one else, since I know not how to explain it and others
would not understand it'. ¹ 'Not the mind, but the
heart, the instinctive sense of things invisible, the sense
of the divine, combine in me to preserve my beliefs.'
'Do not reply to me,' he wrote to a friend in 1833: 'I
can only give you some slight indication of my ideas;
but they are deeply-rooted in me, they have entered
into my very being, into my soul; and I believe that
no human intelligence could tear them from me with-
out destroying all the framework of my inner life.'

The reasoning processes with which Nature has
endowed man and through the use of which the in-
tellectual expects to discover truth, have only a subor-
dinate function in Mazzini's system. Reason helps us
to deduct 'second-grade truths' from the fundamental,
intuitive truths, from the 'foundations of belief' ; but
'it is not, nor can it ever be, the supreme criterion of
certainty'. 'Without method, scientific knowledge -- in
all its truth, fertility and greatness -- is impossible; and
method can only be acquired through a religious and
philosophical approach' which is revealed by intuition,
in moments of ecstatic exaltation. That kind of know-
ledge 'which today is called Free Thought and Reason',
is but an 'arid, desiccated and sorry travesty of true
knowledge'. ²

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