At the present time Croce is directing his criticism on the new line of development which his own friends and colleagues are taking in regard to his own principles, in particular to the "actual idealism" of his colleague Professor Giovanni Gentile. To Croce this new doctrine spells mysticism, and of mysticism in all its forms he is the open enemy. On this point we may, I think, detect an inclination on the part of Dr. Piccoli to disagree with Croce. It will be seen, therefore, that we have in this book a very full and a very welcome account, brought right up to date, of one who is, as far as contemporaries can judge, forming the mind of the present age. H. Wildon Carr PREFACE When, about a year ago, I undertook to write this little book for its present publishers, all that I had in my mind was a brief exposition of the solutions given by Croce to a number of philosophical problems of vital interest to the students of what were once called the Moral Sciences. I thought at the time that it would be possible to abstract such solutions and problems from the body of his Philosophy of Mind, which is a coherent and austere theory of knowledge of a kind that in the modern decadence of philosophical studies and of general culture is rapidly becoming unintelligible even to the most highly cultivated. I hoped that the specialized reader, for whom the larger aspects of Croce's thought have no appeal, and therefore no meaning, would be able to apply those particular solutions to the problems that confronted him in his particular branch of studies, by translating them into terms of his own naïve philosophy. This plan had also a personal advantage, inasmuch as it did not compel me to a conscious revision of my own position in regard to those larger aspects of Croce's philosophy. But as soon as I began to think consistently of this book, the history of my own reactions to Croce's work came back to me so vividly that I found it impossible to set it aside; and I discovered that this supposed advantage was a delusion, towards which I had probably been drawn by a very human, very natural desire of avoiding the most obvious difficulties of my task.