IN translating these essays of Croce I have tried to grasp his thought and to restate it in a language as free as possible from technicalities—in my own language, that is. I am only too well aware of the risks and dangers of such a procedure. One of the beauties of Croce’s writing is the geometrical precision of his terminology, which carries a brilliant transparency even into the most devious subtleties of the idealistic approach to the Universe. However, I have a feeling that the translator of Croce who is over-respectful of such dangers is likely to run into greater ones: the danger of leaving him unintelligible save to those few who are willing to prepare for reading him by a long and thorough study of all the philosophy of the nineteenth century; and the further danger of losing his clarity in the end by transferring his terms into an American language which has most of the same terms, but is coloured by a thought history different from the history of Croce’s idealism.

Nevertheless, I have set a limit to my effort to depart from technicalities at the point where we approach the kernel of the Crocean system. I say “Spirit,” where I might have said “Mind,”—in order to avoid the vagueness of the word “mind” in English. For with Croce the Spirit is a universal immanent “mind” of which the individual “mind” is only a phase.

Now it will be recalled that the essence of Croce’s contribution to contemporary civilisation—a contribution that has reformed the spiritual life of his own country and has not been without influence in other countries—is the critical method he has developed by rigidly distinguishing in the Spirit’s activity three aspects or “spheres”: the intuitional, the logical, the practical; aesthetics, logic, ethics; imagination, thought, will; image, concept, action. I take over this tripartite division in this language, hoping that the reader will recognise any of the terms that thus appear and understand them in the precise and strictly limited sense in which Croce thinks them.

But these essays relate especially to experiences and problems that arise in the “sphere of the practical,” in ethics and action, that is. And here we meet in Croce a number of terms that will be misunderstood if we interpret them in their common meanings in English: practical, economic, utilitarian. I transfer these words just as they are; resting content with the explanation that the word “practical” relates to the whole sphere of action, including its ethical bearings; that the word “economic” relates to action apart from ethical concerns, but with reference to the material or physical welfare or volition of the race at large; whereas “utilitarian” (in Croce it is almost equivalent to “selfish”) relates to action apart from ethics, and apart from society, but with reference to the material or physical welfare or volition of a specific individual or group of individuals.

Some of the fundamentals of Hegelian or Fichtian idealism I also utilise, but with a certain satisfaction, too, in view of their precision. I say “dialectic” for the process of creating reality by “transcending” contraries or “antitheses.” I have used the word “transcend” regularly as a translation of the Italian superare, though there is some objection to the term; since I also use “transcendent” in one of its usual philosophical meanings—for that which, in dualistic systems, is beyond the sphere of the human mind. The German “becoming” is rendered by Croce as “development” (svolgimento), for which, somewhat arbitrarily, I have elected to use the English word “progression.” A. L.