Chapter XVI: History and Philosophy (1)

Frivolity of Renaissance Literature--The Contrast presented
by Machiavelli--His Sober Style--Positive Spirit--The
Connection of his Works--Two Men in Machiavelli--His
Political Philosophy--The _Patria_--Place of Religion and
Ethics in his System--Practical Object of his
Writings--Machiavellism--His Conception of Nationality--His
Relation to the Renaissance--Contrast between Machiavelli
and Guicciardini--Guicciardini's Doctrine of
Self-interest--The Code of Italian Corruption--The
Connection between these Historians and the
Philosophers--General Character of Italian Philosophy--The
Middle Ages in Dissolution--Transition to Modern Thought and
Science--Humanism counterposed to
Scholasticism--Petrarch--Pico--Dialogues on
Ethics--Importance of Greek and Latin Studies--Classical
substituted for Ecclesiastical Authority--Platonism at
Florence--Ficino--Translations--New Interest in the Problem
of Life--Valla's Hedonism--The Dialogue _De
Voluptate_--Aristotle at Padua and Bologna--Arabian and
Greek Commentators--Life of Pietro Pomponazzi--His Book on
Immortality--His Controversies--Pomponazzi's
Standpoint--Unlimited Belief in Aristotle--Retrospect over
the Aristotelian Doctrine of God, the World, the Human
Soul--Three Problems in the Aristotelian
System--Universals--The First Period of Scholastic
Speculation--Individuality--The Second Period of
Scholasticism--Thomas Aquinas--The Nature of the Soul--New
Impulse given to Speculation by the
Renaissance--Averroism--The Lateran Council--Is the Soul
Immortal?--Pomponazzi reconstructs Aristotle's Doctrine by
help of Alexander Aphrodisius--The Soul is Material and
Mortal--Man's Place in Nature--Virtue is the End of
Man--Pomponazzi on Miracles and Spirits--His Distinction
between the Philosopher and the Christian--The Book on
Fate--Pomponazzi the Precursor--Coarse Materialism--The
School of Cosenza--Aristotle's Authority
Rejected--Telesio--Campanella--Bruno--The Church stifles
Philosophy in Italy--Italian Positivism.

The literature which has occupied us during the last nine chapters, is a literature of form and entertainment. Whether treating chivalrous romance, or the Arcadian ideal, or the conditions of contemporary life, these poets, playwrights and novelists had but one serious object--the perfection of their art, the richness and variety of their pictures. In the conscious pursuit of beautiful form, Poliziano and Ariosto, Bembo and Berni, Castiglione and Firenzuola, Il Lasca and Molza, were alike earnest. For the rest, they sought to occupy their own leisure, and to give polite society the pastime of refined amusement. The content of this miscellaneous literature was of far less moment to the authors and their audience than its mode of presentation. Even when they undertook some theme involving the realities of life, they dwelt by preference upon externals. In the _Cortegiano_ and _Galateo_, for example, conduct is studied from an aesthetical far more than from a moral point of view. The questions which stirred and divided literary coteries, were questions of scholarship, style, language. Matter is everywhere subordinated to expression; the writer's interest in actuality is slight; the power or the inclination to think is inferior to the faculty for harmonious construction. These characteristics of literature in general, render the exceptions noticeable, and force me, at some risk of repetition, to devote a chapter to those men in whom the speculative vigor of the race was concentrated. These were the historians and a small band of metaphysicians, who may be fitly represented by a single philosopher, Pietro Pomponazzi. Of the Florentine historiographers, from Villani to Guicciardini, I have already treated at some length in a previous portion of this work.[548] I shall therefore confine myself to resuming those points in which Machiavelli and Guicciardini uttered the reflections of their age on statecraft and the laws that govern political life.

[Footnote 548: _Age of the Despots_, chaps. v. and vi.]

When we compare Machiavelli with his contemporaries, we are struck by his want of sympathy with the prevalent artistic enthusiasms. Far from being preoccupied with problems of diction, he wrote with the sole object of making what he had to say plain. The result is that, without thinking about expression, Machiavelli created Italian prose anew, and was the first to form a monumental modern style. Language became, beneath his treatment, a transparent and colorless medium for presenting thoughts to the reader's mind; and his thoughts were always removed as little as possible from the facts which suggested them. He says himself that he preferred in all cases the essential reality of a fact to its modification by fancy or by theory.[549] His style is, therefore, the reverse of that which the purists cultivated. They uttered generalities in ornamented and sonorous phrases. Machiavelli scorned ornament, and ignored the cadence of the period. His boldest abstractions are presented with the hard outline and relief of concrete things. Each sentence is a crystal, formed of few but precise words by a spontaneous process in his mind. It takes shape from the thought; not from any preconceived type of rhythm, to which the thought must be accommodated. It is perfect or imperfect according as the thinking process has been completely or incompletely victorious over the difficulties of language. It is figurative only when the fact to be enforced derives new energy from the imagination. Beauty is never sought, but comes unbidden, as upon the limbs and muscles of an athlete, whose aim has been to gain agility and strength. These qualities render Machiavelli's prose a model worthy of imitation by all who study scientific accuracy.

[Footnote 549: "Mi e parso piu conveniente andare dietro alla verita effettuale della cosa che all'immaginazione di essa" (_Principe_, cap. xv.).]

The style is the man; and Machiavelli's style was the mirror of his mind and character. While the literary world echoed to the cry of Art for Art, he followed Science for the sake of Science. Occupied with practical problems, smiling at the supra-mundane aspirations of the middle ages, scorning the aesthetical ideals of the Renaissance, he made the political action of man, _l'homme politique_, the object of exclusive study. His resolute elimination of what he considered irrelevant or distracting circumstances from this chosen field of research, justifies our placing him among the founders or precursors of the modern scientific method. We may judge his premises insufficient, his conclusions false; but we cannot mistake the positive quality of his mind in the midst of a rhetorical and artistic generation.

