Which of these doctrines will be most potent to lead our nation to high things? Let us not forget that, although the educated, intellectual, and virtuous may be willing to admit that the wellbeing of the individual should be founded-even at the cost of sacrifice up on the well-being of the many, the majority will, as they always have done, understand their well-being to mean their positive satisfaction or enjoyment; they will reject the notion of sacrifice as painful, and endeavor to realize their own happiness, even to the injury of others. They will seek it one day from liberty, the next from the deceitful promises of a despot; but the practical result of encouraging them to strive for the realization of their own happiness as a right, will inevitably be to lead them to the mere gratification of their own individual egotism. If you reject all supreme law, all Providential guidance, all aim, all obligation imposed by the belief in a mission towards humanity, you have no right to prescribe your conception of well-being to others, as worthier or better. You have no certain basis, no principle upon which to found a system of education; you have nothing left but force, if you are strong enough to impose it. Such was the method adopted by the French Revolutionists, and they, in their turn, succumbed to the force of others, without knowing in the name of what to protest. And you would have to do the same. Without God, you must either accept anarchy as the normal condition of things, and this is impossible, or you must seek your authority in the force of this or that individual, and thus open the way to despotism and tyranny. But what then becomes of the idea of progress?—what of the conception we have lately gained from historic science of the gradual but infallible education of humanity, of the link of solidary ascending life which unites succeeding generations, of the duty of sacrificing, if need be, the present generation to the elevation and morality of the generations of the future, of the pre eminence of the fatherland over individuals, and the certainty that their devotion and martyrdom will, in the fulness of time, advance the honor, greatness, or virtue of their nation? There are materialists, illogical and carried away by the impulses of a heart superior to their doctrines, who do both feel and act upon this worship of the ideal; but materialism denies it. Materialism, as a doctrine, only recognizes in the universe a finite and determinate quantity of matter, gifted with a definite number of properties, and susceptible of modification, but not of progress; in which certain productive forces act by the fortuitous agglomeration of circumstances not to be predicated or foreseen, or through the necessary succession of causes and effects,-of events inevitable and independent of all human action. Materialism admits neither the intervention of any creative intelligence, Divine initiative, nor human free-will; by denying the law-giving Intellect, it denies all intelligent Providential law; and the philosophy of the squirrel in its cage, which men term Pantheism at the present day, by confounding the subject and the object in one, cancels alike the Ego and non-Ego, good and evil, God and man, and, consequently, all individual mission or free-will. The wretched doctrine, recognizing no higher historic formula than the necessary alternation of vicissitudes, condemns humanity to tread eternally the same circle, being incapable of comprehending the conception of the spiral path of indefinite progress upon which humanity traces its gradual ascent towards an ideal beyond. Strange contradiction! Men whose aim it is to combat the practice of egotism instilled into the Italian people by tyranny, to inspire them with a sacred devotion to the fatherland, and make of them a great nation, the artificer of the progress of humanity, present as the first intellectual food of this people now awakening to new life, whose whole strength lies in their good instincts and virginity of intellect, a theory the ultimate consequences of which man conscience and intuition, to limit themselves to the mechanism of analytical observation, and substitute their narrow, undirected physiology for biology and psychology,—if then, finding themselves unable by that imperfect method to comprehend the primary laws and origin of things, they childishly deny the existence of such laws, and declare all humanity before their time to have been deluded and incapable, so be it. Nor should I, had Italy been a nation for half a century, have regarded their doctrines as fraught with any real danger. Humanity will not abandon its appointed path for them; and to hear them—in an age in which the discoveries of all great thinkers combine to demonstrate the existence of an intelligent preordained law of unity and progress spouting materialism in the name of science, because they have skimmed a volume of Vogt, or attended a lecture by Moleschott, might rather move one to amusement than anger. But Italy is not a nation; she is only in the way to become one. And the present is therefore a moment of grave importance; for, even as the first examples set before infancy, so the first lessons taught to a people emerging from a long past of error and corruption, and hesitating as to the choice of its future, may be of serious import. The doctrines of federalism, which, if preached in France at the present day, would be but an innocent Utopia, threatened the dissolution of the country during the first years of the Revolution. They laid bare the path for foreign conquest, and roused the Mountain to bloody and terrible means of repression. Such for us are the wretched doctrines of which I speak. Fate has set before us a great and holy mission, which, if we fail to accomplish it now, may be postponed for half a century. Every delay, every error, may be fatal. And the people through whom we have to work are uneducated, liable to accept any error which wears a semblance of war against the past, and in danger, from their long habit of slavery, of relapsing into egotism. Now the tendency of the doctrines of materialism is to lead the mass to egotism through the path of interest. Therefore it grieves me to hear them preached by many worthy but inconsiderate young men amongst us; and I conjure them, by all they hold most sacred, to meditate deeply the moral consequences of the doctrines they