but few names to record that are of any consequence in the general trend of the evolution of thought. The nineteenth century produced a new Renaissance, which at first assumed a romantic speculative form. During the first half of the century Rosmini and Gioberti developed a kind of Platonism by which they hoped to harmonize religion and science. These philosophical efforts were intimately associated with political issues, because it was generally believed that the head of the church would lead the movement for political rehabilitation. But the hopes of Italy were to be realized by an entirely different method. The harmony of religion and science was broken—in the first place because the head of the Catholic church sanctioned the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages as the only one permissible, and, secondly, because philosophy assumed a more critical and positive character. We shall here treat of Roberto Ardigo (born 1828), a representative of the latter tendency.
Ardigo became a positivist by a process of gradual development. His studies in natural science and philosophy carried him step by step, without being aware of it at the time, away from the scholasticism which he had practiced as a Catholic ecclesiastic. The growth of his ideas proceeded so smoothly, that, when all of a sudden the veil was withdrawn, he thought he had always been a positivist. The evolution experienced in his own intellectual life became the theme of his philosophizing when he accepted the chair of philosophy at Pavia after quitting the church. He regarded his own course of development as a type which reveals the general characteristics of all development, no matter in what department it occurs. Whilst Spencer really started from the analogy of organic evolution, Ardigo starts from the analogy of
