THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND AND ITALY
The contribution of England to the history of the world during the
seventeenth century is so considerable that the very attempt to sketch
it is almost an impertinence. It cannot be reduced into schematic
lines, for there never was a richer synthesis of life. Never have
religion, art, and philosophy pervaded the whole life of a people as
they did in England at the end of the sixteenth and during all the
seventeenth century. Very highly refined periods do not produce great
arts and it must be said that with very few exceptions the creative
generations are bound to be rather trivial. Strong minds, deep
religious feelings, the virile consciousness of personal efficiency,
do not make for tolerance and refinement in practical life; but they
yield a philosophical, an artistic, a political harvest on which their
progeny continue to live for centuries, elaborating and refining
until tolerance is the order of the day in philosophical, religious
and political matters, whilst dilettantism and criticism flourish,
preparing the way for new generations of creative men.
The philosophy of Bacon was essentially oriented towards the world
exterior to man, but it had already taken to consider moral and
especially political life in the light of natural causes. The
divine origin of the king’s majesty was in due time to be denied in
consequence of such a view, although Bacon little suspected the fact
and was ready to uphold such divine origin with all the force of his
genius. Another consequence was to be the consideration of human
society ruled by the same laws that rule the mechanism of nature, and
this was certainly pregnant with political revolutions. The systematic
empiricism so characteristic of English politics need not be traced
farther back. Yet before coming to the political conception of Hobbes,
who was the first great follower of Bacon and one of the first great
political thinkers of England, the contribution of Grotius must be
considered as Hobbes has a good deal in common with him.
Hugo Grotius was born 1583, twenty-two years after Bacon and five
years before Hobbes. Like Bacon this Dutchman was a statesman and an
ambassador. The practice of business had therefore a great influence
on his ideas and was apt to temper the excess of doctrine of the man.
His idea of natural law is a heritage both of Pagan times and of
Scholasticism, and based both on the distinction established by the
Roman jurists, between the _jus civile_ and _jus naturale_, and on the
mediæval notion of _sociability_, a special sense of which he supposes
man to be endowed by Nature. The way such a notion is applied is, on
the contrary, due to the more modern theory of Nature; and there we
meet with an assertion that would have roused Machiavelli from his
grave if he had heard it, and that undoubtedly has given origin to the
negative understanding of history against which Idealism and Fascism
are reacting with all their forces.
According to Grotius such _jus naturale_—the only branch of legal
studies that can be treated is philosophy—is based on the essence of
the nature of men. But such nature is the same all over the world
just as Nature is. It will be the same for ever in spite of historical
oscillations just as Nature will. The presupposition of this nature
of man, postulated out of and against every experience, is a negation
of history as the process of the gradual development of mankind. Yet
unquestionably its introduction in modern politics was the cause of a
great progress towards justice, and in Grotius himself it is balanced
by his insistence on not taking positive law out of history. The
lack of good metaphysical ground brought him to the postulation of
an unhistorical reality whilst the recent improvement of historical
researches at the hands of Jean Bodin and others induced him not to
consider positive laws except in the light of history. To be fair, this
instinct of society deeply inset in the nature of man was not of his
own invention. It is to be found in Aristotle. It is to be found in
St. Thomas. But then the instinct compelling man to live in community
is understood in a very different way by the Greek philosopher, by
the great Scholastic doctor and by the Dutch statesman. For if it is
true that historical facts which are political, artistic, military,
receive their definite character from the ideas of the generation
that achieved them, it is equally true that the meaning attached to
traditional ideas by any one man is to a certain extent modified by the
whole life of his generation. So that Aristotle understands by Nature
the transcendental power which planned the life of man as a part of its
universal scheme; Thomas Aquinas sees in the nature of man that which
was determined as characteristic of mankind by the Divine will; whilst
Grotius sees in this sense of society something very much like the law
of gravitation—not quite, however, since in him we see looming out
already the ghost of man anterior to society, of whom nobody ever heard
anything and which is, therefore, a pure conjecture. Considering this
nature of mankind as his basis, it was inevitable that Grotius should
think the best constitution of the state to be one the origin of which
made it more likely to meet the requirements of such nature. Once the
filiation of law as the product of this nature of man was established,
private and public law obviously derived from the _jus naturale_, and
the state must originate from an agreement of its components.
