The idea of empirical and transcendental self, implicit in this conception of liberty, came to produce the second article of faith in the Mazzinian doctrine. If man were to try creating a new natural kingdom and add it to the animal, vegetable and mineral offered to us by Nature, his attempt would be a vain endeavour. But political reality does not belong to the world of Nature but to the world of Mind, in which man is a Creator, and where nothing is really impossible to him that believeth. This most Christian view of the point frees the nation from natural contingencies and frees the citizens besides from the lazy excuse that man must accept the political and economic position of his country as determined by Nature. Thereby it forbids any idea of its being static. No one can find at his birth his nation ready-made for him; everyone must work to the best of his moral, intellectual, and bodily power to create it; since the moment the citizens cease to work at this, their political task, the country starts ceasing to be a nation and becomes a region whilst the citizens become inhabitants. The nation is not a geographical unit, it is not even history empirically understood, but it is history as far as history is process, development, programme, mission and sacrifice; in a word, human life. In Mazzini’s insistency on the point one detects the desire to react against the negative side of the mentality which has been traced as a consequence of Humanism. The Italians had identified themselves with ancient Rome, and this had brought them to think of their national glory and history as a ready-made affair. In their country they saw the Temple of the past, and exploited their ruins morally as well as financially. Whilst the other countries of the western world had been fighting and labouring, for the conquest of their political and financial status, Italy had sat on her past glories and proudly wrapping herself in Cicero’s or Cæsar’s toga had taken tips from the whole world. Mazzini had grasped enough of Vico’s notion of man as creator of the historical world to bring to the fore, in the average man’s mind, the idea that was the import of all the historical philosophy of Italy and, therefore, the positive side of his country’s historical mentality.