But the unjustified transportation of the concept of mystery from history, where it indicates the future that the past prepares and does not know, into philosophy, causes to be pointed as mysteries which give rise to probabilities and conjectures, problems that consist of philosophical terms, and should therefore be philosophically solved. But if the infinite progress and the infinite perfectibility of man is to be affirmed, although we do not know the concrete forms that progress and perfectibility will assume (not knowing them, because now it imports not to _know_, but to _do_ them), then there is no meaning in positing as a mystery the immortality of the individual soul, or the existence of God; for these are not _facts_ that may or may not happen sooner or later, but _concepts_ that must be proved to be in themselves thinkable and not contradictory. Their thinkability will indeed be a mystery, but of the kind that it is a duty to make clear, because synonymous with obscurity or mental confusion. What has so far been demonstrated has been their unthinkability in the traditional form. Nor is it true that they correspond to profound demands of the human soul. 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[9]. Thus Croce affirms that evolution, development, is demanded by the very nature of spirit. In spirit the problem of the one and the many is solved. The yearnings of man towards something higher, and towards a unity that shall lie behind and stabilise all thought, are but expressions of the nature of Life. The dissatisfaction of such a thought is due to psychological illusion, comparable to a “dream of an art so sublime that every work of art really existing would by comparison appear contemptible.” There is no intuition that cannot be clearly expressed; vague dreams of the Madonna of the Future end inevitably in an empty canvas. So too, according to Croce, is a dream of transcendence empty of content, because inexpressible; based on no clear intuition, but on a confusion between the historical judgment and some vague conception of the transcendental. And thus the life of the spirit is left a mystery.