A number of objections to Croce's æsthetics have been prompted by his use of the word intuition. To the reader who has followed our argument, it is not necessary to explain that Croce's intuition has nothing in common either with the mystic intuition of the Neoplatonists or of the ultra-romantics, or with the intuition which Bergson substitutes for the intellect as the proper organ of absolute knowledge. It is not a mysterious instrument of the mind, by which man can either come in contact with supernatural realities, or, renouncing that which is distinctively human in him, enter into the actual movement and life of nature. The fact that Croce has spent so much time and thought in trying to understand this first, naïve, elementary grade of the theoretical activity, does not justify his critics in putting him in the same class either with romantic metaphysicians or with romantic naturalists. That such a confusion has ever been possible is only a further proof of the immaturity and superficiality of a large part of our most solemn contemporary thought. It shows how it has been given to grown-up and apparently educated men, to read a book without knowing what its subject was, and without even being able to shield themselves behind the saving grace of silence. An objection of a quite different order was raised by Croce himself, who found its solution in the elaboration of his philosophy of the practical, or of will. It can be said of the theory of art as intuition, that it reduces art to a form of knowledge, to a theoretical function, while what we look for in works of art is life and movement, and the feeling and personality of the artist, that is, something that is not theoretical but practical. The answer might be that the feeling is content and the intuition form; but such a dualistic point of view would in reality destroy not only Croce's æsthetics, but the foundations of his whole philosophy of mind. And we would be back at a position which we thought we had already criticised and surpassed. The truth is that intuition, and the personality, or lyrical character, of a work of art, are only different aspects of the same spiritual process, that where one is, the other too will have to be found. What we can abstract as the psychic content of intuition, since we have already excluded abstractions and concepts, is only what we call appetition, tendency, feeling, will--the various facts which constitute the practical form of the human spirit. Pure intuition cannot represent anything but the will in its manifestations, that is, nothing but states of mind. And the states of mind are that passion, feeling, and personality which we find in art, and which determine its lyrical character.