.

IV.

At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth
centuries, philosophy took a new point of departure among the Italians,
and all the fundamental ideas which have since formed the staple of
modern European systems were anticipated by a few obscure thinkers. It
is noticeable that the States of Naples, hitherto comparatively inert
in the intellectual development of Italy, furnished the five writers
who preceded Bacon, Leibnitz, Schelling, and Comte. Telesio of Cosenza,
Bruno of Nola, Campanella of Stilo, Vanini and Vico of Naples are the
chief among these _novi homines_ or pioneers of modern thought. The
characteristic point of this new philosophy was an unconditional return
to Nature as the source of knowledge, combined with a belief in the
intuitive forces of the human reason: so that from the first it showed
two sides or faces to the world--the one positive, scientific,
critical, and analytical; the other mystical, metaphysical, subjective.
Modern materialism and modern idealism were both contained in the
audacious guesses of Bruno and Campanella; nor had the time arrived for
clearly separating the two strains of thought, or for attempting a
systematic synthesis of knowledge under one or the other head.

The men who led this weighty intellectual movement burned with the
passionate ardour of discoverers, the fiery enthusiasm of confessors.
They stood alone, sustained but little by intercourse among themselves,
and wholly misunderstood by the people round them. Italy, sunk in
sloth, priest-ridden, tyrant-ridden, exhausted with the unparalleled
activity of the Renaissance, besotted with the vices of slavery and
slow corruption, had no ears for spirit-thrilling prophecy. The Church,
terrified by the Reformation, when she chanced to hear those strange
voices sounding through 'the blessed mutter of the mass,' burned the
prophets. The State, represented by absolute Spain, if it listened to
them at all, flung them into prison. To both Church and State there was
peril in the new philosophy; for the new philosophy was the first
birth-cry of the modern genius, with all the crudity and clearness, the
brutality and uncompromising sincerity of youth. The Church feared
Nature. The State feared the People. Nature and the People--those
watchwords of modern Science and modern Liberty--were already on the
lips of the philosophers.

It was a philosophy armed, errant, exiled; a philosophy in chains and
solitar