which is always, at least virtually, an organic conception of the
world.

Fascism would therefore not be understood in many of its mani-
festations (as, for example, in its organisations of the Party, its
system of education, its discipline) were it not considered in the
light of its general view of life. A spiritualised view.

To Fascism the world is not this material world which appears
on the surface, in which man is an individual separated from all
other men, standing by himself and subject to a natural law which
instinctively impels him to lead a life of momentary and egoistic
pleasure. In Fascism man is an individual who is the nation and
the country. He is this by a moral law which embraces and binds
together individuals and generations in an established tradition
and mission, a moral law which suppresses the instinct to lead a
life confined to a brief cycle of pleasure in order, instead, to re-
place it within the orbit of duty in a superior conception of life,
free from the limits of time and space a life in which the indvidual
by self-abnegation and by the sacrifice of his particular interests,
even by death, realises the entirely spiritual existence in which his
value as a man consists.

It is therefore a spiritual conception, itself also a result of the
general reaction of the Century against the languid and material-
istic positivism of the Eighteenth Century. Anti-positivist, but
positive: neither sceptical nor agnostic, neither pessimistic nor
passively optimistic, as are in general the doctrines (all of them
negative) which place the centre of life outside of man, who by
his free will can and should create his own world for himself.

Fascism wants a man to be active and to be absorbed in action
with all his energies: it wants him to have a manly consciousness
of the difficulties that exist and to be ready to face them. It con-
ceives life as a struggle, thinking that it is the duty of man to con-
quer that life which is really worthy of him: creating in the first
place within himself the (physical, moral, intellectual) instrument
with which to build it.

As for the individual, so for the nation, so for mankind. Hence
the high value of culture in all its forms (art, religion, science) and
the supreme importance of education. Hence also the essential

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