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 idea, which find expression in our country 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 destined to demonstrate to the youth of Italy that rationalism is but an instrument,—the instrument adopted in all periods of transition by the human intellect to aid its progress from a worn-out form of religion to one new and superior,—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.
Italy—as I have said—is a religion.