and Germany. Any single month of the Thirty Years' War, or even the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, cost more, lives than the whole course of the Inquisition. The victims of the Holy Office were far outnumbered by those who were boiled, roasted or pincered to death during the 17th-century epidemic of witch-mania in such educated countries as Germany, North Britain or New England. If the exaggeration of Catholicism did in some degree stifle thought in Spain, the same may be said of the arid and interminable discussions on doctrinal formulæ in Lutheran Germany. The literary and artistic bloom of Spain belong to the very age when the Inquisition was running riot. perhaps, only one of several factors in Spain's intellectual decline, such as stupid kings, idle people, bureaucratic government and incompetent finance. Spain had suffered from one or more of these before, and it was unlikely that so brilliant a combination as that of Ferdinand and Isabella would be repeated. To sum up, Spain suffered from a surfeit of adventure, to which her enormous coast-line, facing all four points of the compass, tempted her. The strength of the nation was drained seawards. Racial intolerance and ingrained particularism aggravated the evil. Castile claimed the exhausting monoply of America, but the visit of Columbus had been an accident for which she was scarcely ready. The separation of Portugal proved a grave misfortune. Her industrious population, at once agricultural and nautical, would have formed an invaluable reserve for the martial manhood of Castile, while Brazil would not have broken the continuity of Spanish America. Adventure from the first starved agriculture. Soldiers, sailors and settlers left the inland provinces to idlers, who would neither sow nor reap, and 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: II. 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. 3. Translations of Croce's Works. By Douglas Ainslic. 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. 4. Encyclopædia of the Philosophical Sciences. Vol. I, containing The Task of Logic. By Benedetto Croce. Macmillan, 1913. 5. The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce. and History. By H. Wildon Carr. The problem of Art A SYMMETRICAL philosophical system, which proclaims as its principle a perfectly spiritual realm of being, realising itself through a continuous conflict of good and evil, in which good is necessarily triumphant and progressive, offers much that is attractive to thoughtful men to-day. When we further note that it promises a complete liberation from metaphysical and theological dogma, and directs our serious attention to the fullest and truest interpretation of actual life and history, rather than to problems 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 definition of that province which is to be thus excluded from contemplation. In general terms like these we may describe the first impression produced by Croce's philosophy. Signor Croce is a senator of the kingdom of Italy, whose philosophical writings, together with his copious contributions to literary criticism, have attained a remarkable popularity in his own country. And he hardly needs to-day an introduction to English readers, to whom his principal systematic works are accessible in readable translations, while Mr Carr's lucid study offers a valuable synopsis of his thought. Croce's speculation is plainly animated by a double intellectual motive, to affirm spirituality and to deny transcendence. Subject to this latter condition, we find him applying and developing with extreme resolution and acuteness those effective conceptions which a spiritual monism has at command. There is no reality, he teaches, but the one spirit. It lives in finite individuals, in the main, such as ourselves; their minds are its consciousness; their philosophy is its self-consciousness; their action is its history. Reality is its progress; a necessary but creative evolution in which contradictions, evoked by the spirit's activity, are for ever being resolved by its constructive thought and will. The spirit is a universal which has its life and being in the individual; what is real is always this concrete life; abstractions are always fictitious. Freedom is the volition of the individual mind, identified at once with a given historical situation, which is the necessary basis of its action, and with the thinking will which re-creates that necessary datum into novelty. The great positive experiences, Beauty, Truth, Pleasure, and Goodness, carry with them respectively their opposites, Ugliness, Error, Pain, and Evil, which, in accordance with the law of reality, are at once necessary to their being, and perpetually absorbed into its self-completion. Handling uncompromisingly conceptions so comprehensive, a philosopher of acute genius and very considerable learning, a master, moreover, of a vivid and pleasing literary style, he holds an effective position in the modern world. He offers, it would seem, the advantages 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 primâ facie presupposed by will, but not will by knowledge. Knowledge is the condition of action; will cannot be blind. Each of these divisions, necessarily and symmetrically, falls into two 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 certainly in a logical sense, and also, it is clear, to some extent in temporal succession. He gives a striking description of the instant of pure intuition, the living of the sensation, before reflection and volition ensue upon it with lightning rapidity.* This is the pure work of imagination—the image-making power-in presenting before the mind the particulars which form its world. It is mere vision or apprehension, without affirmation of real or unreal. And it is the essence of æsthetic intuition. Further-this is one, perhaps the greatest, of Croce's paradoxes-indistinguishably from this comes the beginning of language, which ab initio is one with the æsthetic experience. For all intuition is expression, and is essentially inward, whether its medium be colour, musical sound, or any other type of sense-quality, or again, what we call articulate speech. Only, if we insist in thinking of language in terms of speech, we are to identify it with speech in its full unanalysed concreteness, as the self-complete sentence in its continuous song or cry, with its individual accompaniment of dramatic look and gesture. All this expression of the soul is one thing with the aesthetic intuition; it is man's primary utterance of what his world is to him; we may call it his natural lyric. This intuition, the primary form of knowledge, in itself and in its purity, coincides with the province of æsthetic experience, with all that belongs to fine art and to beauty. For this primitive feature remains the essential character of art, however elaborated and intellectualised. Just as, for the theorist of modern impressionism, the æsthetic vision never forfeits the singleness of the primary appreciation, so for Croce the expressionist, the intuition, though it may grow from an interjection into a five-act tragedy, will never be more than an imaginative presentation, free from any distinction between what is real and what is not. The sayings of Polonius remain images of Polonius' personality; they are not philosophical affirmations in their own right. Indeed we have been mistaken, so Croce will tell us,† if we have looked for art and beauty among the loftiest summits of philosophy. Their strength is rather in their humbleness; they belong to the birthday of the spiritual life. 'Poetry is "the maternal language of the human race"; the first men "were by nature sublime poets."' The poetic *Fulmineamente,' Saggi i, 484. Esthetic,' Tr., p. 381. |