pseudonyme, is an ex-priest, who, "while maintaining 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