Bertrando Spaventa taught in the university of Napoli, and, a staunch Hegelian, he criticised Hegel in the same creative way as Vico had criticised Descartes and Locke. He developed and continued the intuition which is at the basis of all Hegelian system as Hegel could not have done, inasmuch as Spaventa realises Hegel’s logic in its historical position, that is to say as the fulfilment of Descartes’ claim. Thinking means causing to the French mind, whilst to Hegel it is not merely causing it is creating. But Gioberti had not only expressed the Hegelian intuition; he had completed it; thinking is creating, but to him proving also is creating. And Spaventa, rich with all the history of speculative thought, realised Hegel’s logic and prepared it to enter life, thanks to Gioberti’s contribution, although Gioberti himself had been far from realising it. The speculative possibilities of the Cartesian _Cogito_ are exploited to the full; whereas they had been left aside by Hegel. Vico’s _factum et verum convertuntur_, pragmatically understood by the Positivists, is here realised as a process. But, as is the wont of Italian thinkers, the original part of his intuition remains at an intuitive stage and has to wait for the speculative genius of Gentile to work it out and modify it into the _fieri et verum convertuntur_ which is the adequate expression of the historical dialectic. Hegel’s most original and fecund motive was thus nearing its theoretical realisation at the hands of Spaventa, whilst Vico’s conception of life was practically illustrated by Francesco de Sanctis, whose important part in the shaping out of Italy’s present mentality cannot be overstated. The process of dissolution of Hegel’s and Vico’s theories was accomplished and the passage from dissolution to re-elaboration was done by de Sanctis. In his _Storia della letteratura Italiana_ the philosophy of mind receives more than a perfect illustration, an æsthetic rendering that makes the most abstruse notion of dialectic a tangible object of meditation to the average reader. Æsthetic rendering is here used as excluding anything like theoretic exposition; and such æsthetic quality is insured by the great critic’s own gifts as an artist. His reading and philosophic preparation are incredible, not to be gauged; they are, however, assimilated by him very much in the way in which a great artist assimilates his technique and intellectual experience.