those writers make history from the sources, so they imagine that life itself springs from material sources; and the Renaissance finds its _causes_ in the discovery of monuments and documents of the classical world, in the lives and travels of humanists, in the munificence of popes and princes. It does not seem to occur to them that monuments and manuscripts, which materially had existed in Europe during all the so-called Dark and Middle Ages, could not have been discovered unless, at a certain moment in the development of European civilization, the spirit of the Western nations had not craved those particular helps to its own life, because of motives and impulses generated by its own actual experience; and that the mediæval clericus was not less of a traveller than the humanist, and that the economic aspect of life can never be intelligibly conceived as a cause of that life of which it is but a moment. For the philological historian, the Renaissance begins between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century; but the historian _tout court_ knows that the fundamental impulses and motives by which we empirically ally characterize that period in the history of the human spirit were already present in the Italy of the thirteenth century, and slowly maturing in the other European countries long before any of the Italian humanists had come to them as the apostles of a new creed. If philological history is not history but pseudo-history, so are also two other forms of so-called historical thought, poetical history and rhetorical history. The first substitutes for the value of history, which is thought, a purely immediate and sentimental, or æsthetic value; it presents itself very often as a reaction to philological history, but it falls into the opposite error, which is that of putting the imagination in the place of the document. Rhetorical history is that which is animated by practical ends (moralistic, nationalistic, or other), and it really consists of two distinct elements, history itself, and the particular end towards which the recitation of history is directed, converging into a single practical act. Both partake of life much more intensely than philological history; but the life of the one is poetry, that of the other is economic or moral action. They are, therefore, legitimate as poetry and as action, and become errors only in so far as they are presented as history. It is important to make this distinction as clear as possible: the actual interest which makes history is not for Croce a sentimental or practical interest, but an interest of thought. In the distinction of the various forms of spiritual activity, history is not the sentimental or practical moment, but the moment of ultimate consciousness, the reflection and not either the intuition or the action, the thought which is consciousness of life and not life immediate; neither art nor morality, in a word, but