ways and everywhere in the establishment of identities, that is to say, in proving the perfect equivalence, the exact interchangeableness of the concepts under discussion. Expression, fancy, imagination, are not elements or factors of art; they are art itself, in its entirety. Intuition and lyrism cannot be defined as individual members of the large class of the phenomena of the spirit, because they include the whole range of the phenomena of the spirit with which art is concerned. At the most they may be considered as proper to the human spirit, but since the human spirit belongs to the universal spirit, and the universal spirit is identical with the whole, and the whole is inexpressible because it cannot be distinguished from anything else (since no reality exists outside it), your final result is that intuition is an element of reality—that is to say, you know just as much about it as you knew before.
Croce’s strategy consists in taking secret advantage of the different meanings of the concepts which he employs—denying their diversity, but using them (without seeming to do so) in such a way as to give a certain coloring and a certain content to his system, which would otherwise be merely a game of words—whereas, to be just, not more than three-fourths of it, or at the most four-fifths, is merely a game of words.
