ar by the following passage
from my work on the "Dottrina razionale del Progresso," which I
published in 1863, in the "Politecnico," Milan, on the fusion of the
monotheistic conception of the Semitic race with the beliefs of Greece
and Rome at the dawn of Christianity:--

"Christianity was originally based on the absolute idea of the divine
first Principle, to which one portion of the Semitic race had attained
by intellectual evolution, and by the acumen of the great men who
brought this idea to perfection. Either because of their clearer
consciousness, or from their environment and the physical circumstances
of the race, the Semitic people passed from the primitive ideas of
mythology to the conception of the absolute and infinite Being, while
other races still adhered to altogether fanciful and anthropomorphic
ideas of this Being. Our race had an Olympus, like the others, and
throughout its history this Olympus was always assuming new forms,
although a human conception was the basis of its religious ideas. The
Chinese and Semitic races were the first to rise to the conception of an
absolute first principle, but in both cases the conception was more or
less unfruitful.

"The gradual transition from consciousness to conception, from the fact
to the idea, from the idol to the law, from the symbol to the thought,
from the finite to the infinite, is the characteristic and essential
course taken by the human mind. But, practically, this process is more
gradual or more rapid, is retarded or advanced, attains its aim or stops
short in its first rudiments, according to the race in which it occurs.
So it was that, as we have just said, the Chinese and Semitic races were
the first to reach the final goal of this psychological progress; other
peoples, such as the Aryans and their offshoots, savages and partially
civilized races, remained in the early stages of this dialectic scale.
Undoubtedly, in our own race, the early religious conceptions which
constituted a simple worship of nature in various forms were constantly
becoming of purer character, and they were not only exalted in their
spiritual quality, but in the Greek and Roman religions they attained to
something like scientific precision. Yet even in these higher
aspirations the race did not surrender its mythical faculty, to which it
was impelled by its physical and psychological constitution, and the
pure conception was unconsciously overshadowed by symbolic ideas. We can