unconsciously absorbed through De Sanctis' conception of art; but his theory of knowledge, not yet logically unfolded, was still oscillating between intellectualism and naturalism. He was decidedly anti-Hegelian, on the other hand, in his theory of history and in his general conception of the world. [Footnote 1: _Primi Saggi,_ pp. 79-80.] [Footnote 2: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 80.] [Footnote 3: _Primi Saggi_, p. 82.] [Footnote 4: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 163.] [Footnote 5: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 164.] [Footnote 6: _Primi Saggi, ib._] [Footnote 7: _Contributo,_ p. 54.] [Footnote 8: _Contributo_, pp. 55-56.] [Footnote 9: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 163.] [Footnote 10: _Contributo,_ p. 58.] [Footnote 11: _Contributo,_ p. 59-60.] [Footnote 12: _Contributo,_ p. 60.] [Footnote 13: _Contributo,_ p. 61.] [Footnote 14: _Contributo,_ p. 63.] III. HISTORY AND ECONOMICS A new interest: Marxism--Historical materialism--Criticism and interpretation: a new historical canon--Marxian economics as an application of the hypothetic method--The concepts of science and the economic principle--Science and practice--Marxism and morality. In April, 1895, his old professor at the University of Rome, Antonio Labriola, sent to Croce an essay on the _Communist Manifesto,_ in which he submitted to a critical examination the materialistic conception of history elaborated during the fifty preceding years by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Labriola had been probably the first professor in a European University to take Historical Materialism as a subject for his academic lectures, his first course on Marxism having been delivered in 1889. But Croce, who had given all his thoughts first to his literary work, and then to his meditations on art and criticism, had not been as yet able to perceive the bearing of the new problems discussed by his master on that problem of the nature of history which had been the subject of his first philosophical essay, and was to be the centre of his later speculations. Labriola's little book came to him at a moment when he had reached an impasse in the course of his research, and it opened to him an entirely new field of investigations, it afforded him an escape towards studies and meditations, at first apparently unrelated to his former ones, but the results of which were destined to react vigorously on them. He plunged with youthful enthusiasm into the literature not of Marxism and historical materialism only, but of Economics in general. In the five following years, while he continued with unremitting energy his literary labours, now more clearly directed towards an understanding of the historical problems of Æsthetics, and a clarification of the concepts of a philosophical science of Æsthetics, he published a series of critical essays on _Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica,_ intended at the same time as a defence and a rectification of Marx's doctrines.