Chapter 5 No.5

On the other hand, in opposition to the Papacy, but itself a source of no less corruption, stands materialism.

Materialism, the philosophy of all expiring epochs and peoples in decay, is, historically speaking, an old phenomenon, inseparable from the death of a religious dogma. It is the reaction of those superficial intellects which, incapable of taking a comprehensive view of the life of humanity, and tracing and deducing its essential characteristics from tradition, deny the religious ideal itself, instead of simply affirming the death of one of its incarnations.

Luther compared the human mind to a drunken peasant, who, falling from one side of his horse, and set straight on his seat by one desirous of helping him, instantly falls again on the other side. The simile-if limited to periods of transition-is most just. The youth of Italy, suddenly emancipated from the servile education of more than three centuries, and intoxicated with their moral liberty, find themselves in the presence of a Church destitute of all mission, virtue, love for the people, or adoration of truth or progress,-destitute even of faith in itself. They see that the existing dogma is in flagrant contradiction of the ruling idea that governs all the aspirations of the epoch, and that its conception of divinity is inferior to that revealed by science, human conscience, philosophy, and the improved conception of life acquired by the study of the tradition of humanity, unknown to man previously to the discovery of his Eastern origin. Therefore, in order-as they believe-to establish their moral freedom radically and forever, they reject alike all idea of a church, a dogma, and a God.

Philosophically speaking, the unreflecting exaggerations of men who have just risen up in rebellion do not portend any serious damage to human progress. These errors are a mere repetition of what has always taken place at the decay and death of every dogma, and will-as they always have done-sooner or later wear away. The day will come when our Italian youth will discover that, just as reasonably as they, not content with denying the Christian dogma, proceed to deny the existence of a God, and the religious life of humanity, their ancestors might have proceeded, from their denial and rejection of the feudal system, to the rejection of every form of social organization, or have declared art extinct forever during the transition period when the Greek form of art had ceased to correspond to those aspirations of the human mind which prepared the way for the cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the Christian school of art.

Art, society, religion,-all these are faculties inseparable from human life itself, progressive as life itself, and eternal as life itself. Every epoch of humanity has had and will have its own social, artistic, and religious expression. In every epoch man will ask of tradition and of conscience whence he came, and to what goal he is bound; he will ask through what paths that goal is to be reached, and seek to solve the problem suggested by the existence within him of a conception of the Infinite, and of an ideal impossible of realization in the finite conditions of his earthly existence. He will, from time to time, adopt a different solution, in proportion as the horizon of tradition is progressively enlarged, and the human conscience enlightened; but assuredly it will never be a mere negation.

Philosophically speaking, materialism is based upon a singular but constant confusion of two things radically distinct;-life, and its successive modes of manifestation; the Ego, and the organs by which it is revealed in a visible form to the external world, the non-Ego. The men who, having succeeded in analyzing the instruments by means of which life is made manifest in a series of successive finite phenomena, imagine that they have acquired a proof of the materiality of life itself, resemble the poor fool, who, having chemically analyzed the ink with which a poem was written, imagines he has penetrated the secret of the genius that composed it.

Life,-thought,-the initiative power of motion,-the conception of the Infinite, of the Eternal, of God, which is inborn in the human mind,-the aspiration towards an ideal impossible of realization in the brief stage of our earthly existence,-the instinct of free will,-all that constitutes the mysterious link within us to a world beyond the visible,-defy all analysis by a philosophy exclusively experimental, and impotent to overpass the sphere of the secondary laws of being.

If materialists choose to reject the teachings of tradition, the voice of human conscience and intuition, to limit themselves to the mechanism of analytical observation, and substitute their narrow, undirected physiology for biology and psychology,-if then, finding themselves unable by that imperfect method to comprehend the primary laws and origin of things, they childishly deny the existence of such laws, and declare all humanity before their time to have been deluded and incapable,-so be it. Nor should I, had Italy been a nation for half a century, have regarded their doctrines as fraught with any real danger. Humanity will not abandon its appointed path for them; and to hear them-in an age in which the discoveries of all great thinkers combine to demonstrate the existence of an intelligent preordained law of unity and progress-spouting materialism in the name of science, because they have skimmed a volume of Vogt, or attended a lecture by Moleschott, might rather move one to amusement than anger.

But Italy is not a nation; she is only in the way to become one. And the present is therefore a moment of grave importance; for, even as the first examples set before infancy, so the first lessons taught to a people emerging from a long past of error and corruption, and hesitating as to the choice of its future, may be of serious import. The doctrines of federalism, which, if preached in France at the present day, would be but an innocent Utopia, threatened the dissolution of the country during the first years of the Revolution. They laid bare the path for foreign conquest, and roused the Mountain to bloody and terrible means of repression.

Such for us are the wretched doctrines of which I speak. Fate has set before us a great and holy mission, which, if we fail to accomplish it now, may be postponed for half a century. Every delay, every error, may be fatal. And the people through whom we have to work are uneducated, liable to accept any error which wears a semblance of war against the past, and in danger, from their long habit of slavery, of relapsing into egotism.

