had come out—and he turned back. The ass was always a philosophic beast: witness Buridan and Bruno!
Croce's book makes it unnecessary for us—for the moment at least—to enter the trap, or the den, since it is supposed, as I have said, to be intelligible without previous reading of Hegel, and since it is at the same time a select sample of the products of the Neapolitan branch of Hegel & Co.
Let us see, then, what there is that we may regard as significant and as valid in those elements of Hegel's philosophy which, according to Croce, still persist. Some time ago, in an article in the Critica entitled Are We Hegelians? Croce besought for his favorite philosopher at least a definitive burial, a first-class funeral. For my part, I am quite willing to drive a few more nails into the coffin.
I
The two great merits of Hegel, according to his latest champion, are these: that he demonstrated the existence of a method peculiar to philosophy and different from the methods of art or the physical and mathematical sciences; and that he formulated that dialectic (the co-existence of contraries or the identity of opposites) which was already implicit in certain ear-
