spheres, and many English scholars have been concerned to secure
the common fruits thus promised. In the last analysis, however, the
occasion and the justification for the discussion of Croce's historical
works reside in those works themselves. The inner quality of the
vision of man's life in time which pervades them, and not any cir-
cumstantial criterion, must ultimately measure their stature and
justify their claim the attention of reflective men. The purpose
of the present essay has kept in view both of these factors. It seeks to
minister, in a small way, to the cultural and intellectual understand-
ing between the Italian and the English-speaking spheres; but it is
concerned above all to present this inner and pervasive vision of
Croce's histories in its true lineaments, to be judged by its own
quality.

What is the ultimate quality of this vision of history in Croce? It
may be expressed in a single phrase: history is the history of liberty.
The phrase itself is not new, any more than that vision itself. It is
rather the immemorial vision of history which has evoked the pro-
foundest movement of the spirit of western man. The particular
achievement of Croce as an historian and as a theorist of history (and
these roles are one, for his reflections upon history have their origin
in his commitments as an historian) is the clarity and force with which
he has apprehended and stated this immemorial vision in terms con-
clusively cogent in the twentieth century. His apprehension, more-
over, possesses the dimensions of human reality itself. He sees the
meaning of liberty, of human liberty in history, in its pure idea. Thus
his affirmation of the spirituality and the essential creativity of the
human agent is unfaltering. At the same time, however, he appre-
hends with almost microscopic clarity the existential labour of the
spirit in the creative process of history, the almost Sisyphean labour
by which that image of liberty is converted into the historical reality
of human institutions. Finally, his historical writings are permeated
with a profound appreciation of the ethos and the pathos of the labour
of the human spirit in history. This vision, once glimpsed, needs no
apology. It transcends all cultural limits and addresses itself directly
to the profoundest interest of men in all times and in all circumstances.

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