On the whole, Croce's position at that time was, as he himself defined it many years later, a Platonic-Scholastic-Herbartian one; one that, in the moral held, had at least the advantage of being "invulnerable to the subtle menace of sensualism and decadentism,"[12] in the European life and thought of the nineties, the acme of spiritual distinction--an illusory reaction to and escape from the prevailing positivism and determinism, of which in reality they were but thinly disguised variations. Croce "never lost, even for an instant, the power of discerning sensual refinement from spiritual finesse, erotic flights from moral elevation, false heroism from sheer duty."[13] Here lies the fundamental difference, "of spiritual race," between him and his most illustrious contemporary, Gabriele d'Annunzio, with whom he has more than once been coupled by superficial critics. The character of their respective influence on the younger Italian generations, of D'Annunzio between 1890 and 1900, and of Croce between 1900 and 1910, is more than sufficient evidence on this point. It is something of a surprise to find that he had learnt practically nothing from his uncle Bertrando Spaventa, who had been the most powerful representative of the Hegelian tradition in Italy. The central problem of Spaventa's speculation had been that of the relations between knowing and being, of transcendence and immanence; and although it was only through a solution of this problem that Croce could hope for progress in any of his particular philosophical researches, yet he could take no interest in it when its discussion was earned on independently of those problems of art, of moral life, of law and history, towards which his attention was naturally drawn. Croce himself explains this lack of interest as due to his "unconscious immanentism": "as I met with no difficulty in conceiving the relation between thinking and being; if I had any difficulty, it was rather in conceiving a being severed from thought, or a thought severed from being."[14] But in this case he is probably seeing himself in the light of his later experience: that difficulty did exist, and is the fundamental difficulty of his early speculation. Only, he could not solve it by Spaventa's methods, which were those of a rigorous and formal logician, of a philosopher with a theological background, but only through the elaboration of the materials of his own particular moral and intellectual experience. At a later stage, and when he had already independently arrived at a position much more similar to that of Spaventa, than he would ever have thought possible for him, the influence, if not of Spaventa himself, at least of that attitude towards philosophy which had been his, came back to him through his friend Giovanni Gentile, whose mental temperament was much more akin to that of the old Neapolitan thinker, than Croce's ever was. Croce's idealism (or Hegelianism) was at this time limited to what he had