difficult of all, that of the freedom of the will, we shall find that Croce's solution, though reached by a totally different method, is very similar to the one offered by Bergson. Both Croce and Bergson refuse to take sides in the quarrel between free-will and determinism, but transfer it to a higher or deeper ground where the contrasting terms acquire more significant, and no longer opposite, meanings. Bergson accomplishes his abolition of the dilemma through a masterful psychological analysis of the immediate data of consciousness, Croce comes to the same result by applying to this problem his logic of the distinctions of the concept, which we have already seen so often at work. Every act of the will is determined, in the sense that it is conditioned by a given situation, and varies with the varying of the situation; it is free, inasmuch as it is something new and different, which was not given in the situation, and without which there would be no change, no growth, no development. Necessity and freedom, which so often appear as antagonistic views of the same fact, are both present, though distinct, in the volition, which is the unity of the two, being at once determined and free. The volition is thus regarded as a practical _a priori_ synthesis, the autonomous creative act of the practical mind, as the intuition is the æsthetic, and the concept the logical _a priori_ synthesis; the spirit never realizes itself except by acting, and it never acts except under given conditions of place and time. But as these conditions are nothing but what we have called happenings, which in their turn are complex results of single volitions, the concept of the freedom of the spirit coincides with that of its activity.