Part 7

It was against this kind of confusion, against the transference of the concepts of one science into another, which was the favourite device of positivism, that Croce continually reacted in his criticism of contemporary thought. He instinctively knew the value of distinctions, and also the value of unity; but he would never pay for unity at the expense of the fine, precise, necessary distinctions. This explains why for a certain number of years he may have appeared as a man occupied in the pursuit of two quite different and unconnected lines of research: his literary friends used to look on his economic studies with wonder and distrust, as on a strange whim and a total waste of time, while the economists more or less resented the intrusion of the outsider. But it explains also why, when he finally attempted to give shape to the conclusions he had reached in regard to one particular group of problems, his grasp of the essential unity and his power to build an inclusive and unspecialized conception of reality, were made visible at once. There was no special problem of thought which could be treated apart from an either implicit or explicit view of the whole of reality: there was no solution of any particular problem which would not affect, and in turn be affected by, the solution of every other problem. Or, to say the same thing in different words, philosophy was a system, not in the sense that a rigid logical scheme could once and forever fit the ever moving stream of reality, but because it is impossible to think the distinctions without the unity, or the unity without the distinctions. That which appears to us, psychologically, as the main characteristic of Croce's mind, transforms itself into the intrinsic logic of his system, in which the principles of unity and of distinction are, as we shall see, fundamental.

In the year 1899 Croce had been compelled to spend a good part of his time in a more or less practical activity in connection with the Centenary of the Neapolitan Republic of 1799, and it was only towards the end of that year that he could dedicate himself entirely to the work he had constantly had in mind since the publication of his essays on literary criticism: the exposition of his concept of art in the fulness of its relations and determinations. It will be well to let Croce himself give us an account of that decisive moment, of the ripening and gathering of his various speculations into their first coherent and systematic expression. "When I started my work, and began to collect my scattered thoughts, I found myself extremely ignorant: the gaps multiplied themselves in my sight; those same things that I thought I held well in my grasp wavered and became confused; unsuspected questions came forward asking for an answer; and during five months I read almost nothing, walked for hours and hours, spent half days and whole days lying on a couch, searching assiduously within myself, and putting down on paper notes and thoughts, each of which was a criticism of the other. This torment grew much worse, when in November I tried to set forth in a concise memoir the fundamental theses of Æsthetics, because, ten times at least, having carried my work up to a certain point, I became aware of the necessity of taking a step which was not justified logically, and I started all over again in order to discover in the beginnings the obscurity or error which had brought me to that quandary; and, having rectified the error, again went my way, and a little further I again stumbled into a similar difficulty. Only after six or seven more months was I able to send to the press that memoir in the form in which it has been printed under the title _Tesi fondamentali di un' Estetica come scienza dell' espressione e linguistica generale_; arid and abstruse, but from which, once I had finished it, I came out not only quite oriented in regard to the problems of the mind, but also with an awakened and sure understanding of almost all the principal problems about which classical philosophers have toiled: an understanding which cannot be acquired by merely reading their books, but only by repeating within oneself, under the stimulus of life, their mental drama."[1] We are so used to see the intellectual worker surrounded and propped up by libraries, laboratories, files, and statistics, that the sight of a man abandoning his books, giving himself up to what by all material standards must be classed as a state of idleness, in order to withdraw into the intimacy of his own consciousness, there to find an answer to the problems of reality, cannot but strike us as incongruous and anachronistic. If we were frank about ourselves, we should confess that our unbounded confidence in the purely material helps is merely a mask for our deep-rooted scepticism, for our absolute lack of confidence in the power of reason. What we cannot hope to attain through our individual effort, we expect as the product of a great machine of thought, in which man enters as a little wheel, accomplishing a given function, as mechanical and impersonal as the rest of the machine. We strive for objectivity, and believe in the automatic fabrication of truth. Through a false analogy with the methods of the natural sciences, imperfectly understood, and assimilated to those of industrial production, we call this process scientific, and we pretend to despise what we fear, the testimony of our consciousness and the hardships of personal thought. Reason, the human reason, the ultimate source of all knowledge, we pay lip homage to, but really put in the same category as the obscure intuition of the mystic. Outside our mechanical objectivity, we seem unable to see anything but an arbitrary subjectivism, a capricious and empirical individuality.

