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 been long forgotten.
They were now exhumed, read, discussed. As for Mazzini, an edition of
his writings was financed by the State itself. Vico, the great Vico, a
formidable preacher of idealistic philosophy and a great
anti-Cartesian and anti-rationalist, became the object of a new cult.

Positivism began forthwith to be attacked by neo-idealism.
Materialistic approaches to the study of literature and art were
refuted and discredited. Within the Church itself modernism came to
rouse the Italian clergy to the need of a deeper and more modern