In spite of his brilliant conception of dialectic Hegel’s intuition of Reality is not dialectical but intellectualistic, and therefore static. He realised that we do not conceive reality dialectically unless we conceive it as itself thought. But he distinguished the intellect which conceives things from the reason which conceives mind and his dialectic was in consequence a dialectic of thought, thought however being understood as the result of the act of thinking. Whereas to have a real dialectic, corresponding to the throbbing reality of life, what is wanted is a dialectic of thought, understood as the act of thinking. What has already been thought is as static as a stone. Hence the necessity in which Hegel found himself of separating thought and action, which led him to declare in the introduction to his philosophy of Right that Philosophy was a twilight bird, whose activity began at dusk when the day’s work was done. For Hegel a law in order to be imperative must be pronounced by something that is already in existence. But Reality in existence is nature. Hegel’s state belonging thus to static reality, being a fact, not an act, the citizen is nothing in himself; all his reality come to him from the state. This does not mean that he is annihilated (both in Imperialism and Communism he is very highly cultivated), but is as the little wheel of a huge engine which is carefully oiled so that the machine may go the better for it. His end is the state’s end. Not so with Gentile. Reality, being really dialectical does not admit of a distinction between will and intellect. You do not act and then think about it. For life, natural or spiritual, is the reality: if theory, the activity of the intellect, is merely a contemplation of it, such theory is not even real. How can one think of something added to the real world? What could such an addition be? There is no way of conceiving knowledge except as a creation of the spiritual reality which is itself knowledge. If Reality is spiritual, in realising itself it creates both the will and the intellect. It is only through the empirical consideration of their manifestations that they can be distinguished; speculatively they are one and the same thing. The difference between the idea of a good action and a good action itself is a difference between two ideas. In the first case we mean the idea which is a content or abstract result of thought, but not the act by which we think it, and in which its concrete reality truly lies. And in the second we mean the idea, not as an object or content of thought, but as the act which realises a spiritual reality.