Indeed, we owe it to Gentile that Italian pedagogy has attained in the present day a simplicity and a depth of concepts unknown elsewhere. In Italy, not educational science alone, but the practice of it and its political aspects have been thoroughly recast and amply developed. And this, too, is due pre-eminently to the work of Gentile. His authority therefore is powerfully felt in schools of all grades, for he has lived intensely the life of the school and loves it dearly. In addition to these differences arising from our division of labour, others may of course be noticed, and they are to be found in the form that philosophical doctrines have taken on in each of us. Identity is impossible in this field, for philosophy, like art, is closely bound up with the personality of the thinker, with his spiritual interests, and with his experiences of life. There is never true identity except in the so-called "philosophical school," which indicates the death of a philosophy, in the same way that the poetical school proclaims death in poetry. And so it has come about that our general conception of philosophy as simple philosophy of the spirit--of the subject, and never of nature, or of the object--has developed a peculiar stress in Gentile, for whom philosophy is above all that point in which every abstraction is overcome and submerged in the concreteness of the act of Thought; whereas for me philosophy is essentially methodology of the one real and concrete Thinking--of historical Thinking. So that while he strongly emphasises unity, I no less energetically insist on the distinction and dialectics of the forms of the spirit as a necessary formation of the methodology of historical judgment. But of this enough, especially since the reader can only become interested in these differences after he has acquired a more advanced knowledge of contemporary Italian philosophy.