philosophy, if by philosophy, we mean not a formal discipline, but all knowledge _sub specie universalis_. The defenders of rhetorical history have become more frequent during and after the war than they were before it, it being only too natural that in times of exceptional stress truth should be made subservient to practical ends, and the man of knowledge should be unwittingly transmogrified into a man of action; and they insist more than ever on the moral efficacy of history as its proper educational value. But "if by history we mean both that history which is thought, and those that are poetry, philology or moral will, it is clear that 'history' will enter into the educational process not under one only, but under all these forms; though as history proper, under one only, which is not that of moral education, exclusively and abstractly considered, but of the education or development of thought."[3] The conception of history as contemporary history, or present thought, helps us to discard that form of historical scepticism, or agnosticism, which affirms that all we can know of history is but one part, and a very small part, of the whole. If we should imagine that infinite whole, in its infinite detail, as present for one moment to our mind, all we could do, would be instantly to proceed to forget it, in order to concentrate our attention on that detail only which answers to a problem and, therefore, constitutes a living and active history. That whole is not something of which we can affirm the existence at any given moment, but the eternal phantasm of the thing in itself, the limiting concept of the infinity of our doing and knowing: a naturalistic construction similar to the external and material reality of physical science. It is this naturalistic process that gives birth to agnosticism, in history as in science; that is, to the affirmation of the impossibility of knowing that which has no reality outside our own thought, which has created, or rather posited it, for its own purposes. A further consequence is that we must renounce the knowledge of universal history, not as a fact, because as such it has never existed, but as a pretence under which, in fact, we are given something quite different. The pretence consists (and it will be well to recall Croce's own words, written long before some recent attempts, which in those words find their precise valuation) in "reducing within a single frame all the facts of mankind, from its origins on earth to the present day; or rather, since in this way history would not be truly universal, from the origins of things or from the Creation to the end of the world; hence a tendency to fill the abysm of prehistory or of the origins with theological or naturalistic novels, and somehow to outline the future, either with revelations or with prophecies, as in the Christian universal history (which extended to the Anti-Christ and to the universal judgment), or with forecasts, as in the universal