_Note._--May I be permitted an explanation concerning the history of my thought (and also of its criticism owing to their unity already demonstrated)? Sixteen years ago I began my studies in philosophy with a memoir entitled _History beneath the general concept of Art_ (1893). There I maintained, not that history is art (as others have summarized my thought) but (as indeed the title clearly showed) that history can be placed beneath the _general_ concept of art. I now maintain, sixteen years after, that, on the contrary, history is philosophy and that history and philosophy are indeed the same thing. The two theories are certainly different; but they are far less different than appears, and the second theory is in any case a development and perfecting of the first. _Elle a bien changé sur la route,_ without doubt; but without discontinuity and without gaps. Indeed, the objects of my memoir were chiefly: (1) to combat the _absorption_ of history, which the natural sciences were then attempting more than they are now; (2) the affirmation of the _theoretic_ character of art and of its _seriousness,_ art being then regarded as a hedonistic fact by the prevailing positivism; (3) the negation of history as a _third form_ of the theoretic spirit different from the æsthetic form and from that of thought. I still maintain these three theses intact and they form part of my _Æsthetic_ and of my _Logic._ But the proper character of philosophy, so profoundly different from the empirical and abstract sciences, was not clear to me at the time, and therefore neither was the difference between philosophic Logic and Logic of classification. For this reason I was unable completely to solve the problem that I had proposed to myself. Owing to this confusion of the true universality of philosophy and of the false universality of the sciences (which is either mere generality or abstractness) in a single group, it seemed to me that the concreteness of history could enter only the group of art, understood in its greater extension (hence the general concept of art). In this group, by means of the fallacious method of subordination and co-ordination, I distinguished history as the _representation of the real,_ placing it without mediation alongside the representation of the _possible_ (art in the strict sense of the word). When I understood the true relation between Philosophy and the sciences (a slow progress, because to reattain to consciousness of what philosophy truly is has been slow and difficult for the men of my generation), the nature of history also became somewhat clearer to me as I gradually freed myself from the remnants of the intellectualistic and naturalistic method. In the _Æsthetic_ I looked upon that spiritual product as due to the intersection of philosophy and of art. In the _Outlines of Logic_ I made another step in advance, history there appearing to me as the ultimate result of the theoretic spirit, the sea into which flowed the