From 1876 till the Great War, accordingly, we had an Italy that was materialistic and anti-Mazzinian, though an Italy far superior to the Italy of and before Mazzini’s time.  All our culture, whether in the natural or the moral sciences, in letters or in the arts, was dominated by a crude positivism, which conceived of the reality in which we live as something given, something ready-made, and which therefore limits and conditions human activity quite apart from so-called arbitrary and illusory demands of morality.  Everybody wanted “facts,” “positive facts.”  Everybody laughed at “metaphysical dreams,” at impalpable realities.  The truth was there before the eyes of men.  They had only to open their eyes to see it.  The Beautiful itself could only be the mirror of the Truth present before us in Nature.  Patriotism, like all the other virtues based on a religious attitude of mind, and which can be mentioned only when people have the courage to talk in earnest, became a rhetorical theme on which it was rather bad taste to touch.

This period, which anyone born during the last half of the past century can well remember, might be called the demo-socialistic phase of the modern Italian State.  It was the period which elaborated the characteristically democratic attitude of mind on a basis of personal freedom, and which resulted in the establishment of socialism as the primary and controlling force in the State.  It was a period of growth and of prosperity during which the moral forces developed during the Risorgimento were crowded into the background or off the stage.

IV

But toward the end of the Nineteenth Century and in the first years of the Twentieth a vigorous spirit of reaction began to manifest itself in the young men of Italy against the preceding generation’s ideas in politics, literature, science and philosophy.  It was as though they were weary of the prosaic bourgeois life which they had inherited from their fathers and were eager to return to the lofty moral enthusiasms of their grandfathers.  Rosmini and Gioberti had been long forgotten.  They were now exhumed, read, discussed.  As for Mazzini, an edition of his writings was financed by the State itself.  Vico, the great Vico, a formidable preacher of idealistic philosophy and a great anti-Cartesian and anti-rationalist, became the object of a new cult.

Positivism began forthwith to be attacked by neo-idealism.  Materialistic approaches to the study of literature and art were refuted and discredited.  Within the Church itself modernism came to rouse the Italian clergy to the need of a deeper and more modern culture.  Even socialism was brought under the philosophical probe and criticized like other doctrines for its weaknesses and errors; and when, in France, George Sorel went beyond the fallacies of the materialistic theories of the Marxist social-democracy to his theory of syndicalism, our young Italian socialists turned