Such is the moral development of man, who believes himself an individual, but is in truth humanity considered momentarily in one of its fragments. Such is history: the unfolding of the spirit in its universality. It is not therefore difficult to determine what is the past culture in which we desire to graft our present one. It is our own actual culture in so far as it is not the patrimony, not the spiritual life of the isolated individual, of a particular being; but is instead the life of the spirit in its universality, the development of the human personality taken in its effective, historical concreteness. The past with its entire content is a projection of our actual consciousness, i.e., of the present. But we must not give this proposition a sceptical sense. As I have already pointed out, the present neither in the particular individual nor in the universal history of the spirit, is sundered from the past by that abyss which is ordinarily seen from a materialistic point of view. The past is one and the same thing with the present. The past _is_ the present in its inmost substance; and the present is the past that has matured. The grain of wheat which was buried in the furrow is now no longer to be found under the glebe. It lives, multiplied in the ear of wheat. The seed as such was decomposed and destroyed in the soil; it is there no more, it sprung thence as a blade of grass, it grew, was transformed, still is, still lasts, and will continue to endure in other forms. Where is it now? Why, in whatever form it may now have assumed. It is the past in the present, as the present. So then, what is Dante the poet who towers over the centuries, the object of our admiration, the master of all who speak and use the Italian language? He is the lordly poet of the fourteenth century, not because he then lived his own individual life, but because he survives to-day in us who think him, who appreciate him even when we are not fully acquainted with him. In this sense he lives in us, as the seed does in the ear of corn. I have just hinted at the possibility of appreciating something without fully understanding it. I wanted to make clear how impossible it is to separate, with a clean cut, knowledge from ignorance. It is far from true that before taking up a certain science we know absolutely nothing about it,--that the boy who goes to school for the first time is completely devoid of all knowledge, or that he who is in quest of a book which he has never read can in no way whatever speak about it.