any contradiction which could explain the transition, say, to truth.* This confirms the suggestion that he does not connect the nature or movement of reality with the conception of a whole. But the conception seems indispensable, even to account for the facts as he assumes them. And it leaves us free to examine all experiences on their merits as degrees of reality. There ceases to be any ground for Croce's criticism on the dialectic, that it represents substantial experiences, such as art, history, and the natural sciences, as imperfect forms of philosophy, destroying the autonomy' of the forms of the spirit. It is remarkable that the worst of such errors, the treatment of æsthetic experience and of religion as forms of knowledge, are adopted by Croce himself, though not, in our belief, justly attributable to Hegel. If we attach importance to this point of view, a good deal may be reconsidered which has given us pause in Croce, without destroying the value of his resolute antitranscendentism. He denounces uncompromisingly, for instance, the ideas of metaphysics, of a general philosophy, of a single persistent problem to which all philosophy must address itself. But we found that we could not refer his two movements of the real to a single mainspring. We could discover no logical principle in his degrees of reality.' We could not believe that his partial phases of the spirit are severally free from internal contradiction. So that, although we may rejoice in his repudiation of any 'other' world which cannot be established as the right interpretation of this,' it still seems to us that philosophy is mutilated if we do not recognise as its central problem the nature of reality, its degrees, and its criterion. It is, we cannot help believing, for want of such an inherent order that an artificial symmetry has been adopted. There is a simple test. The scheme allows no implication forwards. Esthetic and Economic respectively are implied in what succeeds them, but do not imply it. Now implication depends on the whole immanent in the parts. Where there are parts without implication, * 'Logic,' Tr., 103; 'Saggio sullo Hegel,' 65. † 'Saggio sullo Hegel,' p. 83. parts which are not more than themselves, you have no true whole of reality and no philosophical system. We may return for a moment to the aesthetic experience. We saw that its priority was doubtful. It is an innocence; but it is an acquired innocence. Nor is æsthetic one with linguistic. If we take all expression to be language, we must still consider expression to be content no less than content is expression; and, if we give the word 'language' its full significance of speech, which involves the analysis of ideas into other ideas, the doctrine comes to be two removes from truth. It is a triumph of art to subordinate speech to beauty, but speech in itself has other aims. And we regret that, by identifying expression with inward intuition, Croce is led wholly to deny the aesthetic significance of physical media, and to reject all enquiry into distinctions between the fine arts founded upon their differences. Externalisation' is for him a mere practical act, subsequent upon 'intuition,' which is purely ideal. It has no æsthetic function, but is merely instrumental to preserving and reproducing the beauty created by inward imagination. Now grant him that the physical world is nothing but spirit. Then he must not annul its significance, but must translate it into spiritual terms. The discipline of the soul through the body, the artist's delight in his mastery of the plastic media, constitute the training of the determinate imagination which is made one with the spirit of things in some special world of beauty. It is a poor idealism which robs the soul of its body. Logically considered, again, æsthetic experience is not knowledge, but has a fundamentally different character. In it, idea and existence are unseparated; and it thus peculiarly anticipates the character of the whole reality. Practice and theory are both, we might say, discursive. In both the idea is opposed to the existence, though in each the adjustment is differently effected. Beside the subordination of æsthetic and economic, we have to note the exclusion of other spiritual forms for which the system can find no place.* Such are sociality, religion, metaphysic. For example, Religion is nothing but knowledge, and does not differ from its *Esthetic,' ch. viii. * other forms and subforms.' There is nothing left to share with religion'; that is to say, the other forms and subforms occupy the whole domain. Some of us, on the other hand, agree with a weighty judgment: The man who demands a reality more solid than that of the religious consciousness, seeks he knows not what.'† What is it, then, finally, that Croce desires to reject in repudiating transcendence? And what attitude does he adopt in consequence towards the fundamental contentions of recent philosophy? In a very plain-spoken paper he insists on the idea that philosophy is nothing more than the methodology of history-writing. This would naturally mean that philosophical conceptions are purely instrumental to the ordering and elucidation of historical data. And he undoubtedly intends to insist on some conclusion of this nature, although it does not follow that such conceptions are pure postulates or fictions. What he has primarily in mind, when he denies transcendence, is, I should venture to think, the Catholic creed and philosophy, which in the judgment of Gentile, a thinker much in harmony with Croce, is the pre-eminent heir and representative of other-worldliness (Gentile's 'Il Modernismo'). Thus religion becomes a creed, and metaphysic a theology. It is in this sense, in the main, that Croce repudiates both. But he also plainly rejects, and with some contumely, the Absolute, and the Reality contrasted with Appearance, of Hegel and of some kindred philosophers.