Benedetto Croce

“ It is enough to make one lose one's head, as those scrupulous people are aware, who the more they attempt to perfect their examination of conscience the more they are confused. No other counsel can be offered to them than that of examining themselves certainly, but not overmuch, of looking rather ahead than behind, or only looking behind to the extent that it is necessary to look. We certainly know our own history and that of the world that surrounds us, but how little and how meagrely in comparison with our infinite desire for knowledge! ”

“ Sometimes repressed, sometimes outspoken, we hear the anxious question: Who will be the successor and the gravedigger? Will it be the menacing Parthian? Will it be the Germans, so rich in new and mysterious energy?—all this, despite the proud consciousness of ancient times that had uttered the words "Rome, the eternal city." Certainly, that general pessimism is not altogether coherent, for no pessimism can be so altogether, and here and there appear fugitive hints of a perception of human progress in this or that part of life. ”

“ The heart or brain is, as I have observed, naturalism, the ideal of historical culture inspired and to be inspired by the natural sciences. So true is this that Fueter himself burns a few grains of incense before this idol, sighing for a form of history that shall be beautiful with the beauty of a well-made machine, rivalling a book on physics such as the Theory of Tones of Helmholtz. The truth is that the ideal of the natural sciences, instead of being the perfection, is one of the many crises that historical thought has passed through and will pass through. ”

“ And what is 'humanism' but a renewed formula of that 'humanity' of which the ancient world knew little or nothing, and which Christianity and the Middle Ages had so profoundly felt? What is the word 'renaissance' or 'renewal' but a metaphor taken from the language of religion? And setting aside the word, is not the conception of humanism perhaps the affirmation of a spiritual and universal value, and in so far as it is that, altogether foreign, as we know, to the mind of antiquity, and an intrinsic continuation of the 'ecclesiastical' and 'spiritual' history which appeared with Christianity? ”

“ In order to turn poetical biography into truly historical biography we must repress our loves, our tears, our scorn, and seek what function the individual has fulfilled in social activity or civilization; and we must do the same for national history as for that of humanity, and for every group of facts, small or great, as for every order of events. We must supersede—that is to say, transform—values of sentiment with values of thought. ”

“ But history is never history of death, but history of life, and all know that the proper commemoration of the dead is the knowledge of what they did in life, of what they produced that is working in us, the history of their life and not of their death, which it behoves a gentle soul to veil, a soul barbarous and perverse to exhibit in its miserable nakedness and to contemplate with unhealthy persistence. ”

“ Indifference is, indeed, one of the principal sources of credulity, because no one is ever credulous in the things that touch him closely and of which he treats, while on the other hand all (as is proved in daily life) are ready to lend an ear to more or less indifferent talk. Asceticism, diminishing the interest for things of the world and for history, assisted in the neglect and dispersion of books and documents, promoted credulity toward everything heard or read, unbridling the imagination, ever desirous of the wonderful and curious, to the disadvantage of discernment. ”

“ What is preserved and enriched in the course of history is history itself, spirituality. The past does not live otherwise than in the present, as the force of the present, resolved and transformed in the present. Every particular form, individual, action, institution, work, thought, is destined to perish: even art, which is called eternal (and is so in a certain sense) , perishes, for it does not live, save to the extent that it is reproduced, and therefore transfigured and surrounded with new light, in the spirit of posterity. ”

“ The progress so much discussed was, so to speak, a progress without development, manifesting itself chiefly in a sigh of satisfaction and security, as of one, favoured by fortune, who has successfully encountered many obstacles and now looks serenely upon the present, secure as to the future, with mind averted from the past, or returning to it now and then for a brief moment only, in order to lament its ugliness, to despise and to smile at it. ”

“ It is true enough that they sometimes afford a hold for derision with their ingenuous belief that they have history under lock and key and are able to unlock the 'sources' at which thirsty humanity may quench its desire for knowledge; but we know that history is in all of us and that its sources are in our own breasts. For it is in our own breasts alone that is to be found that crucible in which the certain is converted into the true, and philology, joining with philosophy, produces history. ”

“ Enfranchising itself from servitude to extra-mundane caprice and to blind natural necessity, freeing itself from transcendency and from false immanence (which is in its turn transcendency) , thought conceives history as the work of man, as the product of human will and intellect, and in this manner enters that form of history which we shall call humanistic. This humanism first appears as in simple contrast to nature or to extra-mundane powers, and posits dualism. On the one side is man, with his strength, his intelligence, his reason, his prudence, his will for the good ”

“ Thing, not thought, is born of thing: a history derived from things would be a thing—that is to say, just the inexistent of which we were talking a moment ago.
But there must be a reason why chronicle as well as documents seems to precede history and to be its extrinsic source. The human spirit preserves the mortal remains of history, empty narratives and chronicles, and the same spirit collects the traces of past life, remains and documents, striving as far as possible to preserve them unchanged and to restore them as they deteriorate. ”