But however incongruous and anachronistic it may appear to us, there is little doubt that this method is the only philosophical method, the method of philosophy in all times. Croce's originality consists merely in having reasserted its validity in such sharp contrast to all the tendencies of the age, and to have shown that true objectivity belongs only to the truth we discover within ourselves, when the eye of our mind is not turned on the transient spectacle of our superficial life, but is reaching under it for that universal consciousness which is the foundation of the individual one. There is no scholar who is as exacting and punctilious as Croce in the choice and elaboration of his material--as conscious of the need of thoroughness and precision--as impatient of any form of improvisation; but he never forgets that the end of all his labours is merely that of _knowing himself,_ in the spirit of the ancient oracle, by acquiring a direct, intimate experience of the processes through which a mind of to-day has come to be what is truly is; of making his own individual consciousness partake more and more of that universality which alone is true consciousness, by liberating itself from all casual determinations, and becoming historically acquainted with itself. It is easy to see how in such a general attitude the road to philosophy is also the road to history; and how both in philosophy and in history the final test must be not that of the dead material, but of the living spirit.

The employment of such a method leads to two consequences: the first, that a philosophy thus conceived will be a philosophy of the human spirit--_Filosofia dello Spirito_--or, as we, following the habits of English-speaking philosophers, shall tentatively call it, a philosophy of mind; the second, that the universality which the individual spirit discovers within itself, not being a static, immovable universality, but merely the form of its ever-changing, historical actuality, philosophy itself will be a continuous progress, and at no particular moment will it be possible to define the thought of the philosopher as a completed system. As we cannot, however, in the small compass of this book, minutely follow all the successive modifications and accretions of Croce's thought, we shall speak of the ten years between 1900 and 1910 as of the period in which the system of the philosophy of mind was developed and determined, and we shall attempt in the following chapters to give a general view of the system itself as it might have appeared in 1910 to a conscientious student of all the works of Croce published during that interval of time.

The _Tesi_ contained already the substance of the _Estetica come scienza dell' espressione e linguistica generale_ which was completed in 1901 and published in 1902, and with which Croce definitely took his place in modern philosophy. The book is divided in two parts, the exposition of the theory and the history of the doctrine. But the two parts are very closely related to each other, as the exposition already criticises all the possible aspects of æsthetic theory, and the history merely disposes the same criticisms in a chronological order, and labels each of them with a name. This plan, with slight alterations, is that of the successive volumes of the _Filosofia dello Spirito_: to the reader who is already acquainted with the history of philosophy, the historical character of the purely theoretical exposition is readily apparent.

Soon after the publication of the _Estetica,_ Croce began to consider his book merely as a programme and a sketch which needed filling in with further developments,--with the investigation of the other forms of human activity, which had been merely postulated in the study of the æsthetic activity; and with a wide cultural work, to be carried on especially by means of a review, through which his ideas should be tested in immediate and constant relation with the problems of contemporary Italian and European thought. The enormous activity of the following years falls easily into this rough division. On one hand we have the completion of the _Filosofia dello Spirito,_ with the _Logica come scienza del concetto puro,_ the first edition of which appeared in 1905 (_Lineamenti di una Logica,_ etc.), and the second, deeply modified by his meditations on the practical activity, in 1909, with the _Filosofia della Pratica: Economica ed Etica,_ written in 1908, but of which some parts had already been given in 1907 in the memoir _Riduzione della filosofia del diritto alla filosofia dell' economia_; and with the new and fuller formulation of his Æsthetics in a paper read to the International Congress of Philosophy in Heidelberg in 1908, on _L'intuizione pura e il carattere lirico dell' arte_. To these must be added the two monographs on Hegel (1906) and Vico (1910), which are at the same time an exposition of their philosophies and a restatement of Croce's own main positions, in so far as they coincided with those elements of truth which he still recognized as living in their thought.

