severely the rule of good morals and the dignity of life,"[83] has turned with violent animosity against his former faith.  He exerts some influence over the youth of Italy, and has met with warm admirers in England and Germany.  Franchi’s profession of faith reduces itself to these very simple terms:—­“The world is what it is, and it is because it is; any other reason whatever of its essence and of its existence can be nothing but a sophism or an illusion."[84] All inquiry into the origin of things is a pure chimera, and we must therefore limit ourselves to the experience of the present life, and look for nothing beyond it.  The author treats with sufficient disdain arguments which satisfied Descartes, Newton, and Leibnitz.  It has seemed to me that his understanding, a little obscured by passion, misconceives the true purport of the reasonings which it rejects, and by thus impairing their force, assumes to itself the right to despise them.

The religious negations of Ausonio Franchi do not stop at Christian dogma.  He denies all value to those higher aspirations of the human soul which constitute reason, in the philosophical meaning of the term.  Now, this radical negation of the reason is what those Italians who do not scruple to practise it denominate Rationalism.  And this very unwarrantable use of a word is in fact only a particular case of a general phenomenon.  To criticise, means to examine the thoughts which present themselves to the mind in order to distinguish error from truth.  The Frenchmen, who call themselves the critics, are men who require that the intellect shall make itself the impartial mirror of ideas, but shall renounce the while all discrimination between truth and error.  The term scepticism, in its primary signification, contains the idea of inquiring, of examining; and they give the name of sceptics to the philosophers who declare that there is nothing to discover, and consequently nothing to examine, or to search for!  One is a free-thinker only on the express condition of renouncing all such free exercise of thought as might lead to the acceptance of beliefs generally received.  This is verily the carnival of language, and the bal masque of words.  These corruptions of the meaning of terms are highly instructive.  Doctrines contrary to the laws of human nature bear witness in this way to a secret shame in producing themselves under their true colors.  Just as hypocrisy is an homage which vice pays to virtue, so these barbarisms are an homage which error pays to truth.

To return to Italy:  that beautiful and noble country has not escaped the revival of atheism.  The intoxication of a new liberty, and the political struggles in which the Papacy is at present engaged, will favor for a time, it may be feared, the development of evil doctrines.[85] But the lively genius of the Italians will not be long in attaching itself again to the grand traditions of its past history; and the inhabitants of the land, whose soil was trodden by Pythagoras and Saint Augustine, will not link themselves with doctrines which always run those who hold them aground sooner or later upon the sad and gloomy shores of a vulgar empiricism.