out the century. Complete Pyrrhonism
under a thin veil of lip-conformity, was preached by Peter Pomponazzi,
[Sidenote: Pomponazzi,1462-1325] professor of philosophy at Padua,
Ferrara and Bologna. His _De immortalitate animi_ [Sidenote: 1516]
caused a storm by its plain conclusion that the soul perished with the
body. He tried to make the distinction in his favor that a thing might
be true in religion and false in philosophy. Thus he denied his belief
in demons and spirits as a philosopher, while affirming that he
believed in them as a Christian. He was in fact a materialist. He
placed Christianity, Mohammedanism and Judaism on the same level,
broadly hinting that all were impostures.

Public opinion became so interested in the subject of immortality at
this time that when another philosopher, Simon Porzio, tried to lecture
on meteorology at Pisa, his audience interrupted him with cries, "Quid
de anima?" He, also, maintained that the soul of man {628} was like
that of the beasts. But he had few followers who dared to express such
an opinion. After the Inquisition had shown its teeth, the life of the
Italian nation was like that of its great poet, Tasso, whose youth was
spent at the feet of the Jesuits and whose manhood was haunted by fears
of having unwittingly done something that might be punished by the
stake. It was to counteract the pagan opinion, stated to be rapidly
growing, that the Vatican Council forbade all clerics to lecture on the
classics for five years. But in vain! A report of Paul III's
cardinals charged professors of philosophy with teaching impiety.
Indeed, the whole literature of contemporary Italy, from Machiavelli,
who treated Christianity as a false and noxious superstition, to Pulci
who professed belief in nothing but pleasure, is saturated with free
thought. "Vanity makes most humanists skeptics," wrote Ariosto, "why
is it that learning and infidelity go hand in hand?"

[Sidenote: German skeptics]

In Germany, too, there was some free thought, the most celebrated case
being that of the "godless painters of Nuremberg," Hans Sebald Beham,
Bartholomew Beham, and George Penz. The first named expressed some
doubts about various Protestant doctrines. Bartholomew went further,
asserting that baptism was a human device, that the Scriptures could
not be believed and that the preaching he had heard was but idle talk,
producing no fruit in the life of the preacher himself; he recognized
no