preach, and especially to study their effect in the case of a neighboring nation, which carried negation to the extreme during the past century, and which we behold at the present day utterly corrupted by the worship of temporary and material interest, disinherited of all noble activity, and sunk in the degradation and infamy of slavery. Every error is a crime in those whose duty it is to watch over the cradle of a nation. an Either we must accept the sovereignty of an aim prescribed by conscience, in which all the individuals composing a nation are bound to unite, and the pursuit of which constitutes the nationality of a given people among the many of which humanity is composed,· aim recognized by them all, and superior to them all, and therefore religious; or we must accept the sovereignty of the right, arbitrarily defined, of each nation, and its practical consequences, the pursuit by each individual of his own interest and his own well-being, the satisfaction of his own desires, and the impossibility of any sovereign duty, to which all the citizens, from those who govern down to the humblest of the governed, owe obedience and sacrifice. -- Which of these doctrines will be most potent to lead our nation to high things? Let us not forget that, although the educated, intellectual, and virtuous may be willing to admit that the wellbeing of the individual should be founded-even at the cost of sacrifice upon the well-being of the many, the majority will, as they always have done, understand their well-being to mean their positive satisfaction or enjoyment; they will reject the notion of sacrifice as painful, and endeavor to realize their own happiness, even to the injury of others. They will seek it one day from liberty, the next from the deceitful promises of a despot; but the practical result of encouraging them to strive for the realization of their own happiness as a right, will inevitably be to lead them to the mere gratification of their own individual egotism. If you reject all supreme law, all Providential guidance, all aim, all obligation imposed by the belief in a mission towards humanity, you have no right to prescribe your conception of well-being to others, as worthier or better. You have no certain basis, no principle upon which to found a system of education; you have nothing left but force, if you are strong enough to impose it. Such was the method adopted by the French Revolutionists, and they, in their turn, succumbed to the force of others, without knowing in the name of what to protest. And you would have to do the same. Without God, you must either accept anarchy as the normal condition of things, and this is impossible, or you must seek your authority in the force of this or that individual, and thus open the way to despotism and tyranny. But what then becomes of the idea of progress?—what of the conception we have lately gained from historic science of the gradual but infallible education of humanity, of the link of solidary ascending life which unites succeeding generations, of the duty of sacrificing, if need be, the present generation to the elevation and morality of the generations of the future, of the pre eminence of the fatherland over individuals, and the certainty that their devotion and martyrdom will, in the fulness of time, advance the honor, greatness, or virtue of their nation? There are materialists, illogical and carried away by the impulses of a heart superior to their doctrines, who do both feel and act upon this worship of the ideal; but materialism denies it. Materialism, as a doctrine, only recognizes in the universe a finite and determinate quantity of matter, gifted with a definite number of properties, and susceptible of modification, but not of progress; in which certain productive forces act by the fortuitous agglomeration of circumstances not to be predicated or foreseen, or through the necessary succession of causes and effects,-of events inevitable and independent of all human action. Materialism admits neither the intervention of any creative intelligence, Divine initiative, nor human free-will; by denying the law-giving Intellect, it denies all intelligent Providential law; and the philosophy of the squirrel in its cage, which men term Pantheism at the present day, by confounding the subject and the object in one, cancels alike the Ego and non-Ego, good and evil, God and man, and, consequently, all individual mission or free-will. The wretched doctrine, recognizing no higher historic formula than the necessary alternation of vicissitudes, condemns humanity to tread eternally the same circle, being incapable of comprehending the conception of the spiral path of indefinite progress upon which humanity traces its gradual ascent towards an ideal beyond. Strange contradiction! Men whose aim it is to combat the practice of egotism instilled into the Italian people by tyranny, to inspire them with a sacred devotion to the fatherland, and make of them a great nation, the artificer of the progress of humanity, present as the first intellectual food of this people now awakening to new life, whose whole strength lies in their good instincts and virginity of intellect, a theory the ultimate consequences of which are to establish egotism upon a basis idea, which find expression in our counof right! They call upon their people worthily to carry on the grand traditions of their past, when all around them-popes, princes, military leaders, literati, and the servile herd-have either insolently trampled liberty under foot, or deserted its cause in cowardly indifference; and they preach to them a doctrine which deprives them of every pledge of future progress, every stimulus to affection, every noble aspiration towards sacrifice, — they take from them the faith that inspires confidence in victory, and renders even the defeat of to-day fruitful of triumph on the morrow. The same men who urge upon them the duty of shedding their blood for an idea begin by declaring to them: There is no hope of any future for you. Faith in immortality — the lesson transmitted to you by all past humanity — is a falsehood; a breath of air, or trifling want of equilibrium in the animal functions, destroys you wholly and forever. There is even no certainty that the results of your labors will endure; there is no Providential law or 'design, consequently no possible theory of the future; you are but building