Now the tendency of the doctrines of materialism is to lead the mass to egotism through the path of interest. Therefore it grieves me to hear them preached by many worthy but inconsiderate young men amongst us; and I conjure them, by all they hold most sacred, to meditate deeply the moral consequences of the doctrines they preach, and especially to study their effect in the case of a neighboring nation, which carried negation to the extreme during the past century, and which we behold at the present day utterly corrupted by the worship of temporary and material interest, disinherited of all noble activity, and sunk in the degradation and infamy of slavery.

Every error is a crime in those whose duty it is to watch over the cradle of a nation.

Either we must admit the idea of a God,-of the moral law, which is an emanation from him,-and the idea of human duty, freely accepted by mankind, as the practical consequence of that law,-or we must admit the idea of a ruling force of things, and its practical consequence, the worship of individual force or success, the omnipotence of fact. From this dilemma there is no escape.

Either we must accept the sovereignty of an aim prescribed by conscience, in which all the individuals composing a nation are bound to unite, and the pursuit of which constitutes the nationality of a given people among the many of which humanity is composed,-an aim recognized by them all, and superior to them all, and therefore religious; or we must accept the sovereignty of the right, arbitrarily defined, of each nation, and its practical consequences,-the pursuit by each individual of his own interest and his own well-being, the satisfaction of his own desires,-and the impossibility of any sovereign duty, to which all the citizens, from those who govern down to the humblest of the governed, owe obedience and sacrifice.

Which of these doctrines will be most potent to lead our nation to high things? Let us not forget that, although the educated, intellectual, and virtuous may be willing to admit that the well-being of the individual should be founded-even at the cost of sacrifice-upon the well-being of the many, the majority will, as they always have done, understand their well-being to mean their positive satisfaction or enjoyment; they will reject the notion of sacrifice as painful, and endeavor to realize their own happiness, even to the injury of others. They will seek it one day from liberty, the next from the deceitful promises of a despot; but the practical result of encouraging them to strive for the realization of their own happiness as a right, will inevitably be to lead them to the mere gratification of their own individual egotism.

If you reject all Supreme law, all Providential guidance, all aim, all obligation imposed by the belief in a mission towards humanity, you have no right to prescribe your conception of well-being to others, as worthier or better. You have no certain basis, no principle upon which to found a system of education; you have nothing left but force, if you are strong enough to impose it. Such was the method adopted by the French Revolutionists, and they, in their turn, succumbed to the force of others, without knowing in the name of what to protest. And you would have to do the same. Without God, you must either accept anarchy as the normal condition of things,-and this is impossible,-or you must seek your authority in the force of this or that individual, and thus open the way to despotism and tyranny.

But what then becomes of the idea of progress?-what of the conception we have lately gained from historic science of the gradual but infallible education of humanity,-of the link of solidary ascending life which unites succeeding generations,-of the duty of sacrificing, if need be, the present generation to the elevation and morality of the generations of the future,-of the pre-eminence of the fatherland over individuals, and the certainty that their devotion and martyrdom will, in the fulness of time, advance the honor, greatness, or virtue of their nation?

There are materialists, illogical and carried away by the impulses of a heart superior to their doctrines, who do both feel and act upon this worship of the ideal; but materialism denies it. Materialism, as a doctrine, only recognizes in the universe a finite and determinate quantity of matter, gifted with a definite number of properties, and susceptible of modification, but not of progress; in which certain productive forces act by the fortuitous agglomeration of circumstances not to be predicated or foreseen; or through the necessary succession of causes and effects,-of events inevitable and independent of all human action.

Materialism admits neither the intervention of any creative intelligence, Divine initiative, nor human free-will; by denying the law-giving Intellect, it denies all intelligent Providential law; and the philosophy of the squirrel in its cage, which men term Pantheism at the present day, by confounding the subject and the object in one, cancels alike the Ego and non-Ego, good and evil, God and man, and, consequently, all individual mission or free-will. The wretched doctrine, recognizing no higher historic formula than the necessary alternation of vicissitudes, condemns humanity to tread eternally the same circle, being incapable of comprehending the conception of the spiral path of indefinite progress upon which humanity traces its gradual ascent towards an ideal beyond.

Strange contradiction! Men whose aim it is to combat the practice of egotism instilled into the Italian people by tyranny, to inspire them with a sacred devotion to the fatherland, and make of them a great nation, the artificer of the progress of humanity, present as the first intellectual food of this people now awakening to new life, whose whole strength lies in their good instincts and virginity of intellect, a theory the ultimate consequences of which are to establish egotism upon a basis of right!

They call upon their people worthily to carry on the grand traditions of their past, when all around them-popes, princes, military leaders, literati, and the servile herd-have either insolently trampled liberty under foot, or deserted its cause in cowardly indifference; and they preach to them a doctrine which deprives them of every pledge of future progress, every stimulus to affection, every noble aspiration towards sacrifice,-they take from them the faith that inspires confidence in victory, and renders even the defeat of to-day fruitful of triumph on the morrow. The same men who urge upon them the duty of shedding their blood for an idea begin by declaring to them: There is no hope of any future for you. Faith in immortality-the lesson transmitted to you by all past humanity-is a falsehood; a breath of air, or trifling want of equilibrium in the animal functions, destroys you wholly and forever. There is even no certainty that the results of your labors will endure; there is no Providential law or design, consequently no possible theory of the future; you are but building up to-day what any unforeseen fact, blind force, or fortuitous circumstance may overthrow to-morrow.

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.