The rest of this particular discussion is not as fruitful or as interesting. Having included history in the concept of art, Croce proceeds to draw a distinction between art in the strict sense, which is a representation of imaginary or merely possible reality, and history, which represents that portion of reality which has actually happened. His final definition of history is: "That kind of artistic production the object of which is to represent that which has really happened."[7] The value of this definition is what we might call a value of reaction against the pseudo-scientific sociology of his day: it consists in the emphasis laid on the concreteness and individuality of historical processes, against the void schematism of general laws. But by introducing the distinction between the possible and the real, Croce had in fact recognized the presence of a conceptual element in history--a conceptual element totally different from the concepts of the sciences, which were all that he could then see outside the æsthetic activity in human knowledge. In a preface to a reprint of his early philosophical essays, written twenty-five years later, Croce explained the conditions which prevented him from perceiving the new problem at once, in a page of admirable self-criticism: "Why did I not perceive it? Because I was full of the first truth which I had found, and for the moment I did not feel any other need: I had violently rejected the weight of sensism and sociologism, and I could breathe. And in my culture at that time the impulses towards that other need were lacking; because neither my scholastic logic nor Labriola's Herbartism opened my mind to a distinction between the concepts of the sciences and the speculative concept; and De Sanctis, entirely given to the criticism of poetry, gave little attention to logical problems. The authority of my first masters of philosophy induced me, in regard to the problems which I had not experienced in myself, to content myself with temporary formulas and solutions, which attracted me through some aspects of truth, and to be satisfied with an imagination of the Ideal above the real, and of the world of Concepts above the world of representations. By this separation, by this collocation in the Empyrean, it seemed to me that I could better attest my reverence for concepts and ideals, which positivists and evolutionists were dragging in the mud, or lowering to the status of superstitions and hallucinations. Now, running again through my pages, it is not possible for me to think those transcendental doctrines again, not because I thought them in the past, and what is past is past, but, on the contrary, because I did not truly think them even then, but only received them or imagined them, so that what I can think now is only the way in which, then, I was brought to imagine them, and to believe that I thought them."[8] [Footnote 1: _Contributo_, p. 32.] [Footnote 2: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 8.]