There is a strict link of connection between Machiavelli's works. These may be divided into four classes--official, historical, speculative and literary. To the first belongs his correspondence with the Florentine Government; to the second, his Florentine History and several minor studies, the _Vita di Castruccio_, the _Ritratti_, and the _Metodo tenuto dal Duca Valentino_; to the third, his _Discorsi_, _Principe_, _Arte della Guerra_ and _Discorso sopra la Riforma di Firenze_; to the fourth, his comedies, poems, novel of _Belfagor_, and _Descrizione della Peste_. The familiar letters should be used as a key to the more intimate understanding of his character. They illustrate some points in his political philosophy, explain his personal motives, and throw much light upon his purely literary compositions. We learn from them to know him as a friend, the father of a family, the member of a little social circle, and finally as the ever-restless aspirant after public employment. Valuable as these letters are for the student of Machiavelli's writings, his private reputation would have gained by their destruction. They show that the man was inferior to the thinker. In spite of his logical consistency of intellect, we become convinced, while reading them, that there were two persons in Machiavelli. The one was a faithful servant of the State, a student of books and human nature, the inaugurator of political philosophy for modern Europe. The other was a boon companion, stooping to low pleasures, and soiling his correspondence with gossip which breathes the tainted atmosphere of Florentine vice. These letters force us to reject the theory that he wrote his comedies with any profound ethical purpose, or that he personally abhorred the moral corruption of which he pointed out the weakening results for Italy. The famous epistle from San Casciano paints the man in his two aspects--at one moment in a leathern jerkin, playing games of hazard with the butcher, or scouring the streets of Florence with a Giuliano Brancaccio; at another, attired in senatorial robes, conversing with princes, approaching the writers of antiquity on equal terms, and penning works which place him on a level with Ariosto and Galileo. The second of these Machiavellis claims our exclusive attention at the present moment. Yet it is needful to remember that the former existed, and was no less real. Only by keeping this in mind can we avoid the errors of those panegyrists who credit the _Mandragola_ with a didactic purpose, and refuse to recognize the moral bluntness betrayed in Machiavelli's theorization of human conduct. The man who thought and felt in private what his familiar letters disclose, was no right censor of the principles that rule society. We cannot trust his moral tact or taste.

Machiavelli was not a metaphysician. He started with the conception of the State as understood in Italy. His familiarity with the Latin classics, and his acquaintance with the newly-formed monarchies of Europe, caused him, indeed, to modify the current notion. But he did not inquire into the final cause of political communities, or present to his own mind a clear definition of what was meant by the phrase _patria_. We are aware of a certain hesitancy between the ideas of the Commune and the race, the State and the Government, which might have been removed by a more careful preliminary analysis. Between the Roman Republic, on the one hand, and the modern nation, on the other, we always find an Italian city. From this point of view, it is to be regretted that he did not appropriate Plato's _Republic_ or Aristotle's _Politics_.[550] He might by such a course of study have avoided the severance of politics from ethics, which renders his philosophy unnatural. We must, however, remember that he did not propose to plan a scientific system. His works have a practical aim in view. They are directed toward the grand end of Italy's restoration from weakness and degeneracy to a place among the powerful peoples of the world. This purpose modifies them in the most minute particulars. It is ever present to Machiavelli's mind. It makes his philosophy assume the form of a critique. It explains the apparent discord between the _Discorsi_ and the _Principe_. It enables us to comprehend the nature of a patriotism which subordinates the interests of the individual to the body politic, even though the State were in the hands of an unscrupulous autocrat. The salvation of Italy, rather than any metaphysical principle, is the animating motive of Machiavelli's political writings. Yet we may note that if he had laid a more solid philosophical basis, if he had striven more vigorously to work out his own conception of the _patria_, and to understand the laws of national health, instead of trusting to such occasional remedies as the almost desperate state of Italy afforded, he would have deserved better of his country and more adequately fulfilled his own end.

[Footnote 550: The section on the types of commonwealths in the _Discorsi_ (cap. ii.) comes straight from Polybius. But I am not aware of any signs in Machiavelli of a direct study of the elder Greek philosophical writings.]

Though Machiavelli had not worked out the conception of a nation as an organic whole, he was penetrated with the thought, familiar to his age, that all human institutions, like men, have a youth, a manhood, and a period of decline. Looking round him, he perceived that Italy, of all the European nations, had advanced farthest on the path of dissolution. He calls the Italians the reproach and corruption of the world--_la corruttela, il vituperio del mondo_. When he inquires into the causes of this ruin, he is led to assign (i) the moral debasement of his country to the Roman Church; (ii) her sloth and inefficiency in warfare to the despots and the mercenaries; (iii) her inability to cope with greater nations to the want of one controlling power in the peninsula. A nation, he argues, cannot be a nation while divided into independent and antagonistic States. It needs to be united under a monarch like France, reduced beneath the sway of a presiding commonwealth like ancient Rome, or connected in a federation like the Swiss. This doctrine of the nation, or, to use his own phrase, of the _patria_, as distinguished from the Commune and the Empire, was highly original in Italy at the time when Machiavelli gave it utterance. It contained the first logically reasoned aspiration after that independence in unity, which the Italians were destined to realize between the years 1858 and 1871. He may be said to have formed it by meditating on the Roman historians, and by comparing Italy with the nascent modern nations. The notion of ethnology did not enter into it so much as the notion of political and social cohesion. Yet nationality was not excluded; for he conceived of no power, whether Empire or Church, above the people who had strength to define themselves against their neighbors. To secure for the population of the Italian peninsula that unity which he rightly considered essential to the _patria_, and the want of which constituted their main inferiority, was the object of all his speculations.

