the nature of language: linguistic expressions have fixed themselves in the course of centuries and stand before us as a body of language, as a reality independent of the individual activity that produces the particular expressions; this is what prevents us from recognizing in the actual linguistic facts the same creative energy that formed the first words uttered by man. In this reduction of the philosophy of language to æsthetics, Croce again follows Vico, who professed to have found the true origins of languages in the principles of poetry, who first asserted the functional identity of language and poetry. This theory, however, seems to clash with the existence of what we might call the implicit conceptuality of language, of which we are constantly made aware by our grammatical categories. The fact is that the relation between language and concept is the same as between intuition and concept: that is, on one side, language is the material of our reflected thought, and it would be impossible for the reflection to begin without or before the language; but, on the other hand, the concepts appear in language not as forms but as matter. In other words, to speak it is not necessary to think logically, but it is impossible to think logically without speaking. The grammatical categories are not real elements of language, but products of abstraction, of a purely practical character, of the kind that we shall soon have to examine in the rhetoric of the arts. What may help us, in thus conceiving of the active and intuitive character of language, is a comparison with other classes of expressive facts. When we speak of musical or pictorial language, we are aware that we are using mere metaphors for the purpose of collecting certain general characteristics which are common to some of these facts. The various musical grammars, the rules of harmony or of orchestration, are nothing but summaries of abstractions: in the presence of a certain music, or of a certain picture, we cannot forget the principle that no expression can give birth to a new expression without first undergoing a new creative process. And this is as true of the highest forms of artistic expression as of the words which we use in our daily life.