“ But sepulchres are not foolishness and illusion; they are, on the contrary, an act of morality, by which is affirmed the immortality of the work done by individuals. Although dead, they live in our memory and will live in the memory of times to come. And that collecting of dead documents and writing down of empty histories is an act of life which serves life. The moment will come when they will serve to reproduce past history, enriched and made present to our spirit.
For dead history revives, and past history again becomes present, as the development of life demands them. ”

“ History is thought by judging it, with that judgment which is not, as we have shown, the evaluation of sentiments, but the intrinsic knowledge of facts. And here its unity with philosophy is all the more evident, because the better philosophy penetrates and refines its distinctions, the better it penetrates the particular; and the closer its embrace of the particular, the closer its possession of its own proper conceptions. Philosophy and historiography progress together, indissolubly united. ”

“ And the illusion of illusions seems to be this: that the individual believes himself to be toiling to live and to intensify his life more and more, whereas he is really toiling to die. He wishes to see his work completed as the affirmation of his life, and its completion is the passing away of the work; he toils to obtain peace in life, but peace is on the contrary death, which alone is peace. How then are we to deny this dualism between the illusion of the individual and the reality of the work, between the individual and the Idea? ”

“ Guicciardini remains perplexed as to one point only, as though he had caught a glimpse of something that is neither caprice of the individual nor contingency of fortune: "When I consider to what accidents and dangers of illness, of chance, of violence, of infinite sorts, is exposed the life of man, the concurrence of how many things is needful that the harvest of the year should be good, nothing surprises me more than to see an old man or a good harvest." ”

“ A schematic and bloodless history of philosophy corresponded, in fact, with the philosophy of the 'fundamental problem.' A far richer, more varied and pliant philosophy should correspond with philosophy as methodology, which holds to be philosophy not only what appertains to the problems of immanency, of transcendency, of this world and the next, but everything that has been of avail in increasing the patrimony of guiding conceptions, the understanding of actual history, and the formation of the reality of thought in which we live. ”

“ The precedent of history cannot be something different from history, but is history itself, as philosophy is the precedent of philosophy and the living of the living. Nevertheless the thought of Herodotus and of the logographs really does unite itself with religions, myths, theogonies, cosmogonies, genealogies, and with legendary and epical tales, which were not indeed poetry, or were not only poetry but also thoughts—that is to say, metaphysics and histories. ”

“ Ancient thought had left fortune, the divinity, the inscrutable, at the edge of its humanism, with the result that the prodigious was never completely eliminated even from the most severe historians—the door at any rate was left open by which it could return. All are aware with how many 'superstitions' philosophy, science, history, and customs were impregnated during late antiquity, which in this respect was not intellectually superior, but indeed inferior, to the new Christian religion. ”

“ The merely finite and particular does not exist save as an abstraction. There is no abstract finite in poetry and in art itself, which is the reign of the individual; but there is the ingenuous finite, which is the undistinguished unity of finite and infinite, which will be distinguished in the sphere of thought and will in that way attain to a more lofty form of unity. And history is thought, and, as such, thought of the universal, of the universal in its concreteness, and therefore always determined in a particular manner. ”

“ History itself was now the teaching, the knowledge of the life of the human race from its creation upon the earth, through its struggles, up to its final state, which was indicated in the near or remote horizon. History thus became the work of God, teaching by His direct word and presence, which is to be seen and heard in every part of it. Declarations are certainly not wanting, indeed they abound, that the reading of histories is useful as counselling, and particularly as inculcating, good behaviour and abstention from evil. ”

“ Let us beware how we slay poor facts, if we wish to think as historians, and in so far as we are such and really think in that way we shall not feel the necessity for having recourse either to the extrinsic bond of causes, historical determinism, or to that which is equally extrinsic of transcendental ends, philosophy of history. The fact historically thought has no cause and no end outside itself, but only in itself, coincident with its real qualities and with its qualitative reality. ”

“ Happiness, beauty of human life, always seemed to be something that had been and was no [Pg 195] longer, and were it present would have soon been lost. For the Romans and those professing the cult of Rome, it was primitive, austere, victorious Rome; and all the Roman historians, big and little, Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, Paterculus and Florus, fix their gaze upon that image, as they lament the corruption of later days. Once it was Rome that trampled the world underfoot; but they knew that the triumphant queen must some day become slave from queen that once she was. ”

“ But they do not see that such an end of the world exists only in their own imaginations, rich in elegiac motives, but poor in understanding. They do not perceive that such importunate trumpet-calls have never in reality existed. These are very useful, on the other hand, for reminding those who may have forgotten it that history always pursues her indefatigable work, and that her apparent agonies are the travail of a new birth, and that what are believed to be her expiring sighs are moans that announce the birth of a new world. ”