_E.g._ the reasoning of so intelligent a thinker as Heeren: "Among those countries in which [political speculation] might have been expected to give the earliest sign of life, Italy was undoubtedly the first: all the ordinary causes appear to have united here; a number of small states arose near each other; republican constitutions were established; political parties were everywhere at work and at variance; and with all this, the arts and sciences were in the full splendour of their revival. The appearance of Italy in the fifteenth century recalls most fully the picture of ancient Greece. And yet in Italy, political theories were as few as in Greece they had been many!--a result both unexpected and difficult to explain. Still, however, I think that this phenomenon may be in great part accounted for, if we remember that there _never was_ a philosophical system of character or influence which prospered _under the sky of Italy_. No nation of civilised Europe has given birth to so few theories as the Italian: none has had less genius for such pursuits. The history of the Roman philosophy, a mere echo of the Grecian, proves this of its earlier ages, nor was it otherwise in its later." (Essay "On the Rise and Progress of Political Theories," in _Historical Treatises_, Eng. tr. 1836, p. 118.) To say nothing of the looseness of the generalisation, which ignores alike Thomas Aquinas and Vico, Leonardo and Galileo, Machiavelli and Giordano Bruno, it may suffice to note once more that on this principle the Germans must be pronounced to have been devoid of theoretical faculty before Leibnitz. On that view it does not become any more intelligible how "they" acquired it.