to the distinction between the scientific and the speculative concept, of which the relation established between Marxian and pure economics is a tentative prefiguration. But the most essential gain of his economic studies was in the direction of the affirmation of the merely practical, or economic, principle, as one of the irreducible forms of human activity, raising the concept of the Useful to the same level (logically speaking) at which those of the Beautiful, the True, and the Good had been kept by the whole European philosophical tradition since Plato. He was here actually elaborating not a scientific, but a speculative concept, though his approach to it was always by means of the discussion of particular problems, the solution of which implied a definite view of the relations between the economic principle on one side, and respectively on the other side, the intellectual and the moral principle. As regards the possibility of inferring practical programmes from scientific principles, he objected that neither the desirable nor the practicable are science. Science may be a legitimate means of simplifying problems, making it possible to distinguish in them what can be scientifically ascertained from what can only be partially known; in the case of the Marxian law of the fall in the rate of profits, for instance, if such a law were proved to be scientifically correct, it could be said, under certain conditions that the end of capitalist society was a scientific certainty, though it would remain doubtful what would follow it. But logic is not life, and the appraisement of social programmes is a matter of empirical observations and of practical convictions. The unconquerable indetermination of social facts brings forth that element of dating in the actions of practical men, which is to will what inspiration is to expression, insight to intellect, in the poet and in the scientist. Socialism could not be called a scientific programme, except in a limited and metaphorical sense, which was not a criticism of socialism itself, but of the bad logic of certain Socialists: the Marxian programme as such, Croce recognized as one of the noblest and boldest, and also one of those which obtain the greatest support from the objective conditions of existing society. Having already denied the dependence of intellectual truth on economic fact, by criticising the metaphysics of historical materialism, he thus asserted now the autonomy of the economic from the logical principle.