This book does not therefore intend to substitute itself, not even as a summary and a short cut for lazy minds, to the works of Croce. It is rather an introduction to those works, and at the same time the confession of one individual experience of that philosophy. It is an historical sketch, and implicitly a criticism, since our way of understanding a thought is our judgment of that thought (when not a judgment that that thought passes on us); a sketch which I think I can honestly write because so much of that philosophy has been the daily food of my intellectual life, my own history, for years. Before the war I should probably have been able to write it with less difficulty, with more complete adhesion; but the perspective of these few years will make it perhaps less passionate and more reflective. An explicit criticism of the whole philosophy of Croce it is not, and it does not attempt to be: the reader may find traces of my doubts and of my preoccupations in it, but I have humbly tried to give not more, and I hope not less, than what he has a right to expect from the title. I do not write this book for the professors of philosophy. Those among them who know Croce will not need it; and those who either have not as yet taken any notice of him, or from a casual acquaintance with one of his books have proceeded to damn most vigorously what they have hardly understood, are certainly beyond my power. I write it for the young, from the heart of my own now fast receding youth, trying to raise before their eyes, in the words of Dante to Brunetto Latini, _la cara e buona immagine paterna_ _di voi, quando .... ad ora ad ora_ _m'insegnavate come l'uom s'eterna._ I trust that they will find in it what they need not less than we of an older generation needed it, and what I know they are thirsting for: an example of intellectual energy and of moral strength converging into a life of unremitting devotion to the service of that truth which is light and love and joy,--our only light against the menace of darkness. Raffaello Piccoli. Northampton, Mass., June-October, 1931. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction I. The Beginnings II. Early Environment III. The Origins of his Thought PART FIRST From Philology to Philosophy (1893-1899) I. History as Art II. On Literary Criticism III. History and Economics PART SECOND The Philosophy of Mind (1900-1910) I. The Growth of the System II. Intuition and Expression III. The Concept of Art IV. Criticism and Technique V. The Pure Concept VI. The Forms of Knowledge VII. The Theory of Error VIII. The Practical Activity IX. Economics and Ethics X. The Laws PART THIRD Philosophy as History (1911-1921) I. Works and Days II. The Theory of History III. Criticism and History IV. Veritas filta temporis Bibliographical Note Index BENEDETTO CROCE INTRODUCTION