The word _patria_ sounds the keynote of his political Army, and a patriot is synonymous for him with a completely virtuous man. All energies, public and private, are only valuable in so far as they build up the fabric of the commonwealth. Religion is good because it sustains the moral fiber of the people. It is a powerful instrument in the hands of a wise governor; and the best religion is that which develops hardy and law-loving qualities. He criticises Christianity for exalting contemplative virtues above the energies of practical life, and for encouraging a spirit of humility. He sternly condemns the Church because she has been unfaithful even to the tame ideal of her saints, and has set an example of licentious living. Religion is needed as the basis of morality; and morality itself must be encouraged as the safeguard of that discipline which constitutes a nation's vigor. A moralized race is stronger than a corrupt one, because it has a higher respect for law and social order, because it accepts public burdens more cheerfully, because it is more obedient to military ordinances. Thus both religion and morality are means to the grand end of human existence, which is strenuous life in a united nation. I need hardly point out how this conception runs counter to the transcendentalism of the Middle Ages.

Machiavelli admires the Germans for their discipline and sobriety, which he ascribes to the soundness of their religious instincts. France and Spain, he says, have been contaminated by the same corrupting influence as Italy; but they owe their present superiority to the fact of their monarchical allegiance. This opens a second indictment against the Church. Not only has the Church demoralized the people; but it is chiefly due to the ambition of the Popes that Italy has never passed beyond the stage of conflict and disunion.

An important element in this conception of the _patria_ is that it should be militant. Races that have ceased from war, are on the road to ruin; and only those are powerful which train the native population to arms. The feebleness of Italy can be traced to the mercenary system, introduced by despots adopted by commercial republics, and favored by ecclesiastics. If the Italians desire to recover freedom, they must form a national militia; and this can best be done by adapting the principles of the Roman army to modern requirements. The _Art of War_ is a development of this theme. At its close, Machiavelli promises the scepter of Italy, together with the glory of creating Italian nationality, to any State clear-sighted and self-denying enough to arm its citizens and take the lead in the peninsula. That State, he says, shall play the part of Macedon. Reading the peroration of the _Art of War_ by the light of recent history, its paragraphs sound like a prophecy. What Machiavelli there promised, has been achieved, much in the way he indicated, by Piedmont, the Macedon of United Italy.

When Machiavelli discusses the forms of constitutions, he is clearly thinking of cities rather than of nations as we understand them. He has no conception of representative government, but bases all his observations on the principle of burghership. There is no sound intermediate, he says, between a commonwealth and a principality. In the former, the burghers have equal rights. In the latter there will be a hierarchy of classes. Though his sympathies are with the former (since he holds that the equality of the citizens is the best safeguard for the liberties and law abiding virtues of the State), he is yet by no means unfavorable to despotism. The decadence of Italy, indeed, had gone so far that her best chance of restoration depended on a prince. Therefore, while he suggests measures for converting despotic States into republics by crushing the aristocracy, and for creating principalities out of free commonwealths by instituting an order of nobles, he regards the latter as the easier task of the two. Upon such topics we must always bear in mind that what he says is partly speculative, and partly meant to meet the actual conditions of Italian politics. The point of view is never simply philosophical nor yet simply practical. So long as the great end could be achieved, and a strong military power could rise in Italy, he is indifferent to the means employed. The peroration of the _Art of War_ is an appeal to either prince or republic. The peroration of the _Riforma di Firenze_ is an appeal to a patriotic Nomothetes. He there says to Clement: You have one of those singular opportunities offered to you, which confer undying glory on a mortal; you may make Florence free, and, by wise regulations, render her the bulwark of renascent Italy. The peroration of the _Principe_ is an appeal to an ambitious autocrat. Follow the suggestions of ancient and contemporary history, which all point to the formation of a native army. Comprehend the magnitude of the task, and use the right means for executing it; and you will earn the fame of restoring your country to her place among the nations.

The case of Italy is almost desperate. Yet there is still hope. A prudent lawgiver may infuse life into the decaying commonwealth of Florence. A spirited despot may succeed in bringing the whole peninsula by force of arms beneath his sway. Machiavelli will not scrutinize the nature of the remedy too closely. He is ready to sacrifice his republican sympathies, and to welcome the saviour who comes even in the guise of Cesare Borgia. When the salvation of the _patria_ is at stake, none but precisians can hesitate about the choice of instruments.

This indifference to means, provided the end be secured, is characteristic of the man. Machiavelli's Machiavellism consists in regarding politics as a game of skill, where all ways are justified, and fixity of purpose wins. He does not believe in Fortune, though he admits the favorable circumstances which smoothed the way for men like Cesare. With Juvenal, he says: _Nos te, nos facimus, Fortuna, deam_. Again, he does not believe in Providence. Though a prophet speak with the voice of God, he will not succeed unless, like Moses, he be provided with a sword to ratify his revelation. History is a logical sequence of events, the sole intelligible nexus between its several links being the human will. Virtue is decision of character, accompanied by intellectual sagacity; it is the strong man's subordination of his passions, prejudices, predilections, energies, to the chosen aim. We all admit that it is better to be good than bad. Yet morality has little to do with political success. What lies in the way of really great achievement, is the mediocrity of human nature. Men will not be completely bad or perfectly good. They spoil their best endeavors by vacillation and incompetence to guide their action with regard to the sole end in view.

