none the less obvious that there were essential differences between the character it gradually assumed in various countries, a character and an attitude that may be identified as the initial stage of the various European mentalities. The best proof of this is to be had in the essential and irreducible differences manifest in the conclusions to which Italian, English and French philosophy came on the very same problem, which they found on the threshold of modern civilisation. Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon and René Descartes treated the same question when their respective countries emerged from the later Middle Ages with their respective schools coming to light from scholasticism through humanism. The problem of knowledge faced them in this dawn of modern intellectual life; and the same passionate reaction against Aristotelianism and scholasticism compelled their researches to take the same bent. Yet they came to widely different conclusions and the differences hold good even to-day as characteristic of Italian, English and French mentalities. Bruno, whose metaphysic is wonderfully synthetic and pregnant with a lyricism the echo of which runs through the work of Vico, faces the problem of truth, of scientific truth according to him, in order to find theoretical ground to reject the authority of antiquity considered by his forerunners as the well of all worldly wisdom. A conception known to that same antiquity but very uncommonly acted upon takes hold of his mind. Truly old age must be wiser than youth, but antiquity is, compared to his age, the nursery age of mankind, and a fairly good student of the sixteenth century knows far more than Aristotle, because he may know, if he chooses, all that Aristotle knew, and all that has come afterwards to the knowledge of men. Each generation brings its stone to the constructive activity of man’s experience. Hence the idea he expressed _veritas filia temporis_. Thus he proclaims that which will be the motto of every true Italian thinker; reality is essentially and above all, Historical Reality.