to us, it is so significant to observe, as masters of irony. There has never again been so great an artist in philosophy, so supreme a dramatist, as Plato. But in later times philosophers themselves have often been willing to admit that even if they were not, like Plato, dramatists, there was poetry and art in their vocation. “One does not see why the sense for Philosophy should be more generally diffused than that for poetry,” remarked Schelling, evidently regarding them as on the same plane. F. A. Lange followed with his memorable “History of Materialism,” in which the conception of philosophy as a poetic art was clearly set forth. “Philosophy is pure art,” says in our own days a distinguished thinker who is in especially close touch with the religious philosophy of the East. “The thinker works with laws of thought and scientific facts in just the same sense as the musical composer with tones. He must find accords, he must think out sequences, he must set the part in a necessary relation to the whole. But for that he needs art.”[36] Bergson regards philosophy as an art, and Croce, the more than rival of Bergson in popular esteem, and with interesting points of contact with the French philosopher, though his standpoint is so different, has repeatedly pointed out—as regards Nietzsche, for instance, and even as regards a philosopher to whom he is so closely related as Hegel—that we may read philosophy for its poetic rather than its historic truth. Croce’s position in this matter is not, indeed, easy to state quite simply. He includes æsthetics in philosophy, but he would not regard philosophy as an art. For him art is the first and lowest stratum in the mind, not in rank, but in order, and on it the other strata are laid and combine with it. Or, as he elsewhere says, “art is the root of our whole theoretic life. Without root there can be neither flower nor fruit.”[37] But for Croce art is not itself flower or fruit. The “Concept” and other abstractions have to be brought in before Croce is satisfied that he has attained reality. It may, perhaps, indeed, be permitted, even to an admirer of the skill with which Croce spreads out such wide expanses of thought, to suggest that, in spite of his anxiety to keep close to the concrete, he is not therein always successful, and that he tends to move in verbal circles, as may perhaps happen to a philosopher who would reduce the philosophy of art to the philosophy of language. But, however that may be, it is a noteworthy fact that the close relationship of art and philosophy is admitted by the two most conspicuous philosophers of to-day, raised to popular eminence in spite of themselves, the Philosopher of Other-worldliness and the Philosopher of This-worldliness.