Enough has been said in different portions of this book about the morality of Machiavelli's political essays. Yet this much may be here repeated. Those who wish to understand it, must not forget the Medieval background of the despots--Ezzelini, Visconti, Scaligeri, Estensi, Carreresi--which lay behind Machiavelli. The sinfulness, treason, masterful personality, Thyestean tragedies, enormous vices and intolerable mischief of the Renaissance--all this was but a pale reflex of the middle ages. In those earlier tyrants, the Centaur progenitors of feebler broods, through generations in which men gradually discriminated the twy-formed nature of their ancestry, the lust and luxury of sin had been at their last apogee. _In istis peccandi voluptas erat summa._ What followed in Machiavelli's age, was reflection succeeding to action--evil philosophized in place of evil energetic.

Though Machiavelli perceived that the decadence of Italy was due to bad education, corrupt customs, and a habit of irreligion, he did not insist on the necessity of reformation. He was satisfied with invoking a Dictator, and he counseled this Dictator to meet the badness of his age with fraud and violence. Thus he based his hope of national regeneration upon those very vices which he indicated as the cause of national degeneracy. Whether we ascribe this error to the spirit of the times in which he lived, or to something defective in his own character, it is clear he had not grasped the fundamental principle of righteousness, as that which can alone be safely trusted by a people or its princes. Perhaps he thought that, for practical purposes, the method of radical reformation was too tardy. Perhaps he despaired of seeing it attempted. Of all Italian institutions, the Church, in his opinion, was the most corrupted. Yet the Church held religious monopoly, and controlled education. And the Church had severed morality from religion, religion from the State; making both the private concern of individuals between their conscience and their God.

Just as Machiavelli proved himself incapable of transcending the corruption of his age, though he denounced it; so, while he grasped the notion of a _patria_ superior to the commune, he was not able to disengage his mind from the associations of Italian diplomacy. He perceived that the _debris_ of medieval society in Italy--the Papacy, the nobles, the _condottieri_--afforded no foundation for the State he dreamed of building. He relied on the masses of the people as the only sound constituent of his ideal _patria_. He foresaw a united nation, to which the individual should devote himself, and which should absorb the dispersed forces of the race. And yet he had not conceived of the nation as a living whole, obeying its own laws of evolution and expansion. He regarded the State as a mechanical or artificial product, to be molded by the will of a firm ruler. In his theory there is always a Nomothetes, a Dictator, the intervenient skill of a constructor, whom he imagines capable of altering the conditions of political existence by a _coup d'etat_ or by a readjustment of conflicting rights and interests. Even while praising the French monarchy for its stability, in words that show a just appreciation of constitutional government, he hypothesizes a lawgiver in the past. _Chi ordino quello stato, volle che quelli re_--he who organized that State, willed that those kings, etc. The _ordino_ and _volle_ are both characteristic of his habitual point of view. Probably this faith in manipulation arose from his lifelong habit of regarding small political communities, where change was easily effected. In his works we do not gain any broad prospect from the vantage-ground of comprehensive principles, but a minutely analytical discussion of statecraft, based in the last resort upon the observation of decadent Italian cities. The question always presents itself: how, given certain circumstances, ought a republic or a prince to use them to the best advantage? The deeper problem, how a nation stirred by some impulse, which combines all classes in a common heroism or a common animosity, must act, hardly occurs to his mind. England, with forces intellectual, emotional and practical at fullest strain, in combat with the Spanish tyranny, adopting a course of conduct which reveals the nation to itself by the act of its instinctive will--such a phase of the larger, more magnetic life of peoples, which Milton compared to the new youth of the eagle, had not been observed by Machiavelli. The German Reformation, the French Revolution, the American War of Independence, might have taught him to understand that conception of the modern nation which he had divined, but which the conditions of his experience prevented his appropriating. Had he fully grasped it, we can scarcely believe that the _Principe_ would have been written. The good faith of that essay depends upon a misconception.

In like manner Machiavelli discerned the weaknesses of the Renaissance without escaping from its enthusiasms. He despised the aesthetical ideal of his age. He was willing to sacrifice form, beauty, rhythm, the arts of culture and learned leisure, to stern matters of fact and stringent discipline. Yet he believed as firmly as any humanist, that the regeneration of his country must proceed from a revival of the past. It is the loss of antique virtues that has enervated our character, he cries. It is the neglect of historical lessons that renders our policy so suicidal. We need to recover the Roman military system, the Roman craft of conquest, the Roman pride and poverty, the Roman subordination of the individual to the State. What we want is a dictator or a lawgiver after the Roman fashion--a Romulus, a Numa, a Camillus, a Coriolanus. The _patria_, as he imagines it, is less the modern nation than the Roman Commonwealth before the epoch of the Empire. This unquestioning belief in the efficacy of classical revival finds vent, at the close of the _Arte della Guerra_, in a sentence highly characteristic of the Renaissance. "This province, Italy," he says, "seems made to give new birth to things dead, as we have seen in poetry, in painting, and in sculpture." Hence, he argues, it may be her vocation to bring back the military system and supremacy of ancient Rome.

Thus, to resume what has been said, Machiavelli ascribed the weakness of the Italians to their loss of morality; but he was not logical enough to insist that their regeneration must begin with a religious revolution. He foresaw the modern nation; but he attempted to construct it on the outlines of antiquity. Believing that States might be formed or reformed by ingenious manipulation of machinery, he acquired no true notion of constitutional development or national evolution. His neglect to base his speculations on a thorough-going definition of the State and its relation to man as a social being, caused him to assume a severance between ethics and politics, which no sound philosophy of human life will warrant.

