The sixteenth century witnesses the final divorce of Italian culture from real life, so that for two subsequent centuries, instead of developing the moral and social qualities of the individual citizen, as in England, in France and in the Netherlands, it tended rather to the atrophy of all real patriotism. But at this very moment, in opposition to this dissolving and negative influence of Italian Humanism, one of the greatest men produced by a land ever “_magna parens virum_” stands forth to proclaim that man alone is the creator of the historical world and arbiter of his own destiny. The public life and the posthumous fame of the Florentine Secretary are equally unfortunate, but the present age is better prepared to appreciate the truths contained in the works of Niccolò Machiavelli. He, like all the intellectuals of the period, would have said “_we_” in speaking of the Romans, and he might have used the phrase of Leonardo Aretino, “_Graecos ΠΟΛΙΣ, NOSTROS CIVITAS appellavisse_,” had he desired to trace the etymology of that political reality so dear to his heart. But this identification was not sentimental; he analyses closely the differences between past glory and present shame. Strictly speaking, he is not a Humanist at all; like Galileo, he repudiates Neoplatonism and follows, rather, the experimental method. He carefully dissects the past for the benefit of the present, and deftly probes the wounds of the body politic. This empirical standpoint indeed would be a grave defect, did not his genius and sense of history as a living reality often lead him to intuitions that transcend both his method and outlook. The intuitions, the proof of the truth of which was to be one of the chief conquests of modern thought, are clouded by his prejudices or obscured by the inevitable limitations of his knowledge of facts. His conception of “virtue” is perhaps the most characteristic of those intuitions that allowed him to foresee ideas only to be understood by the end of the nineteenth century, and only to be acted on by the present day.