that he is a
_tempista_, that his real pride is in "good timing." He makes
decisions and acts on them at the precise moment when all the
conditions and considerations which make them feasible and opportune
are properly matured. This is a way of saying that Fascism returns to
the most rigorous meaning of Mazzini's "Thought and Action," whereby
the two terms are so perfectly coincident that no thought has value
which is not already expressed in action. The real "views" of the
_Duce_ are those which he formulates and executes at one and the same
time.

Is Fascism therefore "anti-intellectual," as has been so often
charged? It is eminently anti-intellectual, eminently Mazzinian, that
is, if by intellectualism we mean the divorce of thought from action,
of knowledge from life, of brain from heart, of theory from practice.
Fascism is hostile to all Utopian systems which are destined never to
face the test of reality. It is hostile to all science and all
philosophy which remain matters of mere fancy or intelligence. It is
not that Fascism denies value to culture, to the higher intellectual
pursuits by which thought is invigorated as a source of action.
Fascist anti-intellectualism holds in scorn a product peculiarly
typical of the educated classes in Italy: the _leterato_--the man who
plays with knowledge and with thought without any sense of
responsibility for the practical world. It is hostile not so much to
culture as to bad culture, the culture which does not educate, which
does not make men, but rather creates pedants and aesthetes, egotists
in a word, men morally and politically indifferent. It has no use, for
instance, for the man who is "above the conflict" when his country or
its important interests are at stake.

By virtue of its repugnance for "intellectualism," Fascism prefers not
to waste time constructing abstract theories about itself. But when we
say that it is not a system or a doctrine we must not conclude that it
is a blind praxis or a purely instinctive method. If by system or
philosophy we mean a living thought, a principle of universal
character daily revealing its inner fertility and significance, then
Fascism is a perfect system, with a solidly established foundation and
with a rigorous logic in its development; and all who feel the truth
and the vitality of the principle work day by day for its development,
now doing, now undoing, now going forward, now retracing their steps,
according as the thing