progressively enlarged, and the human conscience enlightened; but
assuredly it will never be a mere negation.

Philosophically speaking, materialism is based upon a singular but
constant confusion of two things radically distinct;--life, and its
successive modes of manifestation; the _Ego_, and the organs by which it
is revealed in a visible form to the external world, the non-_Ego_. The
men who, having succeeded in analyzing the _instruments_ by means of
which life is made manifest in a series of successive finite phenomena,
imagine that they have acquired a proof of the _materiality_ of life
itself, resemble the poor fool, who, having chemically analyzed the ink
with which a poem was written, imagines he has penetrated the secret of
the genius that composed it.

Life,--thought,--the initiative power of motion,--the conception of the
Infinite, of the Eternal, of God, which is inborn in the human
mind,--the aspiration towards an ideal impossible of realization in the
brief stage of our earthly existence,--the instinct of free will,--all
that constitutes the mysterious link within us to a world beyond the
visible,--defy all analysis by a philosophy exclusively experimental,
and impotent to overpass the sphere of the secondary laws of being.

If materialists choose to reject the teachings of tradition, the voice
of human 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