of being and of thought, and this explains why he still speaks of form and content, and why he still admits of a category of Beauty of nature side by side with artistic Beauty. Later, the relation between form and content will transform itself into that of the æsthetic activity with the other forms of spiritual activity; but even such a momentous change in the foundations of his theory does but slightly impair the substantial truth of the words in which he first expressed it: "An object is either beautiful or ugly according to the category through which we perceive it. Art is a category of apperception, and in art, the whole of natural and human reality--which is either beautiful or ugly according to its various aspects--becomes beautiful because it is perceived as reality in general, which we want to see fully expressed. Every character, or action, or object, entering into the world of art, loses, artistically speaking, the qualifications it has in real life, and is judged only inasmuch as art represents it with more or less perfection. Caliban is a monster in reality, but no longer a monster as an artistic creation."[3] As to natural Beauty, Croce observes that it is not inanimate, as Hegel and his followers would have it, but animated by the spirit of the beholder, and its contemplation is therefore a kind of artistic creation:[4] but this observation, in which the later doctrine is present in germ, is set forth timidly in a note, and remains for the moment sterile and as if incapable able of yielding its obvious logical results. If it were admitted that history is a representation of reality, its inclusion in the concept of art would be obvious. But the adverse contention is that history is a scientific study of reality, or to use Bernheim's definition, the science of the development of men in their activity as social beings. Croce's answer is that history is not a science, because history is constantly concerned with the exposition of particular facts, and not with the formation of concepts, which is the proper sphere of science. There may be a science or philosophy of history, investigating the philosophical problems connected with the facts of history, but such a science or philosophy, which cannot be distinguished as a separate organism from the philosophy of reality as a whole, is not history. History does not elaborate concepts, but reproduces reality in its concreteness: it is therefore not science but art.