more complete, but at the same time more indefinite. The highest completeness is then equal to the highest indefiniteness. And we naturally prefer to be told a few specific facts rather than listen to a man who pretends to tell us everything, but gives us no information. Completeness may be achieved with a single word, but where then is the richness and the fullness we were promised?
Nor can I make out what Croce means by indicating that the philosophic concept is adequate to reality. Certainly not that it is identical with or similar to the reality with which it deals, for a book on botany is not a forest, and a book on philosophy is not the world. Perhaps then knowledge "adequate to reality" is such knowledge as will enable me to recognize things of which I have been told, to foresee them and thus to control them.
Upon this basis chemistry may fairly be called a science adequate to reality. For if I read a description of platinum, and thereafter find myself in possession of a piece of platinum, I am able to determine that it is platinum; and I know that if I fuse a certain quantity of chloride with a certain quantity of mercury, I shall obtain another substance which will have characteristics more or less similar to those of chloride and mercury, and may serve for certain definite purposes.
In philosophy, however, we find no such conditions. No one has ever met a concept on the
