Croce faces this dilemma: either he must contradict himself by assuming that there are differences between phenomena which he has called identical, or he must put ink on paper without intelligible results. Impelled by the desire to say something, Croce here and there loosens the links of his chain of homogeneity; for instance, after saying that art is feeling, he affirms that “what gives coherence and unity to the intuition is feeling: the intuition is really such because it represents a feeling, and can only appear from and upon that.”[1] Now if feeling gives something to intuition; if intuition represents feeling and appears from feeling, then intuition and feeling are two different things; whereas Croce maintains elsewhere that intuition is art and that feeling is art,[2] forgetting, at the appropriate moment, the very simple mathematical and logical axiom which teaches us that two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.
Nor is there any hope of reaching a concrete understanding through the idea that those phases of the spirit which are represented as identical may succeed each other in time. Croce denies resolutely that there is any such succession. Until intuition is expressed, it does not exist even as intuition. “Thought, musical fancy, pictorial image, did not indeed exist without expression,