On what, then, if these criticisms are just, is founded his claim to rank among the inaugurators of historical and political science? The answer has been already given. It was not so much what he taught, as the spirit in which he approached the problems of his inquiry, which was scientific in the modern sense. Practical, sincere and positive, Machiavelli never raises points deficient in actuality. He does not invite us to sympathize with the emotions of a visionary, or to follow the vagaries of a dreamer. All that he presents, is hard, tangible fact, wrought into precise uncompromising argument, expressed in unmistakably plain language. Not only do his works cast floods of light upon Italian history; but they suggest questions of vital importance, which can still be discussed upon the ground selected by their author. They are, moreover, so penetrated with the passion of a patriot, however mistaken in his plan of national reconstitution, that our first sense of repulsion yields to a warmer feeling of admiration for the man who, from the depths of despair, could thus hope on against hope for his country.

Studying Guicciardini, we remain within the same sphere of conceptions, limited by the conditions of Italian politics in the beginning of the sixteenth century. There is no less stringency of minute analysis, an even sharper insight into motives, an equal purity and precision of language.[551] But the moral atmosphere is different. The corruption which Machiavelli perceived and criticised, is now accepted. In the place of desperate remedies suggested by the dread of certain ruin, Guicciardini has nothing to offer but indifference and self-adjustment to the exigencies of the moment. Machiavelli was a visionary and an idealist in spite of his positive bias. Guicciardini is a practical diplomatist, bent on saving his own State and fortune from the wreck which he contemplated. What gives grandeur to Machiavelli's speculation is the conception of the _patria_, superior to the individual, demanding unlimited self-sacrifice, and repaying the devotion of the citizens by strength in union. This idea has disappeared in Guicciardini's writings. In its stead he offers us self-interested egotism. Where Machiavelli wrote _patria_, he substituted _il particolare_. It follows from this cold acquiescence in a base theory of public conduct, adapted to a recognized state of social anarchy, that Guicciardini's philosophy is far more immoral than Machiavelli's. The _Ricordi_, in which, under the form of aphorisms, he condensed the results of his experience and observation, have been well described as the "code of Italian corruption." Resistance has to be abandoned. Remedies are hopeless. Let us sit down and calmly criticise the process of decay. A wise man will seek to turn the worst circumstances to his own profit; and what remains for political sagacity is the accumulation of wealth, honors, offices of power on the ambitious individual.

[Footnote 551: I refer to the _Opere Inedite_. In the _Isteria d'Italia_, Guicciardini's style is inferior to Machiavelli's.]

Machiavelli and Guicciardini had this in common, that their mental attitude was analytical, positive, critically scientific. It negatived the _a priori_ idealism of medieval political philosophy, and introduced a just conception of the method of inquiry. This quality connects them on the one hand with the practical politicians of their age, and on the other with its representative thinkers in the field of metaphysics.

It is no part of my plan to attempt a general history of Italian philosophy during the Renaissance period, or even to indicate its leading moments. On the scale of my present work, any such endeavor would of necessity be incomplete; for the material to be dealt with is obscure, and the threads of thought to be interwoven are scattered, requiring no little patience and no slight expenditure of exposition on the part of one who seeks to place them in their proper relations. Of philosophy, in the strict sense of the term, the Italian Renaissance had not much to offer. We do not revert to that epoch, expecting to meet with systematic theories of the universe, plausible analyses of the laws of thought, or ingenious speculations upon the nature of being. It is well known that the thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can scarcely claim to have done more than lead the revolt of reason against scholastic tyranny and obsolete authorities, appealing with often misdirected enthusiasm to original sources, and suggesting theories and methods which, in the hands of abler speculators, at a more fortunate epoch, generated the philosophies of modern Europe. Yet even so the movement of thought in Italy was of no slight moment, and the work accomplished deserves to be recorded with more honor than it has hitherto received from the historians of philosophy.

The Renaissance in general may be called the Middle Ages in dissolution. That the period was transitional in its chief aspects, has often already been insisted on. The massive fabrics of feudalism and the Church were breaking up. The vast edifice of scholastic theology was being undermined by men who had the energy to free themselves from orthodox tradition, but scarcely force enough or opportunity to mold the thought of the new age. The Italians who occupied themselves with philosophical problems, from Petrarch to Campanella, hold an intermediate place between the schoolmen and the founders of modern metaphysics. They accomplish the transition from S. Thomas and Occam to Bacon, Descartes and Spinoza. It is possible to mark three phases in this process of transition, each of which was necessary in the progress of the mind from theological ontology to science and free speculation. The thinkers of the first stage began by questioning the authority of dogma. Those of the second stage accepted the authority of the ancients. Those of the third appealed to Nature against ecclesiastical and classical authority alike. Humanism was thus intermediate between scholasticism and what, for want of a more definite phrase, may be termed rationalism. Succeeding to the schoolmen, the scholars cleared the groundwork of philosophy of old encumbrances, and reappropriated antique systems of thought. After them, the schools of Lower Italy, including Telesio, Campanella and Bruno, prepared the path to be immediately followed; with what profit is apparent to the dullest intellect. Clearly, and beyond the possibility of question, they propounded the main problems which have agitated all the scientific schools of modern Europe. To them belongs the credit of having first speculated knowledge and reality from no external standpoint, but from the immediate consciousness. The _Interrogatio Naturae_ and the _Cogito, ergo sum_, which became the watchwords of modern empiricism and rationalism, are theirs. But, at the very moment when the Italians of the Revival had performed their pioneering task-work, all vital vigor in the nation was extinguished or suspended by the deadly influences of Spanish domination and Papal terrorism.[552] It was left for other races to enter on the promised land which they had conquered.

[Footnote 552: I cannot refrain from translating a paragraph in Spaventa's Essay upon Bruno, which, no less truly than passionately, states the pith of this Italian tragedy. "The sixteenth century was the epoch, in which the human spirit burst the chains that up to then had bound it, and was free. There is no more glorious age for Italy. The heroes of thought and freedom, who then fought for truth, were almost all her sons. They were persecuted and extinguished with sword and fire. Would that the liberty of thought, the autonomy of the reason, they gave to the other nations of Europe, had borne fruit in Italy! From that time forward we remained as though cut off from the universal life; it seemed as if the spirit which inspired the world and pushed it onward, had abandoned us" (_Saggi di Critica_, Napoli, 1867, p. 140).]