On the other hand we have the publication of a bi-monthly review, _La Critica,_ the first number of which appeared in January, 1903, and which is still being published. _La Critica_ announced itself as a review of literature, history and philosophy, but it differed from all other publications in the same fields in two main features: the first, that the number of its contributors was practically limited to two, Croce himself, and his friend Giovanni Gentile, with whom he had first been brought in contact through their common interest in Marxian studies, and who followed for some years at least a line of thought which touched his own at many points; the second, that it imposed upon itself a very definite programme of work, each number containing an essay, or part of an essay, by Croce on some Italian writer of the preceding half-century, and one by Gentile on the Italian philosophers of the same period, besides a number of reviews of new Italian and foreign books, and notes and comments on contemporary questions of culture and moral life. In his own main work for the _Critica,_ Croce was at the same time aiming at giving concrete examples of the application of æsthetic theory in the domain of literary criticism, and at clearing the ground for the work of the new generation, through an appraisement of the literary values of the preceding one. The general temper of the review is clearly expressed in the following words from the already so often quoted autobiographical notes: "The ideal which I cherished was drawn not from my own personality, but from my varied experience, because, having lived sufficiently in the academic world to know both its virtues and its faults, and having at the same time preserved a feeling of real life, and of literature and science as being born from it and renovating themselves in it, I addressed my censures and my polemics on one hand against dilettanti and unmethodical workers, on the other against the academicians resting in their prejudices and idling with the externals of art and science."[2]

The greatest part of the writings contributed by Croce to the _Critica_ during these years were later collected in volumes, of which however only the _Problemi d'Estetica_ (1910), containing, besides the Heidelberg lecture, a large number of essays both on the theory and history of Æsthetics, appeared before the end of the period we are now considering. To intensify the action of both his books and his review, he initiated in 1906, in connection with the publisher Laterza of Bari, the publication of a series of _Classici della filosofia moderna_, in which he published his own translation of Hegel's Encyclopedia; and in 1909, of the collection _Scrittori d' Italia_, which is in the way to becoming the standard corpus of Italian Literature. He took also a leading part in the editing of the same publisher's _Biblioteca di cultura moderna_, which was enriched through his care and advice with reprints of rare works of southern Italian writers of the Risorgimento and of the early years of the Unity, and with translations of books representative of foreign contemporary thought.

If we add to all this, a number of scattered essays and monographs, editions of texts and documents, and bibliographies, and the generous cooperation, extending from the friendly discussion of plans and ideas to the humble reading of proofs, with a host of friends and disciples, we have a fairly complete idea of the significance of Croce in the cultural life of young Italy. He very rapidly became something like an institution; he was hailed as the master and spiritual guide of the new generation. His work and his example, the clarity of his thought and the rhythm of his steady, harmonious, powerful activity, were an element not of the limited life of the intellectual laboratory only, but of the spiritual life of the nation.

[Footnote 1: _Contributo_, pp. 40-41.]

[Footnote 2: _Contributo_, p. 48.]

II. INTUITION AND EXPRESSION[1]

The four grades of spiritual activity--Intuition and conceptual knowledge--The intuitive consciousness--The limits of intuitive knowledge--Identifications of intuition and expression--Art as expression: content and form--Language as expression; the reality of words--Croce's use of the word intuition--The lyrical character of the pure intuition.

The whole cycle of the philosophy of mind exhausts itself in the study of the four fundamental forms of human activity, the concepts of which we have seen slowly developing through the mazes of Croce's early speculations: the æsthetic, the logic, the economic and the ethic; of the distinction and the unity of æsthetic and logic in the theoretical activity, or knowledge, and of economic and ethic in the practical activity, or action; and finally of the relations between the theoretical and the practical, or knowledge and action. This may be said to be the positive aspect of Croce's philosophy: the negative aspect consists in the criticism and exclusion of any other form of activity from the system of the human spirit, and of that which is not the spirit, or nature, from the system of reality.

To the four forms or grades of spiritual activity, correspond four philosophical sciences: Æsthetics, Logic, Economics, and Ethics. Each of them can be said to be the _organum_ of the particular form of activity which it studies; the affirmation of that sphere of consciousness which is proper to it, and of its relations to the other forms. Each of them is therefore related to the others in the same way as the various forms of activity are related to each other. They might be defined as the projection on the plane of logic of the whole system of human activity, that is, of the whole of reality. They derive their intrinsic validity from this perfect coincidence of their several objects with the only conceivable aspects of reality.

