The great service of Italy to modern freethought, however, was to come later, in respect of the impulse given to the scientific spirit by Bruno, Vanini, and Galileo. On the philosophical or critical side, the Italy of the middle of the sixteenth century left no enduring mark on European thought, though her serious writers were numerous. Aconzio had published, before his De Stratagematibus Satanæ, a treatise De Methodo, sive recta investigandarum tradendarumque scientiarum ratione (Basel, 1558), wherein he pleads strenuously for a true logical method as the one way to real knowledge of things. In this he anticipates Bacon, as did, still earlier, Mario Nizolio in his Antibarbarus sive de veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra pseudo-philosophos (Parma, 1553). Nizolio’s main effort is towards the discrediting of Aristotle, whom, like so many in the generation following, he regarded as the great bulwark of scholastic obscurantism. He insists that all knowledge must proceed from sensation, which alone has immediate certainty; and thus stands for direct scientific observation as against tradition and verbalism. But Ludovicus Vives had before him (in his De causis corruptarum artium, Antwerp, 1531) claimed that the true Aristotelian went direct to nature, as Aristotle himself had done; and Nizolio did nothing in practical science to substantiate his polemic against the logic-choppers.
He and Aconzio in effect cancel each other. Each had glimpsed a truth, one seeing the need for a right method in inference, the other protesting against the idea that abstract reasoning could lead to knowledge; but neither made good his argument by any treasure trove of fact. Another writer of the same decade, Gomez Pereira, joined in the revolt against Aristotelianism, publishing in 1554 his Margarita Antoniana, wherein, in advance of Descartes, he maintained the absence of sensation in brutes.[20] For the rest, he championed freedom in speculation, denying that authority should avail save in matters of faith. But he too failed to bring forth fruits meet for freedom. Neither by abstract exposition of right methods of reasoning, nor by abstract attacks on wrong methods, could any vital impulse yet be given to thought. What was lacking was the use of reason upon actual problems, whether of human or of natural science. All the while Europe was anchored to ancient delusion, historical and scientific. Even as the horrors of age-long religious war could alone drive men to something like toleration in the religious life, there was needed the impact of actual discovery to win them to science as against scholasticism. And rational thinking on the religion which resisted all new science was to be still later of attainment, save for the nameless men who throughout the ages of faith rejected the creeds without publishing their unbelief. Of these Italy had always a large sprinkling.
§ 2. Spain
The fact that sixteenth-century Spain could be charged, on the score of Servetus, with producing the “hen” of Socinianism, is an important reminder of the perpetuity of variation and of the fatality of environment. The Portuguese Sanchez, whom we shall find laying new potential foundations of skepticism in France alongside of Montaigne, could neither have acquired nor propounded his philosophy in his native land. But it is to be noted that an elder contemporary of Sanchez, living and dying in Spain, was able, in the generation after Servetus, to make a real contribution to the revival of freethought, albeit under shelter of a firm profession of orthodoxy.
No book of the kind, perhaps, had a wider European popularity than the Examen de Ingenios para las ciencias of Huarte de San Juan, otherwise Juan Huarte y Navarro (c. 1530–1592). Like Servetus and Sanchez and many another, Huarte had his bias to reason fostered by a medical training; and it is as a “natural philosopher” that he stands for a rational study of causation. As a pioneer of exact science, indeed, he counts for next to nothing. Taking as his special theme the divergences of human faculty, he does but found himself on the à priori system of “humours” and “temperatures” passed on by Aristotle to Galen and Hippocrates, inconsistently affirming on the one hand that the “characters” not only of whole nations but of the inhabitants of provinces are determined by their special climates and aliments, and on the other hand that individual faculty is determined by the proportions of hot and cold, moist and dry “temperatures” in the parents. Apart from his insistence on the functions of the brain, and from broadly rational deliverances as to the kinds of faculty which determine success in theology and law, arms and arts, his “science” is naught. Dealing with an obscure problem, he brought to it none of the exact inductiveness which alone had yielded true knowledge in the simpler field of astronomy. In virtue, however, either of his confidence in affirmation or of his stand for rational inquiry, or of both, Huarte’s book, published in 1575, went the round of Europe. Translated into Italian in 1582 (or earlier; new rendering 1600), it was thence rendered into English by Richard Carew in 1594.[21] A French version appeared in 1598, and two others in 1661 and 1671. A later English translation, from the original, was produced in 1698; and Lessing thought the book worth putting into German in 1785.
The rationalistic importance of Huarte lies in his insistence on the study of “second causes” and his protest against the burking of all inquiry by a reference to deity. On this head he anticipates much of the polemic of Bacon. The explanation of all processes and phenomena by the will of God, he observes, “is so ancient a manner of talk, and the natural philosophers have so often refuted it, that the seeking to take the same away were superfluous, neither is it convenient.... But I have often gone about to consider the reason and the cause whence it may grow that the vulgar sort is so great friend to impute all things to God, and to reave them from Nature, and do so abhor the natural means.”[22] His solution is the impatience of men over the complexity of Nature, their spiritual arrogance, their indolence, and their piety. For himself, he pronounces, as Middleton did in England nearly two centuries later, that “God doth no longer those unwonted things of the New Testament; and the reason is, for that on his behalf he hath performed all necessary diligence that men might not pretend ignorance. And to think that he will begin anew to do the like miracles ... is an error very great.... God speaks once (saith [Job]) and turns not to a second replial.”[23]
Only thus could the principle of natural causation be affirmed in the Spain of Philip II. Huarte is careful to affirm miracles while denying their recurrence; and throughout he writes as a good Scripturist and Catholic. But he sticks to his naturalist thesis that “Nature makes able,” and avows that “natural philosophers laugh at such as say, This is God’s doing, without assigning the order and discourse of the particular causes whence they may spring.”[24] The fact that the book was dedicated to Philip tells of royal protection, without which the author could hardly have escaped the Inquisition. Years after, we shall find Lilly in England protesting on the stage against the conception of Natura naturans; and Bacon powerfully reaffirming Huarte’s doctrine, with the same reservations. The Spaniard must have counted for something as a pleader for elementary reason, if Bacon did.
But this is practically the only important contribution from Spain to the intellectual renascence then going on in Europe. As we have seen, it was not that Spaniards had any primordial bias to dogmatism and persecution: it was simply that their whole socio-political evolution, largely determined by Spanish discovery and dominion in the New World, set up institutions and forces which became specially powerful to stamp out freethought. The work of progress was done in lands where lack of external dominion left on the one hand a greater fund of variant energy, and on the other made for a lesser power of repression on the part of Church and State.