With Croce’s theories such vagueness is destroyed at its root. The will of the people who take a step is their taking of the step, and both action and volition spring from their historical knowledge of the actual situation of fact. Such knowledge is therefore part of the action. The responsibility thus includes the assuming of the information necessary to the taking of the decision. Naturally this has always been the case, where man’s responsibility is really of importance. On board a ship, for instance, the officer in command has always known that his responsibility includes this knowledge. Ignorance of fact is the greatest fault whenever a decision has to be taken, whether the importance of the decision be great or small. This however, must not be held to imply the judging of an action according to its success. Historical judgments are not to be passed on the result of past actions; historical judgment must be passed on acts, not on facts. The distinction between action and event is by Croce emphasised as being grounded on the distinction between the act of one man and the act of the whole; and one might say that the action depends on the will of man and the event on the will of God. According to this theory the action of the man who shoots at Mussolini is the manifestation of his will, and his failure is the manifestation of God’s will; because the will of the whole, including the will of the chauffeur, who is driving Mussolini’s car, the wills of the people crowding the edge of the street, the wills of the guards told off to keep the road clear for the car and the wills of the Fascists thronging to catch a glimpse of their idol, which are also volition-actions, determine the event; and this is usually termed Providence, or the rationality of history. Thus when foreigners, even those who do not approve of Mussolini’s government, and Italians, either religiously or coldly, repeat at each new attempt, “the hand of God is on his head,” the conviction which they express is perfectly in keeping with Croce’s view, and is by no means equivalent to fatalism. To express this relation of action to event in a less mystical form it ought to be said that the volition-action of any single man is his contribution to the volitions of the whole universe. On this point Gentile produced another theory some eight or ten years after Croce had given a systematic form to this doctrine which had been implicit in all his former works. This double contribution of Italy to the conception of conduct, if not an entirely new idea of liberty, provides two very original views on that problem, one of those which have always tormented humanity. The first great step made by Croce was the consequences of his having denied any possible distinction between the volition and the action; for thus he was able to assert the oneness of liberty. We must no longer speak of a liberty of will and a liberty of action.