Dante, in his preface to the _De Monarchia_, has stated his idea of this historical succession. “All men whom a loftier nature leads to the love of truth seem to be most greatly concerned to hand down to posterity the fruits of their efforts so that, even as they themselves have been enriched by the labours of their ancestors, they may to the same degree endow their successors. Indeed, he who is steeped in the knowledge of public affairs is certainly far from fulfilling his duty should he not trouble to bestow the fruit of his studies on the Republic, not like unto ‘a tree by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his season,’ but rather unto a baneful whirlpool that swalloweth up all things nor ever restoreth what it hath once swallowed.” Here we find the empirical expression of what Giordano Bruno was to conceive theoretically three hundred years later, thus foreshadowing the Immanentist doctrine of history and society that Vico was to develop some hundred and fifty years later still. Vico had, in his turn, to wait until the second half of the nineteenth century in order to be properly understood. His ideas in 1916 formed the basis of Giovanni Gentile’s Philosophy of Law, and at the present day are realised in the Italian Constitution as elaborated by the Government of Mussolini. But Dante’s scholastic training could not allow him to have the least inkling of the doctrine of Immanentism; his ideal Monarch is merely a magistrate appointed and endowed by God. For Dante all political power could only be lawfully derived from the Divine law. Scholastic philosophy could not conceive a law that should not be dependent upon a superior will or a pre-existing law. None the less, this empirical statement, such as it is, shows already how no speculation could satisfy the Italian mind unless it avoided the unhistorical position more natural in those countries that had themselves evolved an original form of society.