Machiavelli and Guicciardini had this in common, that their mental attitude was analytical, positive, critically scientific. It negatived the à priori idealism of medieval political philosophy, and introduced a just conception of the method of inquiry. This quality connects them on the one hand with the practical politicians of their age, and on the other with its representative thinkers in the field of metaphysics.
It is no part of my plan to attempt a general history of Italian philosophy during the Renaissance period, or even to indicate its leading moments. On the scale of my present work, any such endeavor would of necessity be incomplete; for the material to be dealt with is obscure, and the threads of thought to be interwoven are scattered, requiring no little patience and no slight expenditure of exposition on the part of one who seeks to place them in their proper relations. Of philosophy, in the strict sense of the term, the Italian Renaissance had not much to offer. We do not revert to that epoch, expecting to meet with systematic theories of the universe, plausible analyses of the laws of thought, or ingenious speculations upon the nature of being. It is well known that the thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can scarcely claim to have done more than lead the revolt of reason against scholastic tyranny and obsolete authorities, appealing with often misdirected enthusiasm to original sources, and suggesting theories and methods which, in the hands of abler speculators, at a more fortunate epoch, generated the philosophies of modern Europe. Yet even so the movement of thought in Italy was of no slight moment, and the work accomplished deserves to be recorded with more honor than it has hitherto received from the historians of philosophy.
The Renaissance in general may be called the Middle Ages in dissolution. That the period was transitional in its chief aspects, has often already been insisted on. The massive fabrics of feudalism and the Church were breaking up. The vast edifice of scholastic theology was being undermined by men who had the energy to free themselves from orthodox tradition, but scarcely force enough or opportunity to mold the thought of the new age. The Italians who occupied themselves with philosophical problems, from Petrarch to Campanella, hold an intermediate place between the schoolmen and the founders of modern metaphysics. They accomplish the transition from S. Thomas and Occam to Bacon, Descartes and Spinoza. It is possible to mark three phases in this process of transition, each of which was necessary in the progress of the mind from theological ontology to science and free speculation. The thinkers of the first stage began by questioning the authority of dogma. Those of the second stage accepted the authority of the ancients. Those of the third appealed to Nature against ecclesiastical and classical authority alike. Humanism was thus intermediate between scholasticism and what, for want of a more definite phrase, may be termed rationalism. Succeeding to the schoolmen, the scholars cleared the groundwork of philosophy of old encumbrances, and reappropriated antique systems of thought. After them, the schools of Lower Italy, including Telesio, Campanella and Bruno, prepared the path to be immediately followed; with what profit is apparent to the dullest intellect. Clearly, and beyond the possibility of question, they propounded the main problems which have agitated all the scientific schools of modern Europe. To them belongs the credit of having first speculated knowledge and reality from no external standpoint, but from the immediate consciousness. The Interrogatio Naturæ and the Cogito, ergo sum, which became the watchwords of modern empiricism and rationalism, are theirs. But, at the very moment when the Italians of the Revival had performed their pioneering task-work, all vital vigor in the nation was extinguished or suspended by the deadly influences of Spanish domination and Papal terrorism.[552] It was left for other races to enter on the promised land which they had conquered.
