place before themselves the documents and narratives, which without them would remain scattered and inert. And it will be impossible ever to understand anything of the effective process of historical thought unless we start from the principle that the spirit itself is history, maker of history at every moment of its existence, and also the result of all anterior history" (p. 25).
Croce distinguishes between true history and what he calls 'pseudo-histories,' distinguishing among the latter various species, such as "philological history," "rhetorical history," "poetical history," "sociological history." All of these have their relative justification in certain relations or practical situations and are 'false' only when they are mistaken for genuine history.
It is not until we reach the true concept of history that its identity with genuine philosophy becomes evident. The ideal of history is not that of universality in the extensive sense—the exhaustive knowledge of all facts belonging to every period in the life of the world, or even such a list of facts as that of a single nation or individual. It is upon such a mistaken view of the task of history that historical scepticism rests. But the absurdity of this demand becomes clear when we reflect that if all such interrogations were answered and we were in possession of such an infinite array of facts "there would be nothing else left for us to do but to clear our minds of them, to forget them, and to concentrate upon that particular point alone which corresponds to a problem and constitutes living, active history, contemporary history" (pp. 53-54). Scepticism in regard to the possibility of fulfilling the demands of history is simply another form of the scepticism in regard to the thing-in-itself. But to deny the possibility of universal history is not to deny the universal in history. For since that which is known by history is determined by thought, the universal is immanent in it. In its essential form, history expresses itself in individual judgments, which are the inseparable syntheses of universal and particular. The subject of the history of poetry is not Dante or Shakespeare, or Italian poetry or English poetry, but poetry, i.e., a universal. Similarly, the subject of political or social history is not that of any particular nation or time, but culture, civilization, progress, liberty (pp. 60-61).
When we hold fast to this conception of history as not concerned with a dead past, but with the thoughts of the living present, and also realize that as thinking it moves in the realm of the concrete universal, we are able to understand the author's identification of
