I PROPOSE in this volume to take up again the subject of the
Theory and History of the Writing of History which I wrote in
1912-13, and which was continued in my History of Italian
Historiography in the Nineteenth Century and in several other
shorter works. I do not wish to offer this book in replacement
of the previous book, but only to add new considerations born
of my further studies and stimulated by new experience of life.
In conformity with its origin, this book consists of a series of
essays which share an implicit unity in the thought which runs
through them all, and to which I have given also an explicit
unity by means of the first essay, which serves as an introduction.
Any slight repetition or infraction of the order of exposition
noticeable now and then is a consequence of the literary form of
the essay.

Particular emphasis is laid, in this volume, on the relation
between the writing of history and practical action; not by way
of defence against the attacks which in the name of abstract
moral absolutism are nowadays often delivered against "his-
toricism" by people who happen to be anxious to put morality
outside the pale of history, and think to exalt it, so that it can
agreeably be reverenced from afar and neglected from near at
hand: no, not with that motive, but because historical thought is
born in an extremely complicated and delicate dialectical process
out of the passion of practical life, transcending the latter and
getting free of it in a pure judgment of truth. By virtue of that
judgment, passion is converted into decisive action.

The problem is difficult. Indeed all the problems of historical
thought are difficult when, as in this book it is viewed as the sole

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