After what has been said of the general relationship between philosophy and science, it will not be difficult to determine the place that _economic science_ occupies in Croce's thought, in relation to his _philosophy of economics_. Economics as a philosophical science is that branch of philosophy, the object of which is the economic activity in its universality, the determination of the concept of volition or action as the volition or action of the individual, that is, as the predicate of the economic judgment or judgment of utility. The economic judgment, in its turn, is but a form of historical judgment, and, therefore, the concrete form of the philosophy of economics is economic history, the history of the spirit of man as it realizes itself in the individual action or volition. Between that philosophy and that history, there is no place, as we know, for any intermediate form of knowledge, but only for the practical (empirical or abstract) elaboration, of the economic datum. This is what the science of economics actually is: an applied mathematical science, founded on empirical concepts. The postulates and types of economic science are among the most perfect examples of conscious fictions, beginning with the fundamental one of the _homo œconomicus_: they are empirical concepts by which the economic reality is simplified to such an extent that it becomes possible to submit it to mathematical calculation, and thereby to recognise promptly its necessary aspects and consequences. Economic science partakes, therefore, of the rigour and absoluteness of mathematics, which is obtained, as we know, only by sacrificing the concreteness of its object. Its laws are arbitrary and tautological, consisting, like all scientific laws, in the definition of those characteristics of reality which have been abstracted to form its postulates or empirical concepts; but it is only through the acceptance of such definitions that it succeeds in dominating, ordering, describing, and classifying the mass and variety of economic facts and, most important of all, in treating them quantitively. It has, in fact, the same structure as another science with which it has been frequently compared, and which is here assumed as typical of the proceedings of applied mathematics--mechanics. I believe that very few economists would quarrel to-day with Croce's characterization of economic science, since its mathematical character is now universally recognised; but Croce proves conclusively that even in its non-mathematical phases, economics has always been a purely quantitative science. Volition and action are assumed in it in their indistinction; and moral facts being volitions and actions as well as the economic facts, they can also be included in the economic calculus, because from a merely abstract point of view there is no way of differentiating them from the latter.