The Atlantic Monthly, page 219 by Various Authors
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e 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