Croce's first philosophical essay is a short memoir, _La Storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell' Arte_, which he read to the Accademia Pontaniana of Naples in March, 1893. In his autobiographical notes, Croce tells us that this memoir was sketched by him one evening in February or March of the same year, "after a whole day of intense meditation."[1] But the reader cannot help feeling that those few pages are very far from being an improvisation; and this, not only because of the ease with which the author finds his way among the literature of his subject, but especially because one realizes that only a discipline so constant and so severe as to become a kind of second nature could give him that sure grasp of the essentials of his problem, which he shows from the very beginning of his speculation. The majority of historians and philologists, when they turn their attention to what Croce calls the logic of their discipline, are apt to trust themselves exclusively to their immediate experience of their work, and to disregard the very obvious fact that an inquiry into the general principles of a certain branch of knowledge is, and cannot be anything but, philosophy: they are therefore either unwilling or unable to follow the implications of that logic on to their ultimate consequences, as this operation would inevitably lead them away from their own safe and solid ground into a discussion of unfamiliar concepts and ideas. They seem to perceive but dimly that the problems of that logic have been intimately connected with the whole development of philosophical thought from the Sophists to our day; and therefore even when they go back to philosophical authorities in their treatment of these problems, when they quote Plato or Aristotle, or Leibnitz or Hegel, they are content with mere fragments, arbitrarily understood, unconnected with the general body of thought from which they derive their meaning. The result is, at best, a futile rediscovery of truths and truisms which have their place in the history of thought, but are meaningless in their modern context. An examination of the greatest part of the methodological literature of the last fifty years, both in Europe and in America, would easily bear out this contention: that it is hard to find a more shallow and imcompetent philosophy than that of the average historian and critic.