If Grotius had been able to realise theoretically the immanence of
the _jus naturale_ in society he would have foreshadowed all the
political theories of the eighteenth century, and worked out his scheme
with far more cogency than the men who came after him. As it is, the
rationality immanent to human society is too difficult for him and his
time, and unable to realise the moral will of the collectivity he is
thrown back with Machiavelli on a very empirical notion of liberty.
The subjectivism of Grotius is the subjectivism of the philosophy of
his time alternatively empirical and rational, so that the contract by
which men give themselves a form of government is irrevocable: they
are free to assume it, not to reject it. Obviously the souvenir of the
Reformation with its political struggles must have been quite fresh in
the mind of his contemporaries and influenced him, as the Revolution
of England was to influence Hobbes; otherwise it would be difficult to
understand how men could be considered as free to choose a constitution
and not to discard it. The contradiction was too patent not to be
noticed, but there again the philosophy of Bacon and his followers
influenced too much the thought of the whole century to allow any
resolution of the difficult problem. It was the nature of man that led
mankind to form communities, and the mechanicalness of this conception
was so much a consequence of the mechanism of the philosophy of the
time that once such communities had come to a contract entrusting their
government to one man or a body of men, the government itself was
conceived of as mechanical as Nature, and its laws as irrevocable as
natural law. The contradiction inherent in the twofold notion of man’s
nature, held by men like Grotius, led them to deny the liberty of man
which was the ground of their theory.
Hobbes has a metaphysic so clear, so well determined, that his
political conception is bound to have that cogency which belongs
exclusively to the works of men whose philosophical grounds are
theoretically first rate. That Cromwell should have offered him a high
office in his government is not surprising. Obviously the mind and
character of Hobbes are for prompt decisions and coherency of action.
Yet his political theories are not fit for actual application. It is
not impossible that his ideas should have influenced the political
men of his days; but his _Leviathan_ is the conception of a man to
whom philosophy was _doctrina corporum_. Bodies can be natural or
artificial, and the state is the most important of all the artificial
bodies, man being both a natural body, the most perfect natural body,
and an element of the state, the most perfect of all artificial bodies.
Psychology is bound to occupy the foreground in his anthropology,
and no philosopher ever laid a greater emphasis on the distinction
between theory and practice. Thought is considered after the Cartesian
doctrine as relatively free, and will as dependent upon thought; the
superiority of the former is acknowledged indeed by all the thinkers of
the time and of the following century. In psychology the consequence
of this distinction is a conception of the volitive activity that
foreshadows the more modern theories of determinism, against which
all idealisms have fought their most strenuous battles and Fascism is
actually leading a political crusade. For Hobbes asserts the necessity
of surpassing the state of Nature, in which all men are free, by the
sacrifice of some liberties and by the sacred preservation of the
engagements of the contract. But on what ground can he require such
sacrifice and faithfulness, except that of self-preservation? Thus
selfishness is at the basis of the edifice and there looms already the
capital sin of the more modern conception of Liberalism. The state is
conceived as the algebraical sum of the citizens, the selfishness of
whose life is guaranteed by the legislature.
But Hobbes was English and, despite the influence of French
Rationalism, his logic was not so imperious as to prevent his views on
actual life from taking the upper hand in some important parts of his
system. Such an artificial agglomeration of political atoms, understood
as it was to be the most realistic and naturalistic view of political
life, could not have stood the test of application; and Hobbes is
carried away by his own notion of the contract into a theoretical view
of it which is distinctly superior in moral truth, and much nearer to
historical truth. When men come to an agreement for the defence of the
peaceful life of each of them the state comes into being; but it is not
a temporary, mechanical agglomeration—it is unity wanted by men. In his
natural state man enjoys some kind of security based on the _concordia
multorum_, but this concord is not sufficient to ensure peace, it is
merely enough for animals. To ensure human peace something more than
common consent is needed.
Union, the union of citizens becomes something superior to the sum of
their particular selfishnesses. Hobbes realises that such union is
a living reality and even if he does not work out the way by which
the notion of the state as a person can be reached, he none the
less joins hands with all political idealism. In the middle of the
seventeenth century he had an intuition of the conception upon which
the Nationalism of all countries was to live and act; whilst Hegel
was to work it out in an abstract theory and Italian Idealism to
make it a reality by its good fortune in having met with a political
movement able to realise this most historical of all the philosophical
conceptions of the state. Hobbes had had enough political experience to
realise intuitively that which his natural mechanism did not allow him
to conceive on theoretical grounds.
