SOURCE: “Gentile's Philosophy of the Spirit,” in Journal of Philosophical Studies, Vol. IV, No. 13, January, 1929, pp. 3-22.

In the following essay, de Burgh examines Gentile's theory of Actual Idealism.

I

Gentile's philosophy merits the attention of every serious thinker, for it presents the doctrine that reality is spiritual in a more uncompromising form than is to be found elsewhere, and claims to solve on this principle all the great problems that have beset the history of metaphysic. His own name for it is Absolute or Actual Idealism (Idealismo assoluto or attuale). For Gentile, nothing is real but the Spirit, and by the Spirit he means the pure act of self-conscious thinking. “The subject that conceives itself in conceiving All is the reality itself.”¹ In the act of conscious thinking, the Spirit is present in its entirety as subject (Io universale, transcendentale, assoluto); generating therein by its own creative...