Their main position can be stated in a few words: history is a science and not an art, because its aim is not to give æsthetic pleasure, but knowledge. The premises of this formula are a hedonistic conception of art, and the identification of all forms of knowledge with science: that is, a too narrow definition of art, and a too broad definition of science. Croce's demonstration takes the form of a rigorous syllogism: he defines the concept of art and the concept of science, the two definitions forming so to speak the two horns of a dilemma; history is shown by its own definition to be included in the definition of art, and the only remaining question is that of the distinction, within the same concept, between art in the strict sense and history. The most important part of this demonstration is that which concerns art. Croce's object was to discover the nature of history, but his real achievement in his first essay was that of stating the æsthetic problem in its true terms. His opinions about history and about science were destined to undergo many changes in the further development of his thought; but his whole theory of æsthetics is already virtually present in these few pages about art and the Beautiful. "Art is an _activity_ aiming at the production of the Beautiful."[2] A purely psychological doctrine of æsthetics, which considers not art as an activity, but the objects of art as a collection of stimuli, a doctrine of æsthetic appreciation rather than of æsthetic creation, of the land that has flourished in Germany and in England during the last twenty years, especially in the field of the graphic and plastic arts, will therefore be incapable of even grasping that which is the specific subject of æsthetics. But Croce does not lose his time in attacking the psychologists. The error of their ways has its philosophical expression in Sensualism and in Formalism, which he summarily dismisses together with Rationalism or Abstract Idealism: the Beautiful as pleasure, the Beautiful as a system of formal relations, the Beautiful as abstractly one with the Good and the True. The fourth solution of the problem of the Beautiful, which he accepts, is that of the Concrete Idealism of Hegel and Hartmann: the Beautiful as _expression,_ as the sensuous manifestation of the ideal. But Croce was guided by his Latin moderation (and probably also helped by his, at the time, insufficient understanding of German Idealism) to give to this formula not the intellectualistic interpretation which rightly belongs to it, but the very simple meaning of an adequate and efficacious representation of reality. The difference between this conception of Art--as an activity aiming at the representation of reality--and the one that we shall find in Croce's later elaborations of his æsthetic theory, does not lie in the conception itself, but in its context of general thought. Here he is still working under the common-sense assumption of a double reality,