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822
Presidential Address
History not in the sense that History is a revelation of the movement of Thought, but in a more startling sense that Philosophy creates History, that is thought creates its own data in the shape of intuitions and expression of intuition viz., images. Similarly, conceptual thinking universalizes what is presented in intuition, so that experience consists of the unity of two distincts viz, intuition and concept.
Now the criticism to which Croce's theory stands exposed is just the one which is often levelled against the Māyāvāda of śamkara. "If it is a unity it cannot generate from within itself distinctions which are as real as the unity, while if the distinctions are not generated but given to begin with then mind is not and never was a unity. This is the dilemma of Śabala Brahman and Suddha Brahman which śāmkara Vadāntin is often called upon to meet. "Gentile, Croce's disciple and vārtikakāra (sympathetic critic) starts with a mind which is a complete unity, retains the unity throughout, and from unity extracts whatever multiplicity there is. “This corresponds to the position of ajatıvāda in the body of Śāınkara Vedānta, with one important difference that mind in Gentile's theory is not a fact but a pure act. Joad in subjecting the Neo-Idealism of the Italian school to criticism mentions two weak points. First that in the Italian Neo-Idealism there is no passage from immediate experience to universal experience. The older Hegelian school regarded universal experience as immanent in each immediate, that is, individual experience. The Italian Neo-Idealist admits only immediate experience which according to him generates all that
