of subjectivity or, as we also say, of the spirit's immediate individuality". Gentile recovers the romantic conception of art as pure sentiment, giving it a character of lyrical intuition as De Sanctis and Croce have already done, however, challenging the latter that art is not mediated expression of feeling, but the feeling itself, an active force of the spirit that contains the whole in power. Moreover, art is not to be distinguished from other forms of human creativity as Croce believes, but permeates them all. And sentiment, as the core of art, will be increasingly revalued by Gentile to the point of saying that it is not only the potentiality of thought in action, but infinite creative energy that moves thought itself, and therefore the world, reality.. Religion (antithesis): opposite to art, religion is the exaltation of the object, disconnected from the subject and therefore from the ideality and knowability of the spirit. As art was consciousness of the subject, religion is therefore consciousness of the object, but without rational mediation, and therefore requires a mystical adherence by the subject who feels like nothing, replacing revelation and grace to knowledge and autonomous will. Religion, however, is a necessary moment in the development of the spirit that needs to alienate itself in order to become self-aware. Philosophy (synthesis): the moment of synthesis is thus represented by philosophy, in whose actuality the contradiction of art and religion, thought at the beginning as inactual, is resolved: these are simultaneously integrated in philosophy, which grasps them not as separate moments, but in the oneness of the final self-conscious act. Gentile recognizes in Christianity the beginning of this process of evolution of the spirit, because it has always privileged the intimacy and the responsibility of the subject starting from the central dogma of the Man-God, which recomposes in unity the separation between the divine spirit and the human spirit. Actualism and Christianity Gentile thus presents his philosophy as essentially Christian, or the fulfillment of Christianity in a demythologized form, as a religion of interiority which he intends to purge of the elements of realism and transcendence brought historically by platonism and aristotelianism. Restoring the authentic Christian tradition, Gentile proposes to renew even the spiritualistic instances of the Italian Risorgimento, removing them from Platonism and mysticism of transcendence, in favor of an immanent religiosity that excludes any barrier between sacred and profane, and in which every