Such a happy intuition does not, however, take him any farther.
His state has nothing of a moral reality, and the union of the
citizens which it implies falls back on the ground of the law of
self-preservation. The fact is that the state so conceived by Hobbes
was an abstraction despite the happy intuition of the oneness of will
implied in the contract; and his natural man another abstraction not
to be met with anywhere. The identification of man and state only
happens in history and there it was to remain, unlooked for in England
until Hume, whilst in Italy Vico was to herald the reality of society
and history as the creation of man between 1720 and 1730. Thus, like
Grotius, Hobbes ended by denying the freedom of will that the very
possibility of the contract had implied. His ideal state, his empirical
state, his natural state, are so conceived that they continually oppose
each other or are identified one with the other in his theory.
The state is therein as mysterious as Nature, and its laws are no
less imperious than the laws of Nature, calling as they do merely for
passive obedience, and at least in Hobbes’ theory the state is no less
eternal than Nature, for after the contract the less the citizens have
to say in the matter the better. Yet Hobbes was an Englishman and the
fact was to tell; even in this most abstract theory he cannot lose
sight of the realm of experience. And if the ruler was a bad one? Like
all his countrymen the father of the _Leviathan_ is ready to trip up
his logic rather than to offer a scheme which after all might not
work. If the ruler proved an inefficient or bad one the citizens could
discard him.
In his opposition to the kingdom by the grace of God the father of the
_Leviathan_ is led by his methodical Naturalism—and not at all by a
repugnance for any form of tyranny. The social contract is a purely
human affair and nothing could be so ridiculous as the grounding of
so human a reality as the authority of the state upon an act of the
grace of God. But the more absolute is this authority the better; and
his indifference as to the choice of the state-religion did not make
for tolerance. Not to think of Cromwell when one studies Hobbes is
impossible; for the philosopher in front of Nature, his almighty though
mechanical Nature, is just a fanatic observer as intolerant as Cromwell
and as energetic in the systematic application of his philosophical
faith. Only men of faith can alter the historical world, for religion
remains one of the greatest factors in men’s life, although it does
not always appear under the cloak of a definite church. In such cases,
however, it is often apt to be more intolerant and certainly more
dangerous—as all abstract dogmas are bound to be—than those which have
through their historical organisation received some kind of adaptation
to the society in which they flourish. Cromwell was intolerant, was a
fanatic, but no more and even perhaps less essentially so than Hobbes,
and both are a perfect embodiment of the genius of England during the
first half of the seventeenth century. Never has the life of a country
expressed itself more fittingly in its theoretical and practical term.
Hobbes like a bee had gathered after Bacon the best of Italy, and the
echo of Campanella is to be detected in the most characteristic part
of his theory of knowledge; he had, besides, imported the result of
the most recent scientific works of the French and Dutch thinkers.
England could prepare on his intellectual contribution to put forth the
genius of Locke just as it could on the assumption to political life of
new elements make ready for the organisation of the state that under
William of Orange was to arouse the envy of the world.
The two fanatics, one in the immediateness of his faith in the
righteousness of God, the other in the elaboration of his faith in
Nature, had done a great deal in the way of shaping the character
of modern England, and the theory of one and the revelation of the
other held in germ much that meant progress for the whole of mankind.
But both by their superlative intolerance and despotism called for
the reaction that was to oppose most formally man to the state. For
Hobbes at least the fact was inevitable, his _Leviathan_ engulfs all
rights and interests; at the same time in his theory of knowledge
he picks up the trend of Campanella and sets the basis for a nearly
Protagorean subjectivism. How far the theory of the _Leviathan_ was
from Italian mentality cannot be judged from contemporary opinion.
The Italians, or at least the greatest number of Italy’s scholars,
were giving themselves up to academical or to immoral pastimes. The
Cinquecento had been personified by Ariosto, Machiavelli, Aretino, the
three expressions of the Italian society during the sixteenth century.
