controversy, but it is a question whether Croce sufficiently recognises it. It is important that in the doctrine of the moral will, the reality of freedom on the one hand and the unreality of evil on the other-truths difficult to conciliate-are both vigorously maintained. If the view is paradoxical yet it is a valuable side of truth, brilliantly expounded. In the first place, volition is the act founded on the given situation. You are responsible for the whole of this, as material to be dealt with. You cannot say, 'I intended so well, but the situation divorced my will from my intention and made it bad.' Intention is coextensive with will. If you have to act in ignorance, you must accept your ignorance as part of the situation. You are aware of it; you take the responsibility of it, as you take the responsibility of your next step upon an iceslope. Definite theoretical error, on the other hand, a different thing from ignorance, does not exist. We catch our breath at the paradox. What it means is this. To think is to think truly; to think falsely is not to think, but to do some convenient action of another kind -to be careless or slovenly or to lie. The argument applies to all ugliness, error, incoherence, and evil; it demands a moment's attention. It rests on an assured truth, that in all negation there is an assertion of some positive factor which excludes the term denied. So it is, then, with Croce, in error and evil. Both, not the latter only, are practical in their origin, and imply a positive action which replaces or excludes what should have been thought or done. A wife hands her husband in the dark the poisonous lotion in place of his medicine. (The example is not Croce's.) She thought it was the right bottle. The act has its rational explanation from the agent's point of view. The identification seemed to her sufficient. To pronounce it false cannot be the part of the agent at the time of acting; and the same applies to evil. To pronounce the knowledge false or the action bad is a comment made by one who is wiser or better. An error is 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. We 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 intention, therefore, you cannot judge it by success. If you judge morally in history, you must take care to judge 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 the spirit as it transforms a given situation by the solution of the problem which it offers. But in every situation we are beset by innumerable solicitations, and we cannot do justice to them all. We may fail by passive acceptance, or by caprice, which are at bottom the same thing. The respect in which we fail, our passivity or non-will, what we let go or let be, is evil, the evil which is the shadow of good and its condition. Now, as we saw, evil, like error, cannot be such for the agent. His act, de facto, is a fulfilment of his want, and, for him, has its justification. Only in the comment of the better man, perhaps in that of the agent after the fact, Would it were otherwise!' does it reveal itself as evil. This gives us Croce's meaning when he says that as real, as a positive fact, it is not evil. It is only explicitly evil when and where its badness is revealed; but then and there it is no longer real. It is ipso facto rejected and overcome. Its positive poisonous reaction, we may think, is inadequately recognised. 6 From these ideas we are led to his 'dialectical optimism,' which translates into terms of good and evil the fundamental idea of reality as 'becoming,' as a struggle of 'being and not-being,' in which the negative is continually absorbed, to the enrichment of the positive. These conceptions are familiar; but in Croce's hands they are subordinated to the reservation we mentioned at starting, Vol. 231.-No. 459, 2 B that all transcendence, we might almost say all totality, is repudiated. The reality is itself a progress and in progress to infinity, though the attainment of the endCroce is aware of the fate of Tantalus *—is not infinitely deferred, but is continuously achieved. Cosmic advance is necessary and demonstrated. 'From the cosmic point of view, at which we now place ourselves, reality shows itself as a continuous growing upon itself; nor is a real regress ever conceivable, because evil, being that which is not, is unreal, and that which is is always and only the good. The real is always rational, and the rational is always real. Cosmic progress, then, is itself also the object of affirmation, not problematic but apodictic.'† 'The work of the spirit is not finished and never will be finished. Our yearning for something higher is not in vain. The very yearning, the infinity of our desire, is proof of the infinity of that progress. The plant dreams of the animal, the animal of man, man of superman; for this, too, is a reality, if it be reality that with every historical movement man surpasses himself. The time will come when the great deeds and the great works now our memory and our boast will be forgotten, as we have forgotten the works and the deeds, no less great, of those beings of supreme genius who created what we call human life, and seem to us now to have been savages of the lowest grade, almost menmonkeys. They will be forgotten, for the document of progress is in forgetting.' 'Man does not seek a God external to himself and almost a despot, who commands and benefits him capriciously; nor does he aspire to an immortality of insipid ease; but he seeks for that God which he has in himself, and aspires to that activity which is both life and death.' § It is characteristic of Croce that the positive account of the ethical will is brief. The universal is the object of the whole philosophy of the spirit; and there is nothing special to reveal when you come upon it in moral philosophy. You may call it the whole, life, freedom, progress. There is no prerogative insistence on the social origin of moral content. The social situation is a situation like another; each has its requirements. He is clear that * Saggio sullo Hegel,' p. 163. Practice,' Tr., 258. Practice,' Tr., 253. § Ibid, 261, 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 circle 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 been thus imperfectly sketched, it will be necessary to pursue a point of view on which Croce himself has laid great stress, as his essential difference from Hegel. Our object is not to criticise historically his reading of that thinker's ideas, but to illustrate his position by comparison with a substantial truth which emerges from Hegel's teaching, as from that of many great philosophers before him. The point in question is the nature of reality as a whole, and of the criterion by which philosophy can appreciate it; in other words, the unity implied in experience, and the principle of metaphysic. We may approach it thus. Croce has developed, in an essay which is the logical keystone of his philosophy,‡ a fundamental objection to the course of Hegel's dialectic. He points out, what is an obvious fact, that there is a plain difference between the relation to each other of positive terms and their negations, such as being and not-being, true and false, and that of conceptions both of which are positive, and which are consistent with each other, though distinct, such as truth and beauty, which according to his system are separate phases of the spirit. Now Hegel's dialectic, the process by which in his logic a 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 connexion alike-that of positive and negative terms, and that of terms both positive, but distinguished from each other-as degrees in a logical progression. This identical treatment Croce holds to be irrational. He confines the principle of advance by absorption of negations-dialectic proper to such cases as the progression from being through not-being to becoming, or from truth through falsehood to a richer truth. The unity in distinction of positive phases of the spirit, as of beauty with truth or with goodness, seems to him to be of a different order. These terms do not appear to him to be abstractions; and the movement from one to the other he treats as a circle or an alternation, there being no internal contradiction within each to suggest a transition to a higher totality. We judge from his attitude that he does not recognise the simple and fundamental principle of the reasoning. I quote from a master of logic— "The opposition between the real, in that fragmentary character in which the mind possesses it, and the true reality felt within the mind, is the moving cause of that unrest which sets up the dialectical process.' 'The datum is felt insufficient, and as such is denied. But in and through this denial the reality produces that supplement which was required to complete the datum, and which very supplement, forefelt in the mind, was the active base of the dissatisfaction and the consequent negation. The important point is that, on this second view, both sides of the correlation are positive, and one is not the mere denial of the other.' It is the law The coincidentia oppositorum, the advance by contradictions, is for Croce, so far as we can see, a method of which no rationale need be offered, and which is restricted, in harmony with its paradoxical appearance, to abstract terms and their negations. But in truth there is a sound and universal rationale. of implication, ex pede Herculem. You incur contradiction in affirming a partial datum as such, because of the immanence of the whole. This is the criterion; coherence and comprehensiveness together are the test of wholeness, that is, of reality. In remarkable passages Croce refuses to find within such an experience as beauty * Bradley, Principles of Logic,' 381-2. Italics the present writer's. |