Excerpt from The Essence of Aesthetic
When I first visited Naples, in 1909, I was quite unprepared for making the discovery of a new philosopher, and nothing was further from my mind than to become his prophet to the English-speaking world. Yet so it has happened.
If I may be permitted the use of metaphor and to take the eternal activities of the spirit of man as equivalent to the eternal ideas of Plato, yet far more real than they, because immanent and not transcendental, and if I may push yet further the metaphor and figure these activities of the spirit as planets, then one might say that Croce is the Adams-Leverrier of philosophy, and his Theory of ?sthetic the discovery of the planet Neptune. For just as those astronomer-mathematicians proved the independent existence of that planet, hitherto unknown, by observing the perturbations it set up throughout the planetary system, so Croce has proved the independent existence of ?sthetic, the last of the great planetary activities of the spirit of man to come into line with thought. Just as the action of Neptune was falsely attributed to other causes, so the action of ?sthetic has been falsely confused with Ethic, Economic and Logic. Croce has disentangled and proved its independence. And just as we can now say that there is no other planet to be discovered in the heavens, so we can say that there is no other activity of the spirit to be discovered.
Returning to 1909 and my visit to Naples, I was not long in finding a copy of the "Estetica," and a single reading made clear to me its supreme importance.
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