After the unfortunate war of ’48–’49, Gioberti went into exile and philosophy was overtaken according to Prof. G. de Ruggiero by an invincible drowsiness. Drowsy, obscure, unconscious of their own positions, are epithets which can be justly bestowed on the thinkers of the time, for eclecticism prevails without the historical culture that alone can make it fertile. And of the most eminent philosopher of the time the best that can be said is that he did his best to lull to sleep his countrymen’s newborn consciousness. Among the Positivists, inferior followers of foreign tendencies, several remain first-rate historians, thanks to a few sentences of Vico kept like the seeds in Noah’s ark, and sufficient to prevent them from falling into a materialist metaphysic which would have been a sterilising curse to the newborn nation. Materialism was far more logical and coherent in France when the historians simply excluded the ideologies which were left hovering through the historical works—for instance, of as good an historian as Villari; but this was not unconscious. After the efforts which they had made to get rid of pseudo-idealistic metaphysic they did not want to entangle themselves in another metaphysic, were it to be materialist. On the other hand, they did not want, or were not able, to make theirs the position of English positivists. Ardigo, for instance, although he is the best Italian thinker that upheld Positivism, cannot be compared to a Spencer or a Mill. But speculative voices are never silenced, although they may be hushed, and the spiritual exigencies which had produced Gioberti and Rosmini were slowly working themselves out in other minds. Neo-Kantianism gave birth in Italy to a series of historical studies in the field of philosophy, so that it became impossible for any decent professor to misrepresent the development of speculative thought as these two great exponents of Italy’s mind had done. Whilst Neo-Kantians achieve little theoretically, they do so much historically that one may say that the works of such men as Fiorentino, Tocco, and others prepared the ground for Spaventa and de Sanctis who in their turn have given us Croce and Gentile. All read German, English and French, besides Latin and Greek; so that we can say that the speculative theories of the whole western world were studied in their schools; and that, like the child who becomes self-conscious as he gradually realises the worth and importance of the people surrounding him, Italy has grown to speculative self-consciousness through the close study of universal speculation and of the history of her national political life, national art, national literature, national speculative theories, until her historians came to the idea of history as the co-ordination of all the different branches.