Mussolini firmly believes in the necessity of arousing strong religious conviction in the people of every class. He does so on ground provided to him by the example of his mother, by the result of his own observation and experience as a leader, and last, but not least by his reading of de Sanctis’s principal work. That great critic is, indeed, the one link between Vico, Croce, Gentile and Mussolini, whose genius was to create the political system in which their ideas receive practical realisation. Fascism rejects the very notion of theory as distinct from action and is a constant expression in action of ideas far more easily acted upon than formulated, so that its most ignorant followers go as far as to reject the possibility of anything like an intellectual movement paving the way for them through the preceding generations, whilst they act all along in keeping with the spiritual atmosphere which that intellectual movement has developed and the ideas it has put in circulation. The reason of this lies in the æsthetic genius of Mussolini. Like the greatest artists produced by Italy, he is at once macrocosm and microcosm. The whole of Italy’s past, as in another Dante, converges in him. His avid personality takes it all in, to put it out again with such an indelible stamp upon it that what might be termed its Fascist-ness is the only character left to it. Now what Mussolini hopes to obtain from the recrudescence of religious life is that the people should get a wider outlook upon _Life_ in the highest sense of the word. He never uses philosophical terms to express it; yet so highly speculative is the notion that Giovanni Gentile is probably the only philosopher to have worked it out, and whosoever did not believe in Providence could be convinced that Providence exists just by studying Croce, Gentile, and the way their work attains realisation at the hands of Mussolini without any previous arrangement. By getting people to have a deeper understanding of life Mussolini means to make them realise that man’s individual life is not by a long way the supreme value, that man’s individual will is not by a long way the supreme law, that man’s individual circumstances are not in themselves by a long way constitutive of _Life_. All these aims he hopes to reach through religion.