up to-day what any unforeseen fact, blind force, or fortuitous circumstance may overthrow to-morrow. They teach these brothers of theirs, whom they desire to elevate and ennoble, that they are but dust, -a necessary, unconscious secretion of I know not what material substance; that the thought of a Kepler or Dante is dust, or rather phosphorus; that genius, from Prometheus to Jesus, brought down no divine spark from heaven; that the moral law, free-will, merit, and the consequent progress of the Ego, are illusions; that events are successively our masters, -inexorable, irresponsible, and insuperable to human will. And they see not that they thus confirm that servile submission to the accomplished fact, that doctrine of opportunity, that bastard Machiavellism, that worship of temporary interests, and that indifference to every great try at the present day in the betrayal of national duty by our higher classes, and in the stupid resignation of our masses. IV. I INVOKE the rising—and I should die consoled, even in exile, could I see the first signs of its advent, but this I dare not hope-I invoke the rising of a truly Italian school; —a school which, comprehending the causes of the downfall of the Papacy, and the impotence of the merely negative doctrine which our Italian youth have borrowed from superficial French materialists and the German copyists, should elevate itself above both, and come forward to announce the approaching and inevitable religious transformation which will put an end to the existing divorce between thought and action, and to the crisis of egotism and immorality through which Europe is passing. I invoke the rising of a school destined to prepare the way for the initiative of Italy; which shall, on the one side, undertake the examination of the dogma upon which Catholicism was founded, and prove it to be worn out, exhausted, and in contradiction to our new conception of life and its laws; and, on the other hand, the refutation of materialism under whatsoever form it may present itself, and prove that it also is in contradiction of that new conception, that it is a stupid, fatal negation of all moral law, of human free-will, of our every sacred hope, and of the calm and constant virtue of sacrifice. I invoke a school which shall philosophically develop all the consequences, the germ of which-neglected or ignored by superficial intellects-is contained in the word Progress considered as a new term in the great historical synthesis, the expression of the ascending advance of humanity from epoch to epoch, from religion to religion, towards a vaster conception of its own aim and its own law. I invoke the rising of a school des - as I have said—is a relig Italy tined to demonstrate to the youth of and science only an accumulation of materials to be arranged and organized in fruitful synthesis by a new moral conception;-a school that will recall philosophy from this puerile confusion of the means with the aim, to bring it back to its sole true basis, the knowledge of life and comprehension of its law. I invoke a school which will seek the truth of the epoch, not in mere analysis, - always barren and certain to mislead, if undirected by a ruling principle, but in an earnest study of universal tradition, which is the manifestation of the collective life of humanity; and of conscience, which is the manifestation of the life of the individual. I invoke a school which shall redeem from the neglect cast upon it by theories deduced from one of our human faculties alone that intuition which is the concentration of all the faculties upon a given subject; —a school which, even while declaring it exhausted, will respect the past, without which the future would be impossible, which will protest against those intellectual barbarians for whom every religion is falsehood, every form of civilization now extinct a folly, every great pope, king, or warrior now in the course of things surpassed a criminal or a hypocrite, and revoke the condemnation, thus uttered by presumption in the present, of the past labors and intellect of entire humanity; a school which may condemn, but will not defame, — will judge, but never, through frenzy of rebellion, falsify history; a school which will declare the death that is, without denying the life that was, which will call upon Italy to emancipate herself for the achievement of new glories, but strip not a single leaf from her wreath of glories past. - Such a school would regain for Italy her European initiative, her primacy. Some have affirmed this of France. They were mistaken. France - if we except the single moment when the Revolution and Napoleon summed up the achievements of the epoch of individuality— has never had any external mission, other than, occasionally, as an arm of the Church, the instrument of an idea emanating from Papal Rome. But the mission of Italy in the world was at all times religious, and the essential character of Italian genius was at all times religious. The essence of every religion lies in a power, unknown to mere science, of compelling man to reduce thought to action, and harmonize his practical life with his moral conception. The genius of our nation, whenever it has been spontaneously revealed, and exercised independently of all foreign inspiration, has always evinced the religious character, the unifying power to which I allude. Every conception of the Italian mind sought its incarnation in action,—strove to assume a form in the political sphere. The ideal and the real, elsewhere divided, have always tended to be united in our land. Sabines and Etruscans alike derived their civil organization and way of life from their conception of Heaven. The Pythagoreans founded their philosophy, religious associations, and political institutions at one and the same time. The source of the vitality and power of Rome lay in a religious sense of a collective mission, of an aim to be achieved, in the contemplation of which the individual was submerged. Our democratic republics were all religious. Our early philosophical thinkers were all tormented by the idea of translating their ideal conceptions into practical rules of government. And as to our external mission. We alone have twice given moral unity to Europe, to the known world. The voice that issued from Rome in the past was addressed to and reverenced by humanity," Urbs Orbi." Italy is a religion. And when, in my |