e sixteenth century
Machiavelli had inaugurated a new method for political philosophy;
Pompanazzo at Padua and Telesio at Cosenza disclosed new horizons for
psychology and the science of nature. It seemed as though the
Renaissance in Italy were about to assume a fresh and more serious
character without losing its essential inspiration. That evolution of
intellectual energy which had begun with the assimilation of the
classics, with the first attempts at criticism, with the elaboration of
style and the perfection of artistic form, now promised to invade the
fields of metaphysical and scientific speculation. It is true, as we
have seen, that the theological problems of the German Reformation took
but slight hold on Italians. Their thinkers were already too far
advanced upon the paths of modern rationalism to feel the actuality of
questions which divided Luther from Zwingli, Calvin from Servetus, Knox
from Cranmer. But they promised to accomplish master-works of
incalculable magnitude in wider provinces of exploration and
investigation. And had this progress not been checked, Italy would have
crowned and completed the process commenced by humanism. In addition to
the intellectual culture already given to Europe, she might have
revealed right methods of mental analysis and physical research. For
this further step in the discovery of man and of the world, the nation
was prepared to bring an army of new pioneers into the field--the
philosophers of the south, and the physicists of the Lombard
universities.

Humanism effected the emancipation of intellect by culture. It called
attention to the beauty and delightfulness of nature, restored man to a
sense of his dignity, and freed him from theological authority. But in
Italy, at any rate, it left his conscience, his religion, his
sociological ideas, the deeper problems which concern his relation to
the universe, the subtler secrets of the world in which he lives,
untouched.

These _novi homines_ of the later Renaissance, as Bacon called them,
these _novatori_, as they were contemptuously styled in Italy, prepared
the further emancipation of the intellect by science. They asserted the
liberty of thought and speech, proclaimed the paramount authority of
that inner light or indwelling deity which man owns in his brain and
breast, and rehabilitated nature from the stigma cast on it by
Christianity. What the Bible was for Luther, that was the great Book of
Nature for Telesio, Bruno