it and works on it
from within. It has therefore a form co-related to the contingencies
of time and place; but it has at the same time an ideal content which
elevates it into a formula of truth in the higher region of the
history of thought.

There is no way of exercising a spiritual influence on the things of
the world by means of a human will-power commanding the wills of
others, without first having a clear conception of the particular and
transient reality on which the will-power must act, and without also
having a clear conception of the universal and permanent reality in
which the particular and transient reality has its life and being. To
know men we must have a knowledge of man; and to have a knowledge of
man we must know the reality of things and their laws.

There can be no conception of a State which is not fundamentally a
conception of Life. It is a philosophy or intuition, a system of ideas
which evolves itself into a system of logical contraction, or which
concentrates itself in a vision or in a faith, but which is always,
at least virtually, an organic conception of the world.

2. Spiritualised Conception.

Fascism would therefore not be understood in many of its
manifestations (as, for example, in its organisations of the Party,
its system of education, its discipline) were it not considered in the
light of its general view of life. A spiritualised view.

To Fascism the world is not this material world which appears on the
surface, in which man is an individual separated from all other men,
standing by himself and subject to a natural law which instinctively
impels him to lead a life of momentary and egoistic pleasure. In
Fascism man is an individual who is the nation and the country. He is
this by a moral law which embraces and binds together individuals and
generations in an established tradition and mission, a moral law which
suppresses the instinct to lead a life confined to a brief cycle of
pleasure in order, instead, to replace it within the orbit of duty in
a superior conception of life, free from the limits of time and space
a life in which the individual by self-abnegation and by the sacrifice
of his particular interests, even by death, realises the entirely
spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.

3. Positive Conception of Life as a Struggle.

It is therefore a spiritual conception, itself also a result of the
general reaction of the Century against the languid and