ntainous province, for instance,
have to have the same bureaucratic machinery, the same body of laws, the
same methods, etc., as the extreme southern province or the province
made up of plains, solely through the passion for symmetrical
uniformity, that pathological expression of unity.

If we disregard those considerations of a political order which make it
possible to conclude, as I have done elsewhere,[35] that the only
possible organization for Italy, as for every other country, appeared to
me to be that of an administrative federalism combined with political
unity, we can regard it as manifest, that at the close of the nineteenth
century the individual, as an independent entity, is dethroned alike in
biology and sociology.

The individual exists, but only in so far as he forms a part of a social
aggregate.

Robinson Crusoe--that perfect type of individualism--can not possibly be
aught but a legend or a pathological specimen.

The species--that is to say, the social aggregate--is the great, the
living and eternal reality of life, as has been demonstrated by
Darwinism and confirmed by all the inductive sciences from astronomy to
sociology.

At the close of the eighteenth century Rousseau thought that the
individual alone existed, and that society was an artificial product of
the "social contract" and, as he attributed (just as Aristotle had done
in the case of slavery) a permanent human character to the transitory
manifestations of the period, such as the rottenness of the regime under
which he lived, he further thought that Society was the cause of all
evils, and that individuals are all born good and equal. At the end of
the nineteenth century, on the contrary, all the inductive sciences
agree in recognizing that society, the social aggregate, is a fact of
Nature, inseparable from life, in the vegetable species as in the animal
species, from the lowest "animal colonies" of zoophytes up to societies
of mammals (herbivora), and to human society.[36]

All that is best in the individual, he owes to the social life, although
every phase of evolution is marked at its decline by pathological
conditions of social decay--essentially transitory, however--which
inevitably precede a new cycle of social renovation.

The individual, as such, if he could live, would fulfill only one of the
two fundamental requirements (needs) of existence: alimentation--that is
to say, the selfish preservation of his own organism, by mean