powerful aid to the popular cause, for it conciliated many who would have shrunk from openly assailing the Pope's secular authority, while at the same time it was not so obviously unsound as to be incapable of being maintained in good faith until refuted by the course of events. Although, nevertheless, Gioberti's essay on Italy's spiritual and intellectual primacy is the most important of his works, it almost disappears in the mass of the remainder, treating for the most part of rehgioir, or of moral or speculative philosophy. Among them was a violent attack on the writings of the most eminent Italian philosopher of the age, Antonio Rosmini-Serbati (1797–1855), who in turn accused Gioberti of pantheism. The great purpose of Rosmini's philosophy may be defined to be the perfecting of St. Thomas Aquinas's system by expelling the element it had derived from Aristotle, which in Rosmini's view led direct to pantheism and materialism. He laboured hard at this object all his life, but died before his work was done. It says much for his genius that one so encumbered with childish ultramontane notions should have won the acknowledged rank he holds among the first philosophical thinkers. He is equally well known as the founder of a religious Order, the constant antagonist of the Jesuits, and the author of the Five Wounds of the Church, an appeal for reform whose honest frankness was used by his enemies to deprive him of the cardinal's hat that had been promised him. His Order still flourishes, his system is still potent, and his memory, honoured everywhere, is almost adored in his native place, Roveredo in the Italian Tyrol.
Another philosopher influential on Italian thought was Giovanni Domenico Romagnosi (1761–1835), whose
