 With all this intellectual and progressive enthusiasm in the air, hopes of imminent general improvement ran high, but “positive” results were slow in coming. The expectations of economic advancement and civic improvement did not materialize as advertised. To compound matters, the devastation caused by the Great War in Europe badly compromised social faith in the products of science. Positivism waned accordingly in Latin America, replaced in the 1920s by a more radical social thought, especially Marxism, as well as approaches distrustful of naturalist reasoning (Bergsonian spiritualism, phenomenology, and later existentialism). Metaphysics unbridled by standard logic became dominant in many university circles.