 While Bosanquet’s aesthetics is close to the expression theory associated with Collingwood and Croce, and while there is a continuity between Bosanquet’s work and Collingwood’s early studies in aesthetics, Bosanquet was a sharp critic of Croce. Bosanquet holds that any adequate aesthetic theory must leave room for externality in art, and so he thinks that any theory that calls into question “the reality of the external world”—which he believes Croce’s does—cannot provide an accurate portrayal of the unity of the world. Bosanquet also challenges, for example, the claim that art is prior to the conceptual and the philosophical. He argues that Croce ignores that “the aesthetic attitude is learnt” (“Croce’s æsthetic”, in Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 113), and that if language is just expression, not only are logic and conceptual meaning are excluded from it, but we get a metaphysical “singleness” without substance, content, or “definite meaning”. Finally, Bosanquet writes that Croce fails to provide an adequate statement of the relation between the aesthetic, nature, and the metaphysical. By restricting the aesthetic to the realm of art, Croce ignores the role that the beauty of nature has in calling us “out of ourselves” and to the recognition of what is real. 