eye, it is possible to discover the successive stages by which it actually incorporated itself in the system. In particular, we have been able to point to the effects of the later meditations on the philosophy of will, on one side, on a more intimate understanding of the pure intuition as the lyrical intuition, on the other, on the identification of the definition with the individual judgment, and thereby on the relations between history and philosophy. On the whole it can be said that two apparently contrasting directions were at work within the system itself: one reflecting Croce's mental need for clear and fine distinctions, the other, that deep consciousness of the unity of the real, without which all distinctions tend to solidify themselves into dead abstractions. If we imagine two students of Croce's philosophy, endowed with antagonistic philosophical temperaments, the one a dialectician, the other a mystic, we can easily conceive them as the founders of two diametrically opposed schools of thought. The first would have emphasized the rigorous distinctions, the formal character, the intellectual precision of the system; he might have retained the identification of philosophy and history, but to him these words would have stood only for the names of two formal disciplines, and not for the concrete life of the human spirit which is present in them. The second would have passed lightly over the distinctions, and probably considered them as partaking of the same unreality which belongs to scientific or legal abstractions; and by obliterating the logical processes without which the mind of man is unable to grasp and to express itself, he would have taken refuge in an ineffable, though not necessarily silent, contemplation of the underlying unity. This hypothesis is not a criticism of Croce's philosophy; it is merely the indication of the fact that, when the system appeared as completed, new problems, and therefore new errors or new truths, were bound to grow out of the elements of the system itself. And nobody was more conscious of this fact than Croce himself, who concluded his volume on the _Filosofia della Pratica_ by expressly warning his readers of the inexhaustibility of thought, which is one with the infinity of reality and of life. No philosophical system is final, because life itself has no end. Every system of philosophy, being conditioned by life, can do no more than solve a group of problems historically given, and prepare the conditions for new problems and new systems. Of his own work in relation to his readers, he conceived as of nothing more than an instrument of work.