Gentile has had the courage to study closely, very closely, the old scholastic Doctors, thereby acquiring a deep and almost unerring sense of Christianity; whilst his familiarity with the problems of law and the works of the Humanists and the Renaissance, have marked him with characteristics that sometimes cause his hearers to hail in him a Father of the Church. All this notwithstanding there are many points of doctrine upon which he stands in contrast with the theologians. * * * * * Where Gentile speaks of thinking he invariably refers both to the act of the will and to the act of the intellect; for he considers their distinction as having been abolished when through the work of modern psychology the very notion of a multiplicity of faculties was rejected. The mind is not now intellect and now will; but is known now as intellect and now as will. It should be observed, however, that the creative will does not create a world that issues from it and exists independently of it; it is self-creative just as any judgment is first of all self-assertive. No act of man’s will is ever directed to something already realised; man always wants to do an action. For instance, wanting a new pair of shoes merely means wanting to buy, to have, to get, a new pair of shoes; and since we have seen that any action is self-assertion, man in any act of will is wanting to realise his own self. In consequence of the unity existing between him and the world, man’s purpose is never external to him. Man realising his own self: such is the nature of mind, dynamic and dialectic at once. This notion of dialectic enables us to meet law and liberty on their common ground, morality; spiritual reality is endowed with a life that is best called dialectic, inasmuch as it is never either completely positive or purely negative. Anything spiritual from the most intimate religious experience, down to any political form, family arrangement, or business establishment _is_ so long as, not yet being, it strives to realise, to assert, to establish itself. Anything spiritual let us say, human, the moment it _is_, that is to say the moment it is accomplished, the moment it ceases to develop or establish itself, is dead or dying. Gentile uses even stronger language: he says outright, _as a reality it is absolutely_ annihilated.