BENEDETTO CROCE
AN INTRODUCTION TO HIS PHILOSOPHY
by
RAFFAELLO PICCOLI
WITH A FOREWORD BY
H. WILDON CARR
JONATHAN CAPE
ELEVEN GOWER STREET, LONDON
1922
FOREWORD
This book is the account of the life and activity of one who isliving and acting. Herodotus tells us the Greeks had a proverb whichforbade them to pronounce any man happy before he is dead. We maycertainly take his warning to this extent,—that we should refrainfrom attempting to fix a philosopher's thought so long as he continuesto think. Benedetto Croce has, it is true, presented his Philosophyof Mind in such "questionable shape," that it gives the student theimpression of finality, the feeling that a doctrine which throughoutthe history of philosophy has been struggling for expression has nowat last come to light. But this appearance of finality is due to acertain artistic power which Croce possesses in an eminent degree, thepower of reliving the past and making history interpret life. Beneathall 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 noliving philosopher has given so complete an appearance of finality tohis doctrine as Croce has done in his Philosophy of Mind it is reallythe reflection of a work of art which serves only to conceal the livingthought.
The publishers of this Introduction to the philosophy of BenedettoCroce by Dr. Raffaello Piccoli have courteously invited me to writethis foreword inasmuch as I was the first to introduce this philosophy,otherwise than by translations, to the attention of English students. Ido so very gladly. My own work was confined to the purely philosophicalwritings, my interest in them having been first aroused by the strikingaddress on Æsthetic delivered by Croce to the International Congress ofPhilosophy at Heidelberg in 1908. When I wrote my book, the Philosophyof Mind consisted of three volumes, the Estetica, the Logica,and the Pratica, but before I had completed my account I read inCroce's Journal Critica the announcement of the forthcoming publicationof the fourth volume on the Theory and History of the Writing ofHistory. Croce had, it seemed to me, closed his book on Practicewith the plain indication, not that he had solved every philosophicalproblem, nor that philosophy was not an external problem, but thathe had given an exhaustive account of the stages or degrees in theirorder as moments of the developing life of the mind, and that outsidethese degrees there were no others. The new work did not, indeed,either negative or qualify this conclusion, but it bore evidence of theceaseless activity of his mind. Are we then, because the philosophy ofCroce is still developing, to refrain from the attempt to interpretit on the ground that any meaning we may find in it is indefinite andinsecure? Certainly not, for a philosopher's thinking unfolds anddevelops like a living thing, it is not constructed like a building,nor does it rest on foundations which may be unsound.
Dr. Raffaello Piccoli, a professor in the University of Pisa, andthe author of this book, was born in Naples, Croce's city, in 1886.He himself as a young student came under the personal spell of thephilosopher he writes about, and grew up in the intellectual atmospherewhich his philosophy was creating. To this great advantage he has addedanother, for first in Australia, and later in the Universities ofEngland and America he has acquired a perfect command of our languageand a thor