 Feeling, for Croce, is necessarily part of any (mental) activity, including bare perception—indeed, feeling is a form of mental activity (it is part of his philosophy that there is never literally present to consciousness anything passive). We are accustomed to thinking of ‘artistic expression’ as concerned with specific emotions that are relatively rare in the mental life, but again, Croce points out that strictly speaking, we are thinking of a quantitative distinction as qualitative. In fact feeling is nothing but the will in mental activity, with all its varieties of thought, desire and action, its varieties of frustration and satisfaction (Aes. 74–6). The only criterion of ‘art’ is coherence of expression, of the movement of the will (for a comparison with Collingwood’s similar doctrine, see Kemp 2003: 173–9).