We shall in this and in the following chapters attempt to fill in with the strictly necessary detail this very ample frame. But we can already point to the idealistic character of such a philosophy resulting from its method, which is that of the testimony of consciousness, as opposed to the naturalistic or psychologic method of indirect observation; from its object, which is the human spirit or mind in the fulness of its determinations; and from the exclusion of any aspect of reality which is not immanent in consciousness, that is, both of the naturally and the supernaturally transcendent. As against another kind of idealism, of which the typical example is Platonic transcendentalism, Croce's idealism is realistic and immanentistic: the task of the philosophy of mind is to discover the immanent logic of reality. But against current realism, which considers mind as the mere spectator and observer of external or natural reality, it asserts the identity of reality and consciousness, which is the basic position of all idealism.

There are two forms of knowledge: intuitive (or æsthetic) and conceptual (or logical). Intuition is the knowledge of the individual or particular; the concept is the knowledge of the universal. This distinction, as we have already seen, corresponds roughly to the old classical distinction of _mythos_ and _logos_, to Vico's definitions of poetry and metaphysics, and to the new meaning given by Baumgarten to the old antithesis of _aisthēta_ and _noēta_. Let us quote Vico again: "Men first feel without perceiving, then they perceive and are perturbed and moved; finally they reflect with pure mind." Here we have three successive grades, of which the first is mere sensation, the lower limit of mental activity; the second is intuition; the third, concept. For Vico, the second grade is identical with Poetry, and the science of this form of knowledge, which we call Æsthetics, he called Poetic Logic, the science of poetry as "the first operation of the human mind." Vico's discovery consists in this definition of Poetry (and Art), not as a casual, capricious, lateral form of spiritual activity, but as the first and necessary grade of knowledge, as an essential function of the mind. But Vico's thought was clothed in what we might well call a mythological form: the various grades of spiritual activity were presented by him as successive stages or epochs in the history of mankind; and the inter-relation of the various grades, as the actual law of the development of human society. Croce unravelled Vico's philosophy, or ideal history, history of the mind, from Vico's concrete, sociological history, and the result was this new Æsthetics which is at the same time a science of the first grade of knowledge, and of art and language.

Of the reality of intuitive, as distinct from reflected knowledge, we have constant evidence in our immediate experience. If I examine my own consciousness, at any particular moment, I find it crowded with _things I know_, as, now, this room in which I am writing, the piano that is open before me, the flowers in a little basket, blue fragments of sky and green branches washed by the recent rain swaying in the clear sunlight, the shrill voice of a child from the road, the light steps of a girl moving about the house. I am not conscious of all these intuitions at once: I write, and I distinctly _know_ this white paper only, and the black signs I am tracing, the pen guided by my hand, and the edges of a few books on my table: all the rest has faded away into a blurred, fused intuition, the intuition of an atmosphere, composed of mere shreds and shadows of the colours and sounds of which I was so distinctly conscious but one minute ago. But now I put down my pen again, and I look at the piano; and I let my mind wander away, from what I see to what I remember or imagine: the fair-headed figure playing this morning Franck's Prelude, Choral and Fugue, the rapid and sure movements of the fingers on the white and black keys, a vague image of the solemn and passionate music, memories of distant days, a sudden rush of obscure fantasies, evoked by the actual playing, and still lingering in the recesses of my mind, returning now with a fragment of a melody, with a succession of triumphant chords. And again, I look beyond the window, and the little square of green and blue expands itself into the vast valley beyond, screened from my view by these few trees clustering around the house, and yet mysteriously present to my inner eye: I see a little company of riders cantering along a shaded lane, coming out in an open meadow surrounded by low, thick-wooded hills; the sun sets in a pale purple sky, and I hear the tramping of the slow, heavy hoofs, as the horses find their way back through the woods, through a darkness much more opaque and solid than that of the remote twilight, still visible above the highest branches, animated by the first faint glittering of a star. And the woods are full of a myriad small breathing and stirring noises, of the sense of the deep surging inhuman life of trees and shrubs, of the penetrating scent of the rich damp earth, of decaying wood, of fallen leaves.

And now, I suddenly shut myself out of this world of perceptions and imaginations, or rather I keep them all before me, but not because of the immediate, individual interest I have in each of them. I try to extract the common, the universal element of which I suspect the existence not beyond but within them. I renounce all particular intuitions for the concept of intuition. I am no longer an image-making mind, no longer engaged in this elementary or "first" operation of the human mind, but I have passed on to a different, and manifestly a "secondary" plane of mental activity, since it would be impossible for me to root my thinking anywhere but on the soil of my intuitions.