§ His logical point in this rejection is that he takes these forms of experience not as inclusive of what is relative and apparent, but as parts of existence selected qua superior in nature to other parts, that is, as sharing the character which makes the thing in itself essentially an 'other world.' We cannot here discuss whether this is fair to Hegel. Nor can we be certain whether Croce would apply it to the absolutist theory familiar to us in England. We, of course, should deny its applicability. It is noticeable that Croce assents to the use of such Esthetic,' Tr., 102, 104. 6 Bradley, Appearance and Reality,' 419. Teoria,' 136 ff.; expressions as Absolute,* God, religion, metaphysic, in his own sense of the words. Therefore he admits an absolutism unaffected by the comic hue which he finds in the absolutist of to-day. But what he understands by such terms appear to be the forms of the spirit in their re-entrant curve, and the human consciousness of them, taken as the self-consciousness of the reality whose progression they constitute. What he denies, I think, is the unity of things in a supreme inclusive experience, or of spirits in a human-divine nature especially aware of itself in the religious consciousness. This denial follows from his disregard of the principle of totality; and the rejection of metaphysic as the criterion of the real, addressed to the fundamental problem of philosophy, inevitably follows. How far, we asked, does he recognise a universe? Reality is a progress to infinity, and does not merely include infinite progressions. Therefore perfection, if there is to be any, must lie in the series itself, and this has familiar difficulties, which we saw that Croce endeavours to escape (supra, p. 370). It is a hard saying, for instance, that the greatest things we have yet known are destined to be forgotten, especially as the human world seems sometimes to be treated as the universe. There is, however, a constant universe in respect of the categories such as beauty and truth. Reality surpasses itself ad infinitum, but does not surpass these. But again he has an instructive objection to a dialectic movement which comes to an end. If it has a raison d'être at all, why not go on for ever? This shows how he ignores the principle that the mover is the immanent whole. For him, we suspect, there is no whole for the abstractions to return to. But the genuine infinite, we should urge, though inexhaustible, is self-complete. And we must note that inclusive transcendence is involved in Croce's own conceptions. There is the unity of past and present in history; all history is contemporary.' This implies a reality which includes appearances. The unity is obviously different from what the individual directly experiences, and is more real. * Practice,' Tr., p. 302. But much that has happened is, on his view, irrevocably gone. It has become a thing in itself, for it is an inaccessible real. The universe, if there is one, arbitrarily ejects portions of itself. Finally, what is that religion, the only religion he admits, which is superseded and replaced by philosophy? There are two possible answers. If we take philosophy to be a strictly speculative activity, which is surely the literal truth, then a religion, destined to be replaced by it, must be a theoretical doctrine; and this is what Croce seemed to say clearly that religion is. If so, we may venture to affirm, he simply and totally ignores the religious consciousness. But another possibility is worth mentioning. Philosophy may in a sense replace religion if it contains, but elucidates, the genuine religious experience. But then it is no longer philosophy literally taken. It has been made into more than it necessarily is. Religion, the individual's self-subordination to supreme power and goodness-supernaturalism has nothing to do with the matter-will still be the most solid fact in the world. But philosophy-and this is how Hegel understood it, for the Absolute spirit includes and does not supersede its forms-would have for its task to show that religion is the truth, the complete reality, of the mind that lived in Art, that founded the State, and sought to be dutiful and upright; the truth, the crowning fruit of all scientific knowledge, of all human affections, of all secular consciousness. Its lesson [that of philosophy] ultimately is that there is nothing essentially common or unclean; that the holy is not parted off from the true and the good and the beautiful.' * This conclusion would be a consequence of the attitude for which reality is the whole; and we should like to believe that so remarkable a thinker as Croce is not unsympathetic to it. BERNARD BOSANQUET. * Wallace, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind,' Introduction, p. xlvi. |