LIGHT FROM ITALY
Benedetto Croce: an Introduction to his Philosophy. By Raffaello Piccoli. 12mo. 315 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.
THE philosophic science which received its first systematic consideration from Plotinus, and to which Baumgarten gave the name Aesthetic, has been ennobled and fortified by such men as Vico, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Shelley, and De Sanctis. The art of every age is accompanied by an intellectual corpus arising from a source as fundamental as the creative impulse itself—the will to determine the true concept of the beautiful. These heuristic speculations have been grouped categorically into five aesthetics: the empirical, hedonistic, intellectual, agnostic, and mystic, each of which has contributed more or less to the eternal problem, but owing to the narrowness of its postulates has failed to approximate anything like a final solution. Another name and another philosophy must be appended to the list, a name by no means new, for out of the crushing materialism of modern life Benedetto Croce has come to be the leader of an idealism which has slowly spread from Italian soil to practically every country of the globe.
Croce's writings, beautiful as they unquestionably are in certain passages, cannot be called artistic. Indeed it is a significant fact that among the illustrious figures in the history of aesthetics we seldom encounter an artist. It will be worth while to look into this matter. A theory comprehensive enough to include the manifold forms of art must, of necessity, be unencumbered with the accidents of means and motives which, through their particularity, witness the limitations of periods and special tendencies. Painters, in discussing art, are, in most instances, bound to the technicalities of the moment, and when the remotest sort of a concept appears, it is likely to prove to be little more than a thin generalization instigated by the purely emotional need for larger statement. This is not always a sign of deficient intelligence; for painters deal with materials sensational in themselves and capable in their raw and unordered state of producing such vivid emotions as to make philosophic vision almost impos-
