from the ethical to the economic, when, as in the case of theological utilitarianism, they are taken as empirical limitations, as particular objects, of the ethical will. The material ethical principles are in fact analogous to those material æsthetic principles which we have criticised as rhetorical; they constitute a rhetoric of the virtues not less deadly to the creative moral will than the rhetoric of the arts is to the creative intuition. The ethical principle must be formal, but not formalistic, and therefore Croce is not satisfied with any of the so-called universal laws or categorical imperatives, or with any of the many formulas which attempt to define the moral actions through one constant determination which ought to be present in each of them. Such formulas are mere symbols or metaphors, and can be used as the equivalents of the ethical principle, as some of the categories of material ethics can be used; but their danger consists in giving the illusion of possessing the true principle, while what we are given is an empty and tautological one, which will again give way to purely empirical determinations and therefore to utilitarianism. This empty formalism, or absolute indetermination, of the ethical principle, corresponds to two conceptions of philosophy, which Croce respectively calls partial and discontinuous. According to the first, man may know a portion of reality, but never reality as a whole; as regards morality, he may hear the voice of his own conscience, but never grasp with his intellect the content of the moral law. According to the second, he may know the reason of morality, but not within the sphere of ethics, whose task consists only in establishing the moral law and deducing the moral precepts; the problem of the essence of morality belongs to another science, metaphysics. The reader who has followed us to this point knows that Croce's philosophy is neither partial nor discontinuous; that he does not admit of any limits to human thought, nor of any division in the body of philosophy. The whole of philosophy is already included for him in the first philosophical proposition, and though it may didactically be useful to divide the problems of philosophy in groups, or even to deal separately with the particular philosophical science on one hand, and with general philosophy or metaphysics on the other, yet truth does not belong to the distinctions outside their unity, to the parts outside the whole, to the segments outside the circle. It is this totality and continuity of Croce's philosophy that makes Croce's ethical principle a form, but not an empty one; a form which is full in a philosophical and universal sense, which is at the same time content, and universal as content not less than as form. He has defined the ethical principle, not, tautologically, as a universal form, but as the volition of the universal: a definition which is at the same time the distinction of the ethical from the economical