Of Croce's attitude during the war we shall say but a few words. He was one of the very few European philosophers or scholars who did not transform themselves into improvised statesmen, or into passionate defenders of national prejudices and proclaimers of national hatreds. Differing from the Germanized philologist, who was the type prevailing in most universities before the war, in that he had not waited for the war to become aware of the many weaknesses and imperfections of modern German culture, while on the other hand he had lived for years in true and intimate contact with the great spirits of German Romanticism, he resisted with all his power the universal tendency of the time to make of the contingent issues of the war a criterion of intellectual truth and of scientific conduct. At the same time, his temper and education reacted violently against the false ideologies of the war, the superstructure of verbal ideals with which on all sides cunning statesmen and naïve philosophers attempted to veil the true nature of the conflict. Against these, he reasserted his conception of the political life and struggles of states as manifestations of the economic, amoral or pre-moral, activity, and of life itself as a perpetual struggle, finding its reason and its rest in the struggle itself. The theory of the state as justice appeared to him merely as a theoretical error, the fortune of which lay in the opportunity it afforded to give a convenient mask of morality to particular interests, either of individuals or of states. The intrinsic morality of the war he conceived as resting on its tragic reality, as reflected in a severely historical thought, to which it appears as a moment of that historical fate which crushes and destroys states as well as individuals, to create from their ruins always new forms of life.