Upon its first appearance, it was clear that humanism would run counter to both currents of medieval thought, the orthodox and the heretical, the Thomistic and Averroistic. Dante designed his epic in accordance with the fixed outlines of Thomistic theology. The freethinkers of the Lombard universities expressed a not uncertain adhesion to the materialistic doctrines which passed for Averroism. But Petrarch, the hero of the coming age, pronounced his contempt for scholastic quibbles, and at the same time waged war against the tenants of Averroes. He introduced a new spirit into philosophical discussion, a new style of treatment, literary rather than scientific, which tended to substitute humane culture for logical pedantry. The departure from medieval lines of thought, thus signalized by Petrarch, was followed by the students of the next two centuries. Questions which had agitated Europe since the days of Roscelin, now seemed to lose the interest of actuality. The distinctions of Nominalism and Realism retained no attraction for men who were engaged in discovering manuscripts, learning to write correct Latin, acquiring Greek, and striving to penetrate the secret of antiquity. The very style of the schoolmen became a byword for ineptitude and barbarism. It required no little courage and a prestige as brilliant as Pico's to sustain the cause of Albertus Magnus or Johannes Scotus.[553] Scholars of the type of Poggio and Filelfo, Beccadelli and Poliziano, abhorred their ponderous metaphysics, as though they were grotesque chimeras generated by the indigestion of half-starved intellectual stomachs. Orpheus had reappeared. He bade the world thenceforward move to music and melodious rhythms both of thought and language. The barbarians might harbor Mercury within their hearts, to quote Pico's apology; they might display wisdom in unvarnished plainness; but what were these claims worth in an age that required the lips rather than the soul to be eloquent, and when a decorated fiction found more favor than a naked truth? No more decided antithesis than that of scholastic philosophy to the new classical ideal is conceivable.
Thus the first movement of the Revival implied an uncompromising abandonment of medieval thought as worse than worthless. If men educated by the humanistic method were to speculate, they would do so upon lines different from those suggested by the schoolmen. Cicero and Seneca became their models; and the rhetorical treatment of moral topics passed muster with them for philosophy. A garrulous colloquial skimming in fair Latin over the well-trodden ground of ethics supplanted the endeavor to think strictly upon difficult subjects. Much of this literature—the dialogues of Alberti, for example, and Landino's Camaldolese Disputations—can still be read with profit. But regarded from the point of view of systematic thought, it has slight importance. We value it principally for the light it casts upon contemporary manners and modes of opinion.
The study of Greek and Latin texts revealed a world to the Italians far wider than the regions where the medieval mind had moved in narrow limits. The immediate effect of this discovery was not, however, wholly salutary. The ancients began to exercise a kind of despotism; and a new authority, no less stringent than that of dogma, bound the scholars of the Revival beneath the tyranny of classical names. It was impossible for the intellect to free itself from fetters at a single leap. This second servitude seemed destined to be even more pernicious than the first; for as yet there was no criticism, and the superincumbent masses of antique literature, extending from the earliest dawn of Greek history to the latest commentators of Byzantium and Ravenna, underwent but little process of sifting. It was enough for the Italians of that epoch to assimilate. Nothing which bore the stamp of antiquity came amiss to their omnivorous appetite. Compilations from second or third sources were valued as equally precious with original texts. The testimony of hearsay reporters passed for conclusive evidence in matters of history. Masters in philosophy were confounded with expositors, who flourished at the distance of some centuries. Athens and Alexandria, Rome and Constantinople, were indiscriminately regarded as a single Holy Land of wisdom.
While this fermentation of assimilative erudition was still at its height, Gemistos Plethon preached his Neo-platonic mysticism at Florence; and the first attempt at a new philosophy for Western Europe, independent of the schoolmen, uninfluenced by orthodoxy, proceeded from the Medicean academy. The Platonism of Ficino and Pico, we now know, was of a very mixed and ill-determined quality. Uncontrolled by critical insight, and paralyzed by the prestige attaching to antiquity, the Florentine school produced little better than an unintelligent eclecticism. Their so-called philosophical writings were commonplace-books of citations, anthologies of ill-digested abstracts, in which Greek and Asiatic and Christian opinions issued in an incoherent theosophy. It must be reckoned a great misfortune for Italian thought that the Platonists were able to approach the masterpieces of their Attic teacher through a medium of Alexandrian and Byzantine enthusiasm. Had they been forced to attack the "Republic" without the intervention of Plotinus and Gemistos, they might have started on some fruitful line of speculation. They would at least have perceived that Plato's theology formed a background to his psychological, ethical, educational and political theories, instead of fastening upon those visionary systems which his later Greek expositors extracted from the least important portions of his works. At the same time, this Neo-platonic mysticism was only too sympathetic to the feebler pietism of the middle ages for men who had discovered it, to doubt its inspiration.
