Once this is clearly understood it is possible to appreciate the services rendered to history by Marx. For Croce holds that economics is a real science. The economic factors in history can be isolated and treated by themselves. Without such isolated treatment they cannot be understood, and if they are not understood, our view of history is bound to be unnecessarily narrow and onesided. _On the relative importance_ of the economic and the political and the religious factors in history he has nothing to say. There is no _a priori_ answer to the question whether any school of writers has unduly diminished or exaggerated the importance of any one of these factors. Their importance has varied at different times, and can at any time only be estimated empirically. It remains a service of great value to have distinguished a factor of such importance which had been previously neglected. If then the economic factor in history should be isolated and treated separately, how is it to be distinguished? For it is essential to Croce's view of science that each science has its own concepts which can be distinguished clearly from those of other sciences. This question is discussed in Essay III Q. 5 and more specifically in Essay VI. Croce is specially anxious to distinguish between the spheres of economics and ethics. Much confusion has been caused in political economy in the past by the assumption that economics takes for granted that men behave egoistically, _i.e._ in an immoral way. As a result of this assumption men have had to choose between the condemnation of economics or of mankind. The believer in humanity has been full of denunciation of that monstrosity the economic man, while the thorough-going believer in economics has assumed that the success of the economic interpretation of history proves that men are always selfish. The only alternative view seemed to be the rather cynical compromise that though men were sometimes unselfish, their actions were so prevailingly selfish that for political purposes the unselfish actions might be ignored. Croce insists, and surely with justice, that economic actions are not moral or immoral, but in so far as they are economic, nonmoral. The moral worth of actions cannot be determined by their success or failure in giving men satisfaction. For there are some things in which men find satisfaction which they yet judge to be bad. We must distinguish therefore the moral question whether such and such an action is good or bad from the economic whether it is or is not useful, whether it is a way by which men get what they, rightly or wrongly want. In economics then we are merely discussing the efficiency or utility of actions. We can ask of any action whether it ought or ought not to be done at all. That is a moral question. We may also ask whether it is done competently or efficiently: that is an economic question. It might be contended that it is immoral to keep a