the more or less consciously accepted foundation of all the doctrines of international relations striving for realization in our times, in no country and in no schools was so resolutely repudiated as in the Italian universities. And it could not have been otherwise, since the new philology was as static and deterministic a doctrine, only more logically and rigorously so, as the evolutionary positivism which we had learnt from England. The faults of Italian culture during this period are therefore the faults of the other European cultures which Italy had to assimilate: at a time when Italy was most in need of cultural help from without, she found that, for reasons infinitely complex and totally different from those which had caused her own exhaustion, the other nations of Europe were also spiritually exhausted. And yet it cannot be said that from these very faults Italy did not draw some useful lessons. The so-called historical method, which completely disregarded the great forces of history, and made of the least significant historical datum a _Ding an sich_ in which the mind of the scholar seemed to find its ultimate object, proved in the end to be a salutary discipline as against the facile and enthusiastic generalizations of the historians of the Risorgimento. Positivism, however barbarous and uncouth in itself, was a powerful weapon for the destruction of the last remnants of a more or less mythological metaphysics, and in that sense it afforded an example of intellectual honesty; and at the same time it awakened the consciousness of the continuity of natural and spiritual life, announcing, though in a hasty and imperfect synthesis, what every philosophy of the future will have to be. And about the middle of the period which we are now considering, the only real contribution of Germany to European thought in the second half of the century became known in Italy with the advent of Marxism, in which we found a new conception of history, in so far adequate to the true spirit and conditions of the times, as it afforded to blind social forces, striving for political expression, an interpretation of their needs and a rationalized programme of action.