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108 dialectic may also be attacked directly, and without recourse to the notion of the inconceivable. The worst absurdity that lurks in the dialectic seems to be this: while the Hegelians boast that by means of their dialectic they can transcend antitheses and can thus attain the unity and homogeneity of the world (Croce affirms that Hegel justifies the saying of Goethe that the world is all of a piece, without kernel and without bark), they start off by accepting as actual and as justified many of the very antitheses which they seek thereafter to transcend. Now anyone who tries to reconcile two persons bears witness, by that very action, that they are in disagreement; while in the case of concepts we have to deal not always with actual antitheses, but often with different expressions of the same idea, or with concepts which are different but not necessarily antithetic.

Croce, to be sure, bases his criticism of Hegel upon what he regards as Hegel's confusion between the relationship of antithetic entities and the relationship of different entities—for Hegel, according to Croce, applies to the latter relationship a procedure which is valid only for the former. Yet Croce himself accepts as antithetic certain concepts which are merely different formulations of one basic concept. In his account of the problem of antitheses in the history of philosophy, for instance, he regards as an-