There are two meanings to the word history, in English as well as in other European languages; on one hand it denotes the actual doing, the immediacy of life, on the other, the thinking that seems to follow the doing, the consciousness of life. In a rough, approximate way, we speak of men who make history, and of other men who think or write history--though we are all perfectly aware of the fact that we cannot make history without first thinking history, that the action, in other words, follows a judgment of the situation, which is an elementary form of historical thought, and is accompanied by its own consciousness, which is its immediate history. In this sense, the action cannot be materially severed from its history: the distinction between the two is a purely formal and ideal one. And again, the thinking of history, in the second meaning of the word, consists in making present to our spirit, in re-living, an action or group of actions, which thus become as actual an experience as any practical doing, a fragment of our own life, and, ultimately, the consciousness of our own individual experience. Thus the two meanings which stand out as sharply contrasting when we objectify and solidify them, as an external, chronological series of happenings, and as a formal discipline attempting to give, in innumerable books, a description and as it were a verbal duplicate of that series, once we examine them in the light of our consciousness, reveal themselves merely as different aspects or moments of the same spiritual process. Croce's latest writings on history may be puzzling to the average reader because this ambiguity cannot be overcome by him unless he is willing to penetrate to the heart of Croce's doctrine, in which the word history acquires a more pregnant and fundamental meaning. In many of us there is a tendency to balk at any attempt at filling old words with deeper and more precise connotations; but philosophy is not a matter of words. A new thought will in any case alter the whole physiognomy of our vocabulary, and to stand up for the old meanings is as much as to refuse to think, or rather, to refuse to live. For history as a formal discipline, for the actual writing of history, Croce uses the word Historiography; but in his _Teoria e Storia della Storiografia_ (Theory and History of the writing of History), history still means both the doing and the thinking, life and the consciousness of life, though not in the abstract distinction in which these meanings are generally apprehended. In Croce the distinction is also unity, and there is no doing which is not also a thinking, no life which is not also the consciousness of life, no consciousness which is not also the consciousness of itself. The ambiguity, some traces of which could still be seen in the _Logica_, entirely disappears in this fourth volume of the system, at least for the reader who has followed the whole development of Croce's thought.