Part 2

This book does not therefore intend to substitute itself, not even as a summary and a short cut for lazy minds, to the works of Croce. It is rather an introduction to those works, and at the same time the confession of one individual experience of that philosophy. It is an historical sketch, and implicitly a criticism, since our way of understanding a thought is our judgment of that thought (when not a judgment that that thought passes on us); a sketch which I think I can honestly write because so much of that philosophy has been the daily food of my intellectual life, my own history, for years. Before the war I should probably have been able to write it with less difficulty, with more complete adhesion; but the perspective of these few years will make it perhaps less passionate and more reflective. An explicit criticism of the whole philosophy of Croce it is not, and it does not attempt to be: the reader may find traces of my doubts and of my preoccupations in it, but I have humbly tried to give not more, and I hope not less, than what he has a right to expect from the title.

I do not write this book for the professors of philosophy. Those among them who know Croce will not need it; and those who either have not as yet taken any notice of him, or from a casual acquaintance with one of his books have proceeded to damn most vigorously what they have hardly understood, are certainly beyond my power. I write it for the young, from the heart of my own now fast receding youth, trying to raise before their eyes, in the words of Dante to Brunetto Latini,

la cara e buona immagine paterna di voi, quando .... ad ora ad ora m'insegnavate come l'uom s'eterna.

I trust that they will find in it what they need not less than we of an older generation needed it, and what I know they are thirsting for: an example of intellectual energy and of moral strength converging into a life of unremitting devotion to the service of that truth which is light and love and joy,--our only light against the menace of darkness.

Raffaello Piccoli.

Northampton, Mass., June-October, 1931.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

I. The Beginnings II. Early Environment III. The Origins of his Thought

PART FIRST

From Philology to Philosophy (1893-1899)

I. History as Art II. On Literary Criticism III. History and Economics

PART SECOND

The Philosophy of Mind (1900-1910)

I. The Growth of the System II. Intuition and Expression III. The Concept of Art IV. Criticism and Technique V. The Pure Concept VI. The Forms of Knowledge VII. The Theory of Error VIII. The Practical Activity IX. Economics and Ethics X. The Laws

PART THIRD

Philosophy as History (1911-1921)

I. Works and Days II. The Theory of History III. Criticism and History IV. Veritas filta temporis

Bibliographical Note

Index

BENEDETTO CROCE

INTRODUCTION

Croce's family, and early education--His religion--Life in Rome in the eighties--Labriola's influence--Meditations on ethics--Return to Naples; life as a scholar--Travels; and the problem of history --Philosophus fit--The intellectual conditions of Italy after the Risorgimento--Contemporary European culture--American analogies --Two leaders of Italian thought--Francesco de Sanctis--Giosuè Carducci--Croce's approach to philosophy, and his method of work--His relations to the philosophical practition--Vico and the philosophy of the Renaissance--Bruno and Campanella--The humanism of Vico--Naturalism and spiritualism--A philosophy of the human spirit.

I. The Beginnings

Benedetto Croce was born in 1866, in a small town in the Italian province of Aquila, the only son of an old-fashioned, Catholic, and conservative Neapolitan family. His grandfather had been a high magistrate, untouched by the new liberal currents in his devotion to the old régime and to the Bourbon dynasty then reigning in Naples. His father followed the traditional maxim of the "good people" of Naples: that an honest man must take care of his family and of his business, and keep away from the intrigues of political life. His mother was a woman of culture and taste, such as the old type of education for women, which is now as completely forgotten as if it had never existed, used to produce. Bertrando Spaventa, the philosopher, and Silvio Spaventa, a statesman who had brought to his enthusiasm for the national cause all the traditions of his Neapolitan conservatism, were her brothers: both of them, however, estranged from Croce's family because of their political ideas.

The child grew in this greyish, subdued atmosphere, in which the only touches of colour were added by his own passion for books of history and romance, and by the visits to the beautiful old churches to which he accompanied his mother. To the circumstances of his childhood, Croce attributes the relative delay in the development of his political feelings and ideals, for a long time submerged by his interests in literature and erudition. But because every fault brings with itself some compensation, he also owed to them his critical attitude towards partisan political legends, his impatience towards the rhetoric of liberalism, his vehement dislike of great emphatic words, and of any kind of pomp and ceremony, together with a power to appreciate what is useful and effectual in the actions of men, wherever it may come from.

As a boy, he went to a Catholic "collegio" or boarding school, and in this too his experience differed from that of the majority of his contemporaries. The insistence on lay education imparted by the State, and the preference for the day school, which allows the family to supplement the work of the school, in fact, to take care of the moral and social side of education, as distinct from the purely intellectual one, are characteristics of the new Italian methods, obviously in keeping with the general tendencies of the age. I remember that to myself as a boy it was inexplicable why anybody should be sent to a "collegio" unless he were an orphan or an unmanageable scamp. But Croce seems to have enjoyed his experience, to which he was submitted merely in accordance with the habits of his family; and even now he praises the system for breeding in him those feelings of loyalty and honour, which are the result of life in common with boys of one's own age, and of the necessity of adapting oneself to a variety of dispositions and temperaments.

Classical secondary education in Italy roughly corresponds in its scope, even to-day, to that which is imparted in Anglo-Saxon countries by secondary schools and liberal colleges. It is supposed to end the "formative" phase of education, and to lead to the higher phase in the Universities, which is, whether cultural or professional, of a highly specialized and "informative" kind. It is the direct outcome of the humanistic tradition, and rather more so in the clerical schools, like the one which Croce attended, than in the public ones. By the time he was ready for the University, he must have had a good knowledge of the classics, as a general background to a mainly literary and historical culture, in which the elements of scientific knowledge, and a good deal of mathematics, had also their place.