Passing to the essential characteristics of what might be opposed as spiritual to what is natural, we find Gentile working out the distinction from the fact that anything natural, such as a stone, _is_ whilst anything spiritual, mind, a work of mind, a political constitution _becomes_. Mind and being are opposite terms. A plant _is_, an animal _is_, in so far as all the determinations of the plant or animal are a necessary and _pre-ordained consequence_ of its nature. All the manifestations by which their nature is expressed are already there, existing implicitly. The empirical manifestations of their being come to be conceived, therefore, as closed within limits already prescribed as impassable boundaries. In the natural world everything is pre-ordained according to the law of Nature, or, to use Gentile’s own words, everything _is by Nature_. In the spiritual world nothing _is by Nature_, but it becomes what it becomes through the activity of mind. Nothing is ever ready-made; nothing can be finished and complete. The social position of a family, the political system of a country can never be settled once for all; the members of the former and the citizens of the latter must go on creating it day by day and hour by hour. So is it with moral life. All the noblest achievements of the past do not diminish one whit the sum of duties still to be performed. The minute man stops realising in the inmost recesses of his consciousness what he must do for his family, for his country, or even for the firm to which he belongs, the family will be decadent, the country will begin to lose what his predecessors had painfully won, the firm will feel the incipient decay of a credit acquired through work and sacrifice. Nothing is ever done once for all; morally, intellectually, politically, socially, economically, everything is always to be done. A hard gospel to preach when man is accustomed as he is now to hear only the proclamation of his rights. Sacrifice, self-denial is here pointed out as the way to greater conquests and to the assertion of a nobler and more powerful self. To find spiritual reality man must seek it and, seeking it, create it. This means that it never confronts him as an external reality. If man wants to find it he must work to realise it. So long as it is sought it is found, so long as it is being conquered or constructed it is to be found, so long but no longer. Empires show signs of incipient decay the moment the Empire builders stop building them, stop wanting to build them. Yet from this austere conception of life springs a beautiful notion of liberty, a splendid conception of man’s creativity.