What was finally accomplished for sound scholarship by Ficino, lay in the direction, not of metaphysics or of history, but of translation. The enduring value of Pico's work is due, not to his Quixotic quest of an accord between Pagan, Hebrew and Christian traditions, but to the noble spirit of confidence and humane sympathy with all great movements of the mind, which penetrates it. If we cannot rate the positive achievements of the Florentines in philosophy at a high value, still the discussion of Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines which their investigations originated, caused the text of the Greek philosophers to be accurately examined for the first time in Western Europe. Their theories, though devoid of originality and clogged at every point with slavish reverence for classical authority, marked a momentous deviation from the traditional methods of medieval speculation.
Thus a vast and tolerably accurate acquaintance with the chief thinkers of antiquity, re-enforced by the translation of their principal works, was the main outcome of the Platonic revival at Florence. Uncritically, and with many a blundering divergence into the uncongenial provinces of Oriental thought, the Italian intellect appropriated Greek philosophy. A groundwork was laid down for the discussion of fundamental problems in the forms under which they had presented themselves to the ancient world. But while the Platonists were wrangling with the Aristotelians about the superiority of their respective masters; while the scholars were translating from the original languages; while the mystics were building castles in the air, composed of fragments from Neo-platonic and Neo-pythagorean systems, cementing them with the mortar of Christianity and adding quaint outbuildings of Cabbalistic and astrological delusions; the writers of ethical treatises pursued another line of inquiry, which was no less characteristic of the age and no less fruitful of results. During the middle ages thought of every kind had been concentrated on the world beyond this life. The question of how to live here was answered with reference to eternal interests solely. Human existence had no meaning except as the prelude to heaven or hell. But contact with antiquity introduced a new class of problems. Men began once more to ask themselves how they ought to live in this world, not with the view of avoiding misery and securing happiness in the next, but with the aim of making their terrestrial home most comfortable and their sojourn in it most effective for themselves and their companions. The discussion of the fundamental question how to live to best advantage, without regard for the next world and unbiased by the belief in a rigid scheme of salvation, occupies an important place in the philosophical essays of the time. Landino, for example, in his Camaldolese Disputations, raises the question whether the contemplative or the practical life offers superior attractions to a man desirous of perfecting self-culture. Alberti touches the same topic in his minor dialogues, while he subjects the organism of the Family in all its relations to a searching analysis in his most important essay.
Valla, in the famous dialogue De Voluptate, attacks the problem of conduct from another point of view.[554] Contrasting the Stoical with the Epicurean ideals, asceticism with hedonism, he asks which of the two fulfills the true end of human life. His treatise on Pleasure is, indeed, a disputation between renascent paganism, naturalism, and humanism on the one side, and the medieval scheme of ethics on the other. Man according to nature contends with man according to grace; the soul, obeying the desires of the flesh, defends her cause against the spirit, whose life is hid with a crucified Christ in God. Thus the two points of view between which the Renaissance wavered, are placed in powerful contrast; and nowhere has their antagonism been more ably stated. For the champion of hedonism Valla appropriately chose the poet Beccadelli, while he committed the defense of asceticism to Niccolò Niccoli. Though at the close of the argument he awarded the palm of victory to the latter,[555] it is clear that his sympathies lay with the former, and all the strength of his reasoning faculty is employed in the statement and support of Beccadelli's thesis. The first and far the longest part of the dialogue, where we detect a true note of sincerity, is a remorseless onslaught upon monasticism under the name of Stoicism, resulting in a no less uncompromising defense of physical appetite. Some of the utterances upon sexual morality are penetrated with the rancor of rebellion.[556] It is the revolt of the will against unnatural restrictions, the reassertion of natural liberty, emboldened by the study of classical literature, imbittered by long centuries of ecclesiastical oppression. Underlying the extravagances of an argument which owes its crudity and coarseness to the contradictions of the century, we find one central thought of permanent importance. Nature can do nothing wrong: and that must be wrong which violates nature.[557] It is man's duty, by interrogation of nature, to discover the laws of his own being and to obey those. In other words, Valla, though in no sense a man of science, proclaims the fundamental principle of science, and inaugurates a new criterion of ethics.