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. Some have affirmed this of France. They were mistaken. France--if we except the single moment when the Revolution and Napoleon summed up the achievements of the epoch of _individuality_--has never had any external mission, other than, occasionally, as an arm of the Church, the _instrument_ of an idea emanating from Papal Rome. But the mission of Italy in the world was at all times religious, and the essential character of Italian genius was at all times religious.