Neither Cuoco nor Mazzini were philosophers, their task was, so to speak, to realise philosophy, to introduce other people’s theories into life, and this they did uncommonly well both of them, although Mazzini played in the Risorgimento so eminent a part that his gigantic historical figure overshadows that of Cuoco. But Cuoco, through his _Giornale d’Italia_ and his subsequent writings had the greatest influence on the best poets and writers of the period, to begin with on Foscolo and Manzoni. For the first time since Savonarola’s days intellectual life in Italy beheld a spontaneous revival of Catholic thinking, and this, strong enough since it counted men as great as Gioberti, Rosmini and Manzoni, was not due to the initiative of the Church. It was spontaneous, intellectually so, and Vico may be considered as its forerunner. What was paramount was perhaps the moral system of Rosmini. He started out to fight Kant’s moral system as unfit for use on account of the subjective ground of the Kantian imperative, and meaning to fight it he developed it and found new ground for it. The moral, pedagogic and even pedantic spirit which spread in the intellectual classes of Italy during the last century has indeed a good deal in common with the moral movement which had accompanied in Germany the development of a national conscience. We have in both cases a reaction against the foreign ways of the aristocracy—but with a great difference since in Italy the aristocracy had very little of the feudal character and was so open to intellectual life that it responded to the call sooner and better than any other class—preluding a reaction against the atomistic political life of the country. To pass from Rosmini and Gioberti to Croce and Gentile, the thinkers who herald the coming of Italy as a modern nation, as much was needed as to pass from Leibniz, living in the days in which German intellectual life and national conscience could be at best the object of a mystical worship, to Kant’s time, when Europe realised that there were actually such things as German metaphysics and a German nation. In both cases the philosophy has to be, and is, synthetic, for in both cases the exigency that opens life with the pungency of need, of deficiency, of negativeness, is the thirst for national assertion and foreign recognition. Obviously in both cases also it is the assimilation of foreign contributions that has enabled the scholars to realise the negative position of their respective countries.