Croce's interest in such couples of opposites as those that we have mentioned is very far from being as keen as Hegel's. Their dialectic solution into single concepts is implicit in every phase of Croce's philosophy. This can best be seen in the constant interchange of such words as spirit and reality; each of them, when taken by itself, a pure, formal spirit, and a pure, material reality, are meaningless, while, once they have been correlated, both indicate the same concept, the spirit perpetually realizing itself in the concreteness of life: a formula which contains the whole of Croce's immanentism. But within the distinctions of the concept, the dialectic process is constantly applied by Croce to such oppositions as those of good and evil, true and false, beautiful and ugly, which are nothing but the double aspect, affirmative and negative, respectively, of the concepts of goodness, and truth, and beauty. We need only recall what we have said of Croce's conception of æsthetic value, and of value in general. The dialectic process is the logical structure of Croce's concept of value. The positive element of each concept is the only real one, and a negative judgment of value is not a purely logical judgment, but a statement to which is added the expression of a desire or of an exigency. If we say: A is immoral, we mean: A follows his own immediate pleasure (a logical statement), and also: A ought to follow a higher end (the expression of a desire). A positive judgment of value, on the other hand, coincides entirely with a logical judgment, or a statement of fact. The opposition of value to fact is of the same kind as that of spirit to reality; verbal and apparent and not logical and real. The underlying reality of the opposition can be grasped only through the distinction; what in the opposition is a negative and therefore a mere abstraction can never be anything but a positive value of another order, a distinct form of activity. The action that we have judged as morally evil, if it is an action at all, belongs to the economic order, is economically rational, directed towards a particular end which confers on it its particular value; and the same applies to all the other categories of reality, in which error and evil cannot be introduced except by the substitution of one form for the other. It is impossible to distinguish a concept from its opposite as two concepts; but when a distinction is introduced, the opposition loses its negative character, and identifies itself with a distinct but positive value. Error and evil as such are never present except in the act that transcends them, in the conscience that, realizing itself in a higher sphere, turns against them and condemns them. It is superfluous to point to the importance that this process lends to the distinctions themselves, which are now seen at last not as mere logical instruments, but as the actual differentiations of reality, the necessary conditions of all life and progress.