 To say the world is essentially history is to say that at the lowest level it is aesthetic experiences woven into a single fabric, a world-narrative, with the added judgement that it is real, that it exists. Croce takes this to be inevitable: the subjective present is real and has duration; but any attempt to determine its exact size is surely arbitrary. Therefore the only rigorous view is that the past is no less real than the present. History then represents, by definition, the only all-encompassing account of reality. What we call the natural sciences then are impure, second-rate. Consider for example the concept of a space-time point. Plainly it is not something anyone has ever met with in experience; it is an abstraction, postulated as a limit of certain operations for the convenience of a ‘theory’. Croce would call it a pseudo-concept, and would not call the so-called ‘empirical laws’ in which it figures to be fit subjects for truth and knowledge. Its significance, like that of other pseudo-concepts, is pragmatic.