, but for its wealth of historical illustration and for the light which it casts upon the biographer's own thought. Vico is the source from which flow many different streams of speculation. He forecast the historical method in the study of law, which has been brought to perfection by modern German jurists; he introduced a new spirit into history and into classical scholarship; he anticipated many of the Homeric criticisms which we associate with the name of Wolf ; he was a pioneer in the study of mythology; he foreshadowed much of the etymological work of Grimm; and he revolutionized the accepted view of the Middle Ages. Mingled with a great deal of fanciful stuff, we can find a critique of the fashionable Cartesianism of his day which has been repeated in modern idealism. In spite of the divergence of their results, he may well stand beside Leibniz as a figure of unwearied vitality. In his aesthetic he broke down the arid doctrines of mediaevalism and prepared the way for the great German movement which we associate with Leasing and Schelling and Hegel. He was too multiform to found a school, and his temper, perhaps, was too alien to that of his day to allow him to be a great contemporary force. But he has had his reward, for at the great momenta of Italian awakening he has been hailed as pre-eminently the national philosopher, and it is only right that the great Italian thinker of to-day should perform the pious duty of elucidating and appraising his predecessor. He also deserves to rank in that comparatively small class of great men who have performed uncomplainingly the homeliest duties
"The repose," says Signor Croce, "the peace, the tranquillity which other philosophers enjoy all their life or for long periods
together was always lacking to Vico. He was forced to play both Martha and Mary: working at every moment for his own and his family's practical needs, and working at the same time to fulfil the mission to which he was devoted from Me birth and to give concrete form to the spiritual world that moved within him."
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