Benedetto Croce: An Introduction to His Philosophy

This book is the account of the life and activity of one who is living and acting. Herodotus tells us the Greeks had a proverb which forbade them to pronounce any man happy before he is dead. We may certainly take his warning to this extent,—that we should refrain from attempting to fix a philosopher's thought so long as he continues to think. Benedetto Croce has, it is true, presented his Philosophy of Mind in such questionable shape, that it gives the student the impression of finality, the feeling that a doctrine which throughout the history of philosophy has been struggling for expression has now at last come to light. But this appearance of finality is due to a certain artistic power which Croce possesses in an eminent degree, the power of reliving the past and making history interpret life. Beneath all his systematization there is the germ of a new life, a new life, which, will take form in new problems. While then we may say that no living philosopher has given so complete an appearance of finality to his doctrine as Croce has done in his Philosophy of Mind it is really the reflection of a work of art which serves only to conceal the living thought.
The publishers of this Introduction to the philosophy of Benedetto Croce by Dr. Raffaello Piccoli have courteously invited me to write this foreword inasmuch as I was the first to introduce this philosophy, otherwise than by translations, to the attention of English students. I do so very gladly. My own work was confined to the purely philosophical writings, my interest in them having been first aroused by the striking address on Æsthetic delivered by Croce to the International Congress of Philosophy at Heidelberg in 1908. When I wrote my book, the Philosophy of Mind consisted of three volumes, the Estetica , the Logica , and the Pratica , but before I had completed my account I read in Croce's Journal Critica the announcement of the forthcoming publication of the fourth volume on the Theory and History of the Writing of History . Croce had, it seemed to me, closed his book on Practice with the plain indication, not that he had solved every philosophical problem, nor that philosophy was not an external problem, but that he had given an exhaustive account of the stages or degrees in their order as moments of the developing life of the mind, and that outside these degrees there were no others. The new work did not, indeed, either negative or qualify this conclusion, but it bore evidence of the ceaseless activity of his mind. Are we then, because the philosophy of Croce is still developing, to refrain from the attempt to interpret it on the ground that any meaning we may find in it is indefinite and insecure? Certainly not, for a philosopher's thinking unfolds and develops like a living thing, it is not constructed like a building, nor does it rest on foundations which may be unsound.