Upon its first appearance, it was clear that humanism would run counter to both currents of medieval thought, the orthodox and the heretical, the Thomistic and Averroistic. Dante designed his epic in accordance with the fixed outlines of Thomistic theology. The freethinkers of the Lombard universities expressed a not uncertain adhesion to the materialistic doctrines which passed for Averroism. But Petrarch, the hero of the coming age, pronounced his contempt for scholastic quibbles, and at the same time waged war against the tenants of Averroes. He introduced a new spirit into philosophical discussion, a new style of treatment, literary rather than scientific, which tended to substitute humane culture for logical pedantry. The departure from medieval lines of thought, thus signalized by Petrarch, was followed by the students of the next two centuries. Questions which had agitated Europe since the days of Roscelin, now seemed to lose the interest of actuality. The distinctions of Nominalism and Realism retained no attraction for men who were engaged in discovering manuscripts, learning to write correct Latin, acquiring Greek, and striving to penetrate the secret of antiquity. The very style of the schoolmen became a byword for ineptitude and barbarism. It required no little courage and a prestige as brilliant as Pico's to sustain the cause of Albertus Magnus or Johannes Scotus.[553] Scholars of the type of Poggio and Filelfo, Beccadelli and Poliziano, abhorred their ponderous metaphysics, as though they were grotesque chimeras generated by the indigestion of half-starved intellectual stomachs. Orpheus had reappeared. He bade the world thenceforward move to music and melodious rhythms both of thought and language. The barbarians might harbor Mercury within their hearts, to quote Pico's apology; they might display wisdom in unvarnished plainness; but what were these claims worth in an age that required the lips rather than the soul to be eloquent, and when a decorated fiction found more favor than a naked truth? No more decided antithesis than that of scholastic philosophy to the new classical ideal is conceivable.

[Footnote 553: _Epistolae Angeli Poliziani_, lib. ix. p. 269 (ed. Gryphius, 1533).]

Thus the first movement of the Revival implied an uncompromising abandonment of medieval thought as worse than worthless. If men educated by the humanistic method were to speculate, they would do so upon lines different from those suggested by the schoolmen. Cicero and Seneca became their models; and the rhetorical treatment of moral topics passed muster with them for philosophy. A garrulous colloquial skimming in fair Latin over the well-trodden ground of ethics supplanted the endeavor to think strictly upon difficult subjects. Much of this literature--the dialogues of Alberti, for example, and Landino's Camaldolese Disputations--can still be read with profit. But regarded from the point of view of systematic thought, it has slight importance. We value it principally for the light it casts upon contemporary manners and modes of opinion.

The study of Greek and Latin texts revealed a world to the Italians far wider than the regions where the medieval mind had moved in narrow limits. The immediate effect of this discovery was not, however, wholly salutary. The ancients began to exercise a kind of despotism; and a new authority, no less stringent than that of dogma, bound the scholars of the Revival beneath the tyranny of classical names. It was impossible for the intellect to free itself from fetters at a single leap. This second servitude seemed destined to be even more pernicious than the first; for as yet there was no criticism, and the superincumbent masses of antique literature, extending from the earliest dawn of Greek history to the latest commentators of Byzantium and Ravenna, underwent but little process of sifting. It was enough for the Italians of that epoch to assimilate. Nothing which bore the stamp of antiquity came amiss to their omnivorous appetite. Compilations from second or third sources were valued as equally precious with original texts. The testimony of hearsay reporters passed for conclusive evidence in matters of history. Masters in philosophy were confounded with expositors, who flourished at the distance of some centuries. Athens and Alexandria, Rome and Constantinople, were indiscriminately regarded as a single Holy Land of wisdom.

While this fermentation of assimilative erudition was still at its height, Gemistos Plethon preached his Neo-platonic mysticism at Florence; and the first attempt at a new philosophy for Western Europe, independent of the schoolmen, uninfluenced by orthodoxy, proceeded from the Medicean academy. The Platonism of Ficino and Pico, we now know, was of a very mixed and ill-determined quality. Uncontrolled by critical insight, and paralyzed by the prestige attaching to antiquity, the Florentine school produced little better than an unintelligent eclecticism. Their so-called philosophical writings were commonplace-books of citations, anthologies of ill-digested abstracts, in which Greek and Asiatic and Christian opinions issued in an incoherent theosophy. It must be reckoned a great misfortune for Italian thought that the Platonists were able to approach the masterpieces of their Attic teacher through a medium of Alexandrian and Byzantine enthusiasm. Had they been forced to attack the "Republic" without the intervention of Plotinus and Gemistos, they might have started on some fruitful line of speculation. They would at least have perceived that Plato's theology formed a background to his psychological, ethical, educational and political theories, instead of fastening upon those visionary systems which his later Greek expositors extracted from the least important portions of his works. At the same time, this Neo-platonic mysticism was only too sympathetic to the feebler pietism of the middle ages for men who had discovered it, to doubt its inspiration.

What was finally accomplished for sound scholarship by Ficino, lay in the direction, not of metaphysics or of history, but of translation. The enduring value of Pico's work is due, not to his Quixotic quest of an accord between Pagan, Hebrew and Christian traditions, but to the noble spirit of confidence and humane sympathy with all great movements of the mind, which penetrates it. If we cannot rate the positive achievements of the Florentines in philosophy at a high value, still the discussion of Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines which their investigations originated, caused the text of the Greek philosophers to be accurately examined for the first time in Western Europe. Their theories, though devoid of originality and clogged at every point with slavish reverence for classical authority, marked a momentous deviation from the traditional methods of medieval speculation.

