sible. Every period has its immediate preoccupations; every few years the ideas of artists undergo a shift of direction, and with each point of departure a new set of positive tenets is formulated. New liberties taken with the simple facts of the visual world: geometrical design and amusing effects in the unconventional combination of bits of matter added to the sensuous excitement of varying colour-ranges absorb the artist's entire attention. All of these factors have their value as means—they are expressions, stuff of the mind in their origin and closely linked with the material steps from the palette to the canvas. Beyond them the painter is rarely at home. He is too intensely concentrated on some particular discovery to be bothered about universals, or to inquire critically into the larger meaning of what he is doing. He is like the natural scientist who gets elated over the precision and arresting clarity of a microscopic revelation. It remains for the philosopher, to whom art is neither a specialized science nor a technical process, to give us a logical analysis, and to show how art is a coherent manifestation of the reality of life.
Raffaello Piccoli's exposition of the most convincing cycle of spiritual activity since Hegel is an achievement. Not only does he understand thoroughly Croce’s philosophy, but he also succeeds in putting into English, a foreign idiom, the glowing humanism which he has caught from the master of modern Italian thought. If Signor Piccoli is typical of the cultural life of young Italy, then I advise all American expatriates to hurry thither for spiritual solace. His book is profound and sympathetic: intended as an introduction to Croce, it goes much farther, and presents in compact form a complete interpretation of the doctrine of the theoretical and the practical. Croce's influence has been steadily growing in this country—in 1912 he wrote his Breviario di Estetica for the Rice Institute of Houston, Texas—and his disciples will welcome a volume that is systematic, sensitive, and exhilaratingly above journalistic smartness.
With Croce philosophy is a living reality: "Problems are not given to you from the outside, as puzzles at which you might try your skill, or duties imposed by the pedagogue: they are your experience, and your philosophy is your conscious reaction to them." His method annihilates all static conceptions of truth, and logic rises to its proper function, "an inquiry into the nature of thought and therefore, since there is no way by which we can reach reality except through thought, into the nature of reality itself." Briefly,
