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 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.