The characteristics of the times had been an artistic fancy, full of
serenity, aware of its being a mere play of imagination and making fun
of itself; an adult thought that swept away the illusions of fancy
and feeling, to make its own way towards the shrine of science, at
the very core of what is the world of Man and Nature; then a moral
licentiousness, remorseless because unconscious, therefore shameless
and cynical. Ariosto’s fancy is displayed to such an extent that it
mostly aroused mere irony from his contemporaries. Machiavelli brings
realism and logic to their ultimate consequence, arousing thereby
a sense of repulsion in men far more wicked than he was. Aretino’s
cynicism reaches such a monstrous pitch that the most dissolute men
turn away sickly from his books.
That was the era in which the great nations of Europe were taking
their definitive personal physiognomy. (England, as has been said,
had already the features that were going to be the family likeness
to be reproduced all over the Anglo-Saxon world by her sons.) As De
Sanctis points out, the European races were building up the “Patria”
so fondly dreamed by Machiavelli for his own people, a “Patria” which
was to be a political unity, fortified and cemented by religious,
moral, and cultural elements. At this same time Italy not only failed
to build up a “Patria,” but was losing her independence, her liberty,
and her beloved and treasured pre-eminence in the historical world.
Not that such a catastrophe was realised except by the keen mind of
Machiavelli. It was unconscious, it was bound to be unconscious, since
it happened just because national consciousness had vanished. How
could it have assumed national shape? The name of Italy was to become
a geographical expression, for its inhabitants were not citizens,
they were mere inhabitants, subjects by natural determination of this
or that petty Prince. The geographical name of a region becomes the
name of a nation through the very long or extremely short process of
formation of national consciousness that permits of all its inhabitants
coming on the historical stage of the world as a person, through
the manifestation of a personal will in foreign politics, which are
the country’s assertion as a personal conscience. Thus a people is
acknowledged as a nation by the rest of the world the moment when,
through an action, the final scope of which is purely national, it
asserts itself as a living organism able to manifest a will and act
upon it. What Machiavelli had termed the _corruttela_ of Italy was the
absence of national and religious consciousness, and he had pointed a
way out of it.
He was too much of a positive mind not to realise that the difference
between past and modern times was due to a spiritual difference.
Not knowing what to attack in the mentality of his countrymen, both
clever and learned beyond words, he thought that the only great
difference between ancient Rome and the Italy of the Cinquecento were
the political institutions which of old had been based on a religion
that pervaded the whole of civic life, and now were quite a practical
affair modified continually by the chance of other countries waging
war in Italy. His great blunder, the notion he had that the Roman
state-religion of Pagan times would be the one chance of salvation for
his own time is to be considered with due allowance for the ignorance
of the sixteenth century as to the real import of the notion of
progress. Machiavelli pronounced human things to be always in movement,
but in spite of this intuition he could not detect the processional
character of such movement. As it was, it was sufficient to induce
him to reject the notion of the natural state of Man as a constant so
dear to Grotius. Yet it could not help him to realise that his own
times, with all their wickedness, might be thought superior to Roman
times; and Guicciardini, a friend of his, felt himself much wiser than
Machiavelli because he had no illusion on the possibility of making
a nation out of his countrymen. It was absurd to him, to be always
calling on the Romans for example, it was just like wanting a donkey
to gallop horsewise! But whatever the wisdom of Guicciardini, who
made his God of his own private peace and well-being, a God no less
exacting than the State of Machiavelli, and considered the world as
his world, thereby enforcing to irrelativism the subjective atomism
that was disintegrating Italy, Machiavelli was a wonder child of genius
whilst his wise friend was merely a clever gentleman making egotism the
special study of his life.
Mussolini’s view on the civic regeneration of the Italian politically
amorphous classes is very much like Machiavelli’s. Political
indifference is also to him a result of the lack of religiousness in
the spirit animating Italians in their public life. But four hundred
years have passed and he could not if he wished turn to the state
religion of Pagan Rome. If the basis of social life has to be religion,
the positive religion has to be the one historically belonging to the
people.
