Note 2 — CONCLUSION

The student of comparative thought will find it both interesting and profitable to compare the work done recently in Italy by Croce and Gentile. The intellectual kinship of Croce and Bergson has frequently been pointed out, but Gentile’s work comes very close to the philosophy of action and to the whole positive-idealistic tendency of contemporary French thought. This is particularly to be seen in L’atto del pensare come atto puro (1912), and in Teoria generalo dello spirito come atto puro (1916). Professor Carr, the well-known exponent of Bergson’s philosophy, remarks in his introduction to the English edition of Gentile’s book, “We may individualise the mind as a natural thing-object person. . . . Yet our power to think the mind in this way would be impossible were not the mind with and by which we think it, itself not a thing, not a fact, but act; . . . never factum, but always fieri.” This quotation is from p. xv of the Theory of Mind as Pure Act. With one other quotation direct from Gentile we must close this reference to Italian neo-idealism. “In so far as the subject is constituted a subject by its own act it constitutes the object. . . . Mind is the transcendental activity productive of the objective world of experience” (pp. 18, 43). Compare with this our quotation from Ravaisson, given on p. 75 of this work, and the statement by Lachelier on p. 122, both essential principles of the French New Idealism.