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What Lies Beyond? The institute is a symbol of all the problems that Benedetto Croce has himself wrestled with. Years ago, as the erudite young man of the Rome salons, he found himself "suddenly nauseated by all this erudition. I knew facts and events. But what was the point of it all?" In trying to find the point, he was to build up his own system of thought and his own definition of the function of philosophy.
Croce had written warmly and feelingly of the history of other men's faith, but at 83 he was still an agnostic. Like the pragmatists, he held that the philosopher had no business delving into the supernatural: "Man can only know that which he has experienced. He may believe, but he cannot know what lies beyond." What he could know was history—not a history of unique moments, but of time that flows without end. In Croce's philosophy, history, the only reality, is the unfolding of the human spirit itself, and experience the only test of truth—a detached point of view that undoubtedly explained Liberal Croce's relative slowness in divining Mussolini's course.
In the Croce interpretation, philosophy is no more than a method of history, and it was that method which Croce's students studied while Don Benedetto padded about them, ready to answer their questions. He believed that they could hope to find no final truths: "No philosophical system is ever final, for life itself is never final." But as men live, he thinks, they come upon new fragments of truth, and each fragment must be placed in the ever-changing universal scheme. "So it has ever been," says Benedetto Croce, "and so it will ever be."