In spite of the Machiavellian conception of history, the sixteenth
century was to see the introduction of the experimental method, as
practised in natural science, in the treatment of history at the hands
of no less a man than Guicciardini. His _Storia d’Italia_ is in twenty
books and covers the period between 1494 and 1534, thus beginning
with the invasion of Charles VIII of France and ending with the fall
of Florence. Francesco de Sanctis, with the heart of a man of the
Risorgimento, commenting upon this work, so remarkable from many points
of view, says that the historical period of which it treats could
rightly have been called “The Tragedy of Italy,” but that the historian
has not the slightest notion either of the unity or of the import of
this tragic drama. One could object to the great critic that to realise
such oneness of drama was impossible to Guicciardini, as the tragedy
had its root in the historian’s unconsciousness of this oneness or
rather of the possibility of this oneness, since such oneness did not
exist in Italy when Guicciardini wrote, except perhaps in the heart of
his friend Machiavelli. People of other countries provided them with
the political events and the philosophical theories that kept their
brains going.
The works of Grotius were taken and easily studied in the land of
jurisprudence, for the studies that went on flourishing were law
and history. But the purpose was a sterile erudition, at least at
the moment, for apathy had reached such a superlative degree that
the martyrdom of men like Bruno and Socino passed unheeded—worse
than unheeded, not understood—so that it is absurd to hear modern
Free-thinkers reproach the Church with the death of Bruno, who was far
from questioning the right of the Church to burn him. The Church in its
practical policy, like all the institutions in Italy, was lacking in
ideas and in life. The centre of civilisation had moved northward, and
south of the Alps people were getting more and more away from it, more
and more effeminate. In a land where indifference was the shroud of a
martyr, Churchmen who knew Bruno for the heretic he truly was could
not be expected to realise that apart from his heresy he had given the
world an idea that would enable modern thought to realise the part
played by religion in man’s life and to reject the very idea which
had severed man from authority. The seventeenth century, inaugurated
in Italy by the burning of Bruno, had in literature little to boast
of besides the _Jerusalemme liberata_ of Tasso, for it began with the
_Arcadia_ of Sannazaro and ended with the _Arcadia_ of Guarini. On
the other hand Campanella, the most eminent philosopher, was not the
only one. Although the philosophers became less and less original they
maintained a sufficient theoretical interest to accept all that France
and England were throwing on the world.
Perhaps nothing is more expressive of the life of the mind than
this temporary intellectual dearth and sterility of a race whose
faculties were, even then, far above the average. Reduced to political
non-existence and therefore to speculative unproductiveness, the whole
country seemed to have gone to pieces just on purpose to let the new
nations shake off the yoke of history, of a history too heavy with
its pagan heritance to allow full play to the new forces of modern,
that is to say Christian, civilisation. For modern thought and modern
politics seemed to reject authority and history, in order to have the
possibility of displaying what they held virtually in their mediæval
and Christian youth. They rid themselves of the past just as the
Church had done at her start, throwing overboard Pagan culture. But
is it not allowable to think that just as the Church ceased to be
anti-philosophical as soon as it had asserted its original intuition,
modern nations will cease to be anti-historic now that the value of
man as a man has been asserted, and has even been over-asserted? For
if such were the case then Italy’s standing out of the game, in order
to elaborate slowly the historical forces that may contribute to give
back to the world the ballast it seems to have lost, would appear to
be in harmony with the developing process of Mind. Nations have their
dawn, their twilight, and their night, but Mind never rests or sleeps,
and through their individual characteristics all the races tell more
or less directly on the whole life of mankind. If Italy had to stand
aside to let England and France assert the individual worth of the
most inferior human beings, and work up systems where the weakest may
be heard in legal circles, then her attitude all through the sixteenth
century is that of a boxer training for his next match. To rid politics
and law of the idea that legitimised all authority by appeal to the
Will of God (as it was commonly understood to be a kind of _Deux ex
Machina_) something had to be appealed to that could be considered as a
religious support on the modern side. Nature was upheld as antagonistic
to superior authority and religious interference. Yet Nature, at least
to the men of the seventeenth century, was the work of God, and if
mankind was endowed with a longing, or beset with a necessity for
society, surely the Creator of mankind was responsible for it. The fact
is that it was not of the will of God that the jurists and philosophers
wanted to be rid, for they could have found cogent arguments to uphold
the thesis, so dear a century later to Rousseau, that God had created
man free, and that he was therefore at liberty to choose the political
constitution that suited him best—conforming by so doing to the Will
of God: it was the authority of men, the authority of tradition, which
taught that it had always been the natural lot of some men to obey,
and the natural lot of others to command; and that is far more Pagan
in its political origin and Aristotelian in its theoretical form than
Catholic. It was the hierarchy of birth, quite a Pagan notion, that
men were fighting against in Northern Europe during the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.
