In their rationalism or empiricism, France and England threw overboard the past that loomed indeed rather oppressive, and in so doing they assert man, in his individual determination, as the ground of all reality. It is perfectly allowable to consider that the two schools were bound to stimulate and temper each other. The atom, the monad at the basis of their system is always man, but at the outset the unilateralism of Bacon’s gnoseology, a method based so to speak exclusively on sense knowledge, called for the mathematical and deductive method of Descartes in order to display all that it held virtually of scientific progress. On the other hand the French deductive method, although admitting the inference and resorting to it in its research of first principles, stood in sore need of a well-balanced recognition of the part played by sense perception in human knowledge. This will be specially obvious in the political consequences of the two theories. For both had their political system, in which their common character prevailed, inasmuch as the seventeenth century was for France and England the century of metaphysics whilst the eighteenth drew the conclusions of their premises, seeing to the application or realisation of all that was fertile as a suggestion of a renovating process to be undergone by society. Bruno’s historical reality was left in a corner, for it could not have been integrated in our system to which it was then contradictory, and still less in the political conditions that were to be the outcome of our theories, since it was consonant with them only as far as the individual was the basis of his reality as well as of ours. His individual is, however, neither rational, nor empirical; he is historical, and this implies that he cannot be considered bereft either of his roots in the past nor of his projection on the future. Nothing therein tends to diminish man; on the contrary everything adheres to him, dilating his personality right into infinity. But this notion of man was far too difficult to be realised even theoretically in the sixteenth century, and the arduous task of the French and English schools was to pave the way for the German and modern Italian thinkers and provide them with a starting-point to reach the heights from which the relation of the transcendental and empirical selves can be detected, and the historical notion of man realised in the light of such a conception. In Bruno it is not, however, a mere intuition although it is realised only as far as the conception of science and its historical development are concerned. The practical realisation of this notion implied a new conception of tradition and authority, which, far from being shaken to pieces, are in it invested with a new and nearly sacred character. Antithetic thereby to Protestantism, it knocked no less against the transcendent reality of God as understood then by decadent scholasticism and by most Catholics. CHAPTER II