ABSTRACT
The Aesthetic of the Italian philosopher is partly speculative, partly historical, about a third of the whole being devoted to theory and approximately two-thirds to a history at once critical and expository. There is no distinction whatever for B. Croce between aesthetics and philology, the science of art and that of language, for Aesthetic and Linguistic, conceived as true sciences, are not two distinct things, but one thing only. The former, in his principal work, gives a brief historical account of certain types of aesthetic theory, and a yet briefer sketch of his own views on the subject. Beauty, for him, is the expression of emotion, and all such expression, without any exception, is beautiful. Art or beauty is nothing more than 'intuition', the pre-conceptual stage of thought, and so entirely distinct from material reality, from the useful, from the pleasant, from moral conduct, and from conceptual knowledge.
