n the feeling that each man must instinctively seek his own
well-being and defend it. This was the very conception which Mazzini
had fought in socialism, though he rightly saw that it was not
peculiar to socialism alone, but belonged to any political theory,
whether liberal, democratic, or anti-socialistic, which urges men
toward the exaction of rights rather than to the fulfillment of
duties.

From 1876 till the Great War, accordingly, we had an Italy that was
materialistic and anti-Mazzinian, though an Italy far superior to the
Italy of and before Mazzini's time. All our culture, whether in the
natural or the moral sciences, in letters or in the arts, was
dominated by a crude positivism, which conceived of the reality in
which we live as something given, something ready-made, and which
therefore limits and conditions human activity quite apart from
so-called arbitrary and illusory demands of morality. Everybody wanted
"facts," "positive facts." Everybody laughed at "metaphysical dreams,"
at impalpable realities. The truth was there before the eyes of men.
They had only to open their eyes to see it. The Beautiful itself could
only be the mirror of the Truth present before us in Nature.
Patriotism, like all the other virtues based on a religious attitude
of mind, and which can be mentioned only when people have the courage
to talk in earnest, became a rhetorical theme on which it was rather
bad taste to touch.

This period, which anyone born during the last half of the past
century can well remember, might be called the demo-socialistic phase
of the modern Italian State. It was the period which elaborated the
characteristically democratic attitude of mind on a basis of personal
freedom, and which resulted in the establishment of socialism as the
primary and controlling force in the State. It was a period of growth
and of prosperity during which the moral forces developed during the
_Risorgimento_ were crowded into the background or off the stage.

IV

But toward the end of the Nineteenth Century and in the first years of
the Twentieth a vigorous spirit of reaction began to manifest itself
in the young men of Italy against the preceding generation's ideas in
politics, literature, science and philosophy. It was as though they
were weary of the prosaic bourgeois life which they had inherited from
their fathers and were eager to return to the lofty moral enthusiasms
of their grandfathers. Rosmini and Gioberti had bee