AESTHETICS For Croce, art occupies a position between history and science Like history it deals with particular cases rather than general laws, but its particular cases are imagined, not real, and they illustrate, as science does, universal truths Croce himself distinguished between four phases of his aesthetic theory, from the first volume of his Filosofia dello Spirito in 1902 to La Poesia of 1936 But several themes are common to every one of the phases of his thought The core of art, for Croce, is intuition Intuition is not the same as feeling, whatever positivists might say: feelings need expression, and expression is a cognitive, not just an emotional, matter Art in human beings, unlike emotion in animals, is something spiritual, not merely sensual On the other hand, rationalist aestheticians are wrong to see art as something intellectual: it operates through images, not through concepts Thus Croce distances himself from Romantics on the one hand and classicists on the other The artistic intuition is essentially lyrical Croce explains what this means principally by contrasts Art is not concerned with the True (as logic is) nor the Useful (as economics is) nor with the Good (as morality is) It has its own object, the Beautiful, that stands independently on equal terms with the other three (For Croce, the notion of the Sublime was only a pseudo-concept.) An artistic expression is lyrical only if it is concerned exclusively with the beautiful Thus a poem like Lucretius’ de Rerum Natura, with its heavy scientific and moral messages, is not something lyrical, but merely a piece of literature True poetry must have no utilitarian, moral, or philosophical agenda Views similar to Croce’s were made familiar to the English-speaking world by R G Collingwood (1889–1943), who translated Croce’s article on aesthetics for the 1928 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Collingwood, a classicist and archaeologist of distinction, became Wayneflete Professor of Metaphysics at Oxford in 1936 He is best known for his contributions to the philosophy of history, on which he was specially qualified to write, but his Principles of Art (1938) was a significant contribution to aesthetic theory Much of the book is taken up with explaining what art is not Art is not mere amusement; even if much of what goes by the name of art is simply entertainment, true art is something different Art is not a magical procedure like a war dance By magic, Collingwood explains, he means a procedure for arousing emotion to some preconceived end, such as 266