School is a form of spiritual association implying a teacher, lawgiver to his pupils. It is not the teacher, however that, through his authority, brings the pupils to accept truth; on the contrary it is truth that confers authority on the teacher. The _Ipse dixit_ implies a great knowledge of the master’s familiarity with science. Whatever the ground on which we acknowledge an authority, the authority is such as a consequence of our _acknowledging_ it; and all the theories and inquiries concerning the source of a higher authority are to Gentile vain prattling. For him it is quite obvious that, however high such an authority may be it will never be higher than the height to which it has been raised by the people subject to it. Through this agency and this agency alone authority _becomes_ law. Authority is invested in the spiritual self, the universal person, ultimately the only sovereign. This transcendental self is the transcendental law of which we have spoken as moral law, the transcendental sovereign which has brought Gentile to reject Rousseau’s distinction between passive citizenship and active sovereignty because it throbs in every man’s breast and is the one law and sovereign that can impose laws and make them acknowledged. * * * * * It is now easy to realise that, although Gentile was first known as a Hegelian, by the time he wrote his philosophy of law he had fully developed the more realistic tendencies of his Idealism which link him to Thomas Aquinas, Kant and above all to Vico. The real difference between Gentile’s notion of political reality and that of Hegel—the likeness is too obvious to require pointing out—is a consequence of their different ways of working out their respective notions of reality.