Aristotle’s first book on politics settles the point for the hellenic
world. Some men are born to be masters; some are born to be slaves. He
that is to be a master is born with the qualities that befit command;
he that is to be a slave is born with the qualities required to fulfil
orders. Were it not so, Nature would have failed to fit each of them
for the end to which it brought them into life. Man was what he was to
be anterior to his birth. As to slavery, as an institution it was to be
deplored; it was rather sad for the people who were born slaves, and
terribly immoral at best, but it was an evil that could not be avoided
inasmuch as it was essential to the nature of society. The metaphysics
and religion of the day could not conceive of any alteration in the
nature of things.
The Stoics and Epicureans did improve, but not much, the idea of
liberty. The best thing for men to do was to know Nature and their
own natural disposition, not to go against the natural bent of things
and of their constitution. Thus the part of Fate was reduced and the
dignity of man asserted. But the reduction and assertion would have
been more verbal than actual had it not been for the Romans, who with
their realistic mind could not overlook the fact that man’s _virtus_,
or lack of it, made a lot of difference in his life. Their religion
and philosophy though lacked originality and had no adequate notion of
liberty.
Christianity was to relieve mankind from such a fate. Man is in the
world to save his soul. The grace of God is necessary to him, but he
only can achieve his own salvation. If you want your horse to jump,
as the sportsmen of the old school used to say, give him his head;
the freedom to use his neck, head and shoulder to the best of his
ability. If God means man to save his soul, he must have given him
sufficient freedom to be made responsible. And in fact the proclamation
of this power of man is the import of the New Testament. Everything
is possible to him that believeth. This is far from Aristotle, so
far that men could not at first realise what it meant, and that the
abolition of slavery is only recent is sufficient to show the slowness
of the process through which the good word of the Gospel has reached
theoretical consciousness and practical realisation.
Man’s liberty, man’s dignity, were asserted all through the Scholastic
period and the prayer of Thomas Aquinas thanking God for the dignity He
had bestowed upon man is a good proof of the fact. It could, therefore,
only be through the greatest misrepresentation of historical facts
that Pagan times were identified with the cause of liberty and equality
of men, two ideas that are essentially Christian and were in their
present form unknown to Paganism. Such perversion of facts cannot be,
however, ascribed to a wilful adulteration of history. The men who
upheld it are too many and some are too obviously sincere. Yet on the
other hand it is impossible to ascribe it to an instinctive foreboding
of immanence as nowadays understood. The only possible explanation is
the force of repulsion for the immediate past that is inherent in the
historical assertion of any new social force. A new age always asserts
itself by fighting its antecedents and often the very cause of its
coming to light.
Hobbes, rejecting sovereignty by the grace of God to enforce his own
conception of the sovereignty of his _Leviathan_ grounded on the
_Bellum omnium contra omnes_, is merely conforming to the philosophy of
Nature, which, as materialism, was to him a religion, a new religion
that must take the place of the old one, at least amongst educated men.
In its objectivity Nature stood to him as God; an awful divinity that
had a good deal in common with the God of Calvin in the inalterability
of its will. But few of the new thinkers had the courage to be as
coherent as he was. For he was quite aware that the substitution of
Nature for the God of Christianity, as the ultimate reality to which
political forms had to be traced back, made for a greater implacability
of political laws. The others sometimes pretended to believe and mostly
did believe that the unknown _quidditas_ which they call human nature
had a luminous social instinct that had been marred through what they
called the Dark Ages; and they did not realise that the belief in such
nature of man was elaborated in the schools of the Middle Ages, and
that if it was taken for granted as much as the geometrical postulate
that makes the three inner angles of a triangle equivalent to two
right angles, it was just as abstract and could no more be proved on
experimental ground. The nature of man taken as implying the necessity
of or longing for social arrangements is illustrated in history; but it
is the essence of history to relate to men the deeds of men, thereby
is enforced the necessity of having society in order to have history.
