[Footnote 3: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 14.] [Footnote 4: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 140.] [Footnote 5: _Primi Saggi_, p. 23.] [Footnote 6: _Primi Saggi_, p. 230.] [Footnote 7: _Primi Saggi_, p. 36.] [Footnote 8: _Primi Saggi_, pp. XI-XII.] II. ON LITERARY CRITICISM The problem of literary criticism--The three phases: exposition, valuation, history--Æsthetic judgment and history of art: the exigency of a new Æsthetics--The place of Æsthetics in Croce's thought--Moral and logical preoccupations--Croce and Spaventa. At the end of the following year (1894), Croce interrupted again the steady flow of his erudite production with the publication of a little book, _La Critica Letteraria: questioni teoriche,_ which was the outcome of a discussion he had had during the summer with a friend, a professor of philosophy. As the net result of his first philosophical effort had been the conquest of a clearer conception of art, it was natural that he should proceed to investigate the relations between history and the subject-matter of history in that field in which he felt he had already been able to find some light. The general problem of the nature of history, of which he had seen but one aspect, was set aside for the moment, giving way to a close examination of the methods of historical thought in the study of literature. Only a few of the conclusions of this particular research were destined to have any kind of permanency in Croce's theories; but it is useful to recall them, not only as a step in the development of his thought, but as representing a marked progress in that conception of literary criticism which is still predominant wherever the influence of that thought has not yet been felt. Croce submitted that conception to a process similar to what a French critic calls a disassociation of ideas, trying to establish which can be said to be the essential operations of literary criticism, and the relations between these and the various kinds of possible works on literary material. Given this method, which is that of abstract classification, and having approached his problem through criticism itself instead of starting from the other end and deducing the concept of criticism from the concept of art and literature, he was bound to reach a number of abstract concepts, apparently irreducible to each other, and the fundamental unity of which he could only later affirm through the general progress of his theory of æsthetics.