Thus a vast and tolerably accurate acquaintance with the chief thinkers of antiquity, re-enforced by the translation of their principal works, was the main outcome of the Platonic revival at Florence. Uncritically, and with many a blundering divergence into the uncongenial provinces of Oriental thought, the Italian intellect appropriated Greek philosophy. A groundwork was laid down for the discussion of fundamental problems in the forms under which they had presented themselves to the ancient world. But while the Platonists were wrangling with the Aristotelians about the superiority of their respective masters; while the scholars were translating from the original languages; while the mystics were building castles in the air, composed of fragments from Neo-platonic and Neo-pythagorean systems, cementing them with the mortar of Christianity and adding quaint outbuildings of Cabbalistic and astrological delusions; the writers of ethical treatises pursued another line of inquiry, which was no less characteristic of the age and no less fruitful of results. During the middle ages thought of every kind had been concentrated on the world beyond this life. The question of how to live here was answered with reference to eternal interests solely. Human existence had no meaning except as the prelude to heaven or hell. But contact with antiquity introduced a new class of problems. Men began once more to ask themselves how they ought to live in this world, not with the view of avoiding misery and securing happiness in the next, but with the aim of making their terrestrial home most comfortable and their sojourn in it most effective for themselves and their companions. The discussion of the fundamental question how to live to best advantage, without regard for the next world and unbiased by the belief in a rigid scheme of salvation, occupies an important place in the philosophical essays of the time. Landino, for example, in his Camaldolese Disputations, raises the question whether the contemplative or the practical life offers superior attractions to a man desirous of perfecting self-culture. Alberti touches the same topic in his minor dialogues, while he subjects the organism of the Family in all its relations to a searching analysis in his most important essay.

Valla, in the famous dialogue _De Voluptate_, attacks the problem of conduct from another point of view.[554] Contrasting the Stoical with the Epicurean ideals, asceticism with hedonism, he asks which of the two fulfills the true end of human life. His treatise on Pleasure is, indeed, a disputation between renascent paganism, naturalism, and humanism on the one side, and the medieval scheme of ethics on the other. Man according to nature contends with man according to grace; the soul, obeying the desires of the flesh, defends her cause against the spirit, whose life is hid with a crucified Christ in God. Thus the two points of view between which the Renaissance wavered, are placed in powerful contrast; and nowhere has their antagonism been more ably stated. For the champion of hedonism Valla appropriately chose the poet Beccadelli, while he committed the defense of asceticism to Niccolo Niccoli. Though at the close of the argument he awarded the palm of victory to the latter,[555] it is clear that his sympathies lay with the former, and all the strength of his reasoning faculty is employed in the statement and support of Beccadelli's thesis. The first and far the longest part of the dialogue, where we detect a true note of sincerity, is a remorseless onslaught upon monasticism under the name of Stoicism, resulting in a no less uncompromising defense of physical appetite. Some of the utterances upon sexual morality are penetrated with the rancor of rebellion.[556] It is the revolt of the will against unnatural restrictions, the reassertion of natural liberty, emboldened by the study of classical literature, imbittered by long centuries of ecclesiastical oppression. Underlying the extravagances of an argument which owes its crudity and coarseness to the contradictions of the century, we find one central thought of permanent importance. Nature can do nothing wrong: and that must be wrong which violates nature.[557] It is man's duty, by interrogation of nature, to discover the laws of his own being and to obey those. In other words, Valla, though in no sense a man of science, proclaims the fundamental principle of science, and inaugurates a new criterion of ethics.

[Footnote 554: _Laurentius Valla: Opera omnia_, Basileae, 1465. The "De Voluptate" begins at p. 896 of this edition.]

[Footnote 555: "Uterque pro se de laudibus Voluptatis suavissime quidem quasi cantare visus est; sed Antonius hirundini, Nicolaus philomelae (quam lusciniam nominant) magis comparandus" (_ib._ lib. iii. p. 697).]

[Footnote 556: "Mea quidem sententia odiosus est si quis in moechos, si rerum naturam intueri volumus, invehat" (_ib._ lib. i. cap. 38). "Quisquis virgines sanctimoniales primus invenit, abominandum atque in ultimas terras exterminandum morem in civitatem induxisse.... Melius merentur scorta et postribula quam sanctimoniales virgines ac continentes" (_ib._ lib. i. cap. 43).]

[Footnote 557: "Quod natura finxit atque formavit id nisi sanctum laudabileque esse non posse" (_ib._ lib. i. cap. 9).]

Three main points may be discriminated in the intellectual movement briefly surveyed in the preceding paragraphs. The first is an abrupt breach with scholasticism. The whole method of philosophy has been changed, and the canon of authority has altered. The second is the acquisition of classical thought, and the endeavor, especially at Florence, among the Platonists to appropriate it and adapt it to Christianity. The third is the introduction of a new problem into philosophical discussion. How to make the best of human life, is substituted for the question how to insure salvation in the world beyond the grave. It will be observed that each of these three points implies departure from the prescribed ground of medieval speculation, which always moved within the limits of theology. Theology, except in the mysticism of the Platonists, except in occasional and perfunctory allusions of the rhetoricians, has no place in this medley of scholarship, citation, superstition, and frank handling of practical ideals.

