the sighed-for eminence, repulsing his adversary, and yet in his company.”[1] Every particular concept “is independent on one side and dependent on another, or both independent and dependent.”[2] The spirit which possesses intuition “finds in that virtue, together with its satisfaction, its dissatisfaction.”[3] Foscolo, after the writing of a certain famous ode, is “a poet who has utterly achieved his task, and is therefore no longer a poet.”[4] The paths of error are the same as the paths of truth;[5] nay, more, pure error does not exist, for if it did exist, it would be truth.[6] The concept and other things which are not art “are in art as art, either antecedent or consequent.”[7] The activities of the spirit are at the same time all real and all unreal.[8]
You simply cannot count the identifications: philosophy is religion,[9] history,[10] poetry;[11] language is art;[12] art is intuition, intuition is expression, expression is imagination, imagination is fancy, fancy is lyrism, lyrism is intuition, expression is beauty, etcetera, etcetera. Croce’s logic tends inevitably and infinitely toward fusions (not to say confusions). One does not see what is to prevent his reducing the entire system, by means of such identities, to one single word, to that Absolute which he regards as the synthesis of syntheses, the Spirit, the Real, and so forth.
