artist, but this is for him but the soil in which his thought must spread its roots; it is true that without that power, no criticism is possible, but it is equally true that no philosophy of art can grow on any but that same soil. The ultimate test of the validity of æsthetic thought is in its capacity to expand our sphere of æsthetic apprehension; and pure æsthetics is but the methodological moment of æsthetic history or criticism. [Footnote 1: _Contributo_, pp. 79-81.] [Footnote 2: _Nuovi Saggi, di Estetica_, p. 126.] [Footnote 3: _Nuovi Saggi_, p. 142. Also _Conversazioni Critiche_, I, pp. 58-63.] [Footnote 4: _Nuovi Saggi_, p. 231.] [Footnote 5: _Nuovi Saggi_, p. 181.] [Footnote 6: _L'arte come Creazione_ (1918), in _Nuovi Saggi_, p. 160.] [Footnote 7: _La Critica Letteraria come Filosofia_ (1918), in _Nuovi Saggi_, p. 217.] IV. VERITAS FILIA TEMPORIS _Quid est veritas?_--Platonism, or transcendental idealism--Naturalism, or transcendental realism--The idea of progress--Progress and truth: evolutionism--Pragmatism--Croce's new pragmatism--The immanence of value--The actuality of Truth--Truth as history: the function of error and of evil--The foundations of Croce's thought. There is one problem in the history of human thought, which, however conscious we might be of the multiplicity and historical contingency of philosophical problems, yet can appear to us as the ultimate or central one, if only because it is an abstract interrogation describing the attitude of the philosopher, and to which every concrete logical research, every act of thought, can be reduced. It is Pilate's question: _Quid est veritas?_ What is truth? The question itself has no definite meaning, until it receives from the individual thinker a definite content, which is history or experience, and the infinite variety of the answers it has received is due to the infinite variability of that content. But at all times man has been urged by a passionate desire to lift his own individual answer from the flux of life, to put it as it were over and against that experience from which it had emerged, not as the truth of his particular problem, but as an abstractly universal truth. It is by violently breaking the process of thought, and hypostatizing in essence the subject of his thought, abstracted from its object, or the object from its subject, and both from the creative activity which produces truth, that man has created, both in philosophy proper and in the minds of the multitude, a double transcendence, of pure ideas, on one side, of brute matter on the other, from which the two most common meanings of the word truth are derived.