So that isolated man cannot enter history. Of men anterior to society
we can, therefore, know nothing. But prehistoric times are not of
necessity presocial; indeed, the art that flourished in such periods
shows the existence of social intercourse in times of which we have, up
to now, no historical knowledge. In any case the philosophy of politics
if it wants to borrow the experimental method of natural science must
take history for its basis, with all the limitations that this implies,
in order to reach positive conclusions. The political thinkers of the
seventeenth century thought and acted as men of deep convictions, but
of very faulty methods; the world they cast into shape reposed on an
assumption which is the most metaphysic of all the metaphysic axioms
they hated so much; it will be more and more obvious through the
eighteenth century.
Italy stood aside. Italian minds could not have made such a position
theirs. The attitude of a Bacon, of a Descartes, of a Hobbes, could
not be assumed in the land of Machiavelli and Bruno, the fathers of
the idea of history understood as a constructive process of Science
and Society, of Campanella, the man who foreshadowed in the sixteenth
century the phenomenologic conception of reality and the notion of
immanence: which may have been, which was in fact heretic, but is
undoubtedly the offspring of Christianity, and knows that it is.
The race whose energy and virility had been maimed by the constant
contemplation of the past, by thorough identification with the past,
had been politically stunned like the people of the Bible who turned
back when they should have been looking and proceeding forward. Italian
scholars kept assimilating and admiring the philosophical production of
foreigners, and the more readily praised and the more truly appreciated
the new theories that they felt farther from imitating them. What they
could give they gave, in legal and historical erudition, preparing the
materials on which Vico was to build his imposing Scienza Nuova and
preparing the historical ground for the philosophy that flourishes two
centuries after him, just as Scholasticism had prepared the abstract
ground on which the theories, that were to give their democratic or
individualistic impulsion to the modern world, flourished two centuries
after a reaction had started against the abstractness of Scholasticism.
Francesco de Sanctis realises it because he has lived for this oneness
of Italy, thereby giving it the full reality of an historical person.
Guicciardini was as interested in the calamities that befell the
individuals as de Sanctis was in the tragedy of his country, and if he
filled twenty books with the matter of two good books it was because
Italy’s genius had lost for the time being its synthetic power. He was
an accurate man, with immense knowledge and great acuteness of mind
taking each fact in its most minute particularity, but losing sight of
the importance of such events as the Reformation. He was a naturalist
and uses the same methods as if he studied vegetables or minerals,
looking into the intimate structure of facts to find out why they are
as they are. Men therefore appear in his work like a product of Nature,
whose actions are as fatally determined as those of an animal. It is
impossible, therefore, to find in Guicciardini’s twenty books a single
page alive with the feelings that throb in Machiavelli’s historical
works; he keeps the calm brow of the naturalist counting the legs of an
insect. And Italy, until Vico comes, will go on between these two ideas
of history and society.
Guicciardini sees man free in appearance, but in reality bound to act
according to the determinations of his character, of his temperament,
of his circumstances; and the wise historian can very nearly make out
beforehand that what he shall do with the same approximate certainty
with which the naturalist can tell the way the swallows will take when
the wind and atmospheric pressure are known.
Machiavelli foreshadows a kind of sociology and in his truly Italian
synthetic view of history he sees the play of the various forces,
spiritual forces, that make of the human world a different realm of
reality from that of nature, where forces exclusively physical are
at play. “Patria,” liberty, nationality, humanity, social classes,
interests and passions, are to him forces that move man, but would
never move a plant or a tree.
But the fact is, to quote again De Sanctis, that Machiavelli is the
starting point of a period and Guicciardini is the ultimate end of the
preceding age.
France, Spain, England, Germany and the Netherland, were overrun with
blood, shed either through the War of Religion or in consequence of
the Inquisition, in the proceedings of which the governments of the
different states interfered to further their political interests though
seldom on the side of mercy. In Italy there was no struggle; men do not
face death or torture without passionate convictions; and while other
races, young as they were, had such strong convictions the country
which had reaped too easy and too rich a harvest between the eleventh
and fifteenth centuries, had given all that her assimilation of ancient
wisdom could give, and at the end of her career she sat exhausted on
the wayside to watch the young ones at play, as a connoisseur watches
a boxing-match and takes all the hints which may be useful to him.
Metaphysics could not flourish under such circumstances, as virility is
the first requisite for original thinking, so Italian scholars stood on
the watch taking law and thought from abroad.