While the Florentine Platonists were evolving an eclectic mysticism from the materials furnished by their Greek and Oriental studies; while the Ciceronian humanists were discussing the fundamental principles which underlie the various forms of human life; the universities of Lombardy continued their exposition of Aristotle upon the lines laid down by Thomistic and Averroistic schoolmen. Padua and Bologna extended the methods of the middle ages into the Renaissance. Their professors adhered to the formal definitions and distinctions of an earlier epoch, accumulating comment upon comment, and darkening the text of their originals with glosses. Yet the light shed by the Revival penetrated even to the lecture-rooms of men like Achillini. Humanism had established the principle of basing erudition on the study of authentic documents. The text of Aristotle in the Greek or in first-hand translations, had become the common property of theologians and philosophers. It was from these universities that the first dim light of veritable science was to issue. And here the part played by one man in the preparation of a new epoch for modern thought is so important that I may be allowed to introduce him with some prolixity of biographical details.[558]

[Footnote 558: For the following sketch of Pomponazzi's life, and for help in the study of his philosophy, I am indebted to Francesco Fiorentino's _Pietro Pomponazzi_, Firenze, Lemonnier, 1868, 1 vol. I may here take occasion to mention a work by the same author, _Bernardino Telesio_, _ibid._ 1872, 2 vols. Together, these two books form an important contribution to the history of Italian philosophy.]

Pietro Pomponazzi was born of noble lineage at Mantua in 1462. He completed his studies at Padua, where he graduated in 1487 as laureate of medicine. It may be remarked incidentally that teachers of philosophy at this era held the degree of physicians. This point is not unimportant, since it fixes our attention on the fact that philosophy, as distinguished from theology, had not yet won a recognized position. Logic formed a separate part of the educational curriculum. Rhetoric was classed with humanistic literature. Philosophy counted as a branch of Physics. At Florence, in the schools of the Platonists, metaphysical inquiries assumed a certain hue of mysticism. At Padua and Bologna, in the schools of the physicians, they assimilated something of materialism. During the middle ages they had always flourished in connection with theology. But that association had been broken; and as yet a proper place had not been assigned to the science of the human mind. A new department of knowledge was in process of formation, distinct from theology, distinct from physics, distinct from literature. But at the epoch of which we are now treating, it had not been correctly marked off from either of these provinces, and in the schools of Lombardy it was confounded with physical science.

In 1488 Pomponazzi, soon after taking his degree as a physician, was appointed Professor Extraordinary of Philosophy at Padua. He taught in concurrence with the veteran Achillini, who was celebrated for his old-world erudition and his leaning toward the doctrines of Averroes. Pomponazzi signalized his _debut_ in the professorial career, by adopting a new method of instruction. Less distinguished for learning than acuteness, he confined himself to brilliant elucidations of his author's text. For glosses, citations and hair-splitting distinctions, he substituted lucid and precise analysis. It is probable that he was a poor Greek scholar. Paolo Giovio goes so far, indeed, as to assert that, of the two classical languages, he only knew Latin; nor is there anything in his own writings to demonstrate that he had studied Greek philosophy in the original. But he proved himself a child of the new era by his style of exposition, no less than by a strict adherence to Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Greek commentator of Aristotle. What that divergence from the system of his rival, Achillini, who still adhered to the commentaries of Averroes, implied, I shall endeavor to make clear in the sequel. For the present, we must follow his career as a professor. Before the year 1495 he had been appointed to the ordinary chair of Natural Philosophy at Padua; and there he resided until 1509, when the schools of Padua were closed. He spent this period chiefly in lecturing on Aristotle's Physics, for the sake presumably of the medical students who crowded that university. Forced by circumstances to leave Padua, Pomponazzi found a home in Ferrara, where he began to expound Aristotle's treatise _De Anima_. Unlike Padua, the University of Ferrara had a literary bias; and we may therefore conclude that Pomponazzi availed himself of this first favorable opportunity to pursue the studies in Aristotelian psychology for which he had a decided personal preference. In 1512 he was invited to Bologna, where he remained until his death, in the capacity of Professor of Natural and Moral Philosophy. His stipend, increased gradually through a series of engagements, varied from a little over 200 to 600 golden ducats. Bologna, like Ferrara, was not distinguished for its school of medicine. Consequently, we find that from the date of his first settlement in that city, Pomponazzi devoted himself to psychological and ethical investigations. All the books on which his fame are founded were written at Bologna. In the autumn of 1516 he published his treatise _De Immortalitate Animae_. It was dedicated to Marcantonio Flavio Contarini; and, finding its way to Venice, it was immediately burned in public because of its heretical opinions. A long and fierce controversy followed this first publication. Contarini, Agostino Nifo, Ambrogio Fiandino, and Bartolommeo di Spina issued treatises, in which they strove to combat the Aristotelian materialism of Pomponazzi with arguments based on Thomistic theology or Averroistic mysticism. He replied with an _Apologia_ and a _Defensorium_, avowing his submission to the Church in all matters of faith, but stubbornly upholding a philosophical disagreement with the doctrine of the immortality of the human soul. During this discussion Pomponazzi ran some risk of being held accountable for his opinions. The friars and preachers of all colors were loud in their denunciations; and it is said that Bembo's intercession with Pope Leo in behalf of his old master was needed to secure Pomponazzi from ecclesiastical procedure. During the last years of his life the professor of Bologna completed two important treatises, _De Incantationibus_ and _De Fato_. They were finished in 1520 but not published until after his death, when they appeared in the Basle edition of his collected works. He died in 1525, and was buried at Mantua. Pomponazzi had been thrice married. He left behind him an unsullied reputation for virtuous conduct and sweet temper. He was, physically, a little man, and owed to this circumstance the _sobriquet_ of _Peretto_. We gain a glimpse of him in one of Bandello's novels. But, with this exception, the man is undiscernible through the mists of three intervening centuries. With the author the case is different. In his books Pomponazzi presents a powerful and unmistakable personality. What remains to be said about him and his influence over Italian thought must be derived from an examination of the three treatises already mentioned.