The first and second rules of reasoning, as formulated by Newton and repeated by popular physicists down to the present, read as follows: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearance. . . . Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes. As to respiration in a man and in a beast; the descent of stones in Europe and America; the light of our culinary fire and of the sun; the reflection of light in the earth, and in the planets.” Such rules are valid for human as well as for natural history, and therefore the reasons that explain Italian fascism must be good, at least in their main outlines, for fascism too, and vice versa, or they are not reasons at all.