Philosophy of the Practical Author:Benedetto Croce Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II NEGATION OF THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FEELING In affirming the existence of the practical form The practical activity and of activity, we have had in ... more »view only the theoretical ' to-caiud third spiritual form and have demonstrated that the one cannot form: f"lie- be absorbed and confused in the other, and we have referred only to the theoretic form, when announcing our intention of determining the relations of the practical with the other forms of the spirit. This seems but little correct, and in any case not exhaustive, because there are or may be other non-theoretical forms of the spirit, into which the practical form could be resolved. Of these it would be necessary to take account. And not to beat too long about the bush, that of which in this case it is question, is the form of feeling, the last or intermediary of the three forms into which it is customary to divide the spiritual activity: representation, feeling, tendency ; thought, feeling, will. Attempts have not been wanting to reduce tendency or will to feeling, or, as is said, to a sentimental reaction from perceptions and thoughts. In fact there is hardly a treatise of philosophy of the practical without a preliminary study of the relations between the will and feeling. We cannot, then, escape from the dilemma; either we must recognize the omission into which we have fallen and hasten to correct it, or else make explicit the supposition that may be contained in that omission (which would thus be intentional and conscious), that a third general form of the spirit, or a form of feeling, does not exist. We have adopted precisely this last position, and it therefore becomes incumbent upon us briefly to expose the reasons for which we hold that the concept ...« less