Thus, the end of this exposition of Croce's system, the doctrine of language with which the system opens links itself intimately with this doctrine of law, with which it closes. And both as regards language and as regards law, the last word is, of necessity, a new implicit affirmation of the identity of the philosophical with the historical method. The true history of a language is not a history of abstract grammatical schemes, but the history of the poetry and literature in which that language has realized itself, a history of individual expressions; the true history of law is one with the social and political history of a people, which is, and cannot be but the history of its practical activity in its effective, individual realization, that is, juridical and economic history. [Footnote 1: See _Filosofia della Pratica_, part iii, "Le Leggi," pp. 321-407.] PART THIRD PHILOSOPHY AS HISTORY (1911-1921) I. WORKS AND DAYS A retrospective view of the system--Germs of development--The return to history--Croce's attitude during the war--Essays on the great poets. To the reader of the three volumes of the _Filosofia dello Spirito_, which were published before 1910, the whole of Croce's thought appeared as a solidly constructed system, in which the four grades or forms of spiritual activity were studied in their intrinsic essence, and presented in their relations as completing the cycle of living reality, in contrast with that reality which the mind postulates outside its living self, and which the system reduces to a complex practical product of the mind, a collection of material helps subservient to the essential forms of its activity. Knowledge and action, reciprocally implicated, are the substance of reality; and both knowledge and action, rising, the first, from the intuition to the concept, the second, from the economic to the ethical will, attain the universal, all-including values which we express by the words Beautiful, True, Useful and Good, but only and in so far as they realize themselves in the concrete and individual. A universal more universal than that which is present in the individual act is inexistent, or exists only as an impotent abstraction renouncing the concreteness and reality of the individual, and therefore also that true universality which has no being outside this action, this thought, this life. The soul of the system, slowly extricating itself from the traces of naturalism or intellectualism, which are still visible in the _Estetica_, is the logic of the pure concept, which resolves in the concrete universal the dualisms of nature and spirit, of fact and value, of life and thought, and, finally, of history and philosophy. But while this logic can be seen at work in all the parts of the system, and is, in fact, the form towards which all Croce's thoughts seem to have constantly tended from the time of his earliest philosophical essays, yet, to an attentive