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, eve