The two fanatics, one in the immediateness of his faith in the righteousness of God, the other in the elaboration of his faith in Nature, had done a great deal in the way of shaping the character of modern England, and the theory of one and the revelation of the other held in germ much that meant progress for the whole of mankind. But both by their superlative intolerance and despotism called for the reaction that was to oppose most formally man to the state. For Hobbes at least the fact was inevitable, his _Leviathan_ engulfs all rights and interests; at the same time in his theory of knowledge he picks up the trend of Campanella and sets the basis for a nearly Protagorean subjectivism. How far the theory of the _Leviathan_ was from Italian mentality cannot be judged from contemporary opinion. The Italians, or at least the greatest number of Italy’s scholars, were giving themselves up to academical or to immoral pastimes. The Cinquecento had been personified by Ariosto, Machiavelli, Aretino, the three expressions of the Italian society during the sixteenth century. The characteristics of the times had been an artistic fancy, full of serenity, aware of its being a mere play of imagination and making fun of itself; an adult thought that swept away the illusions of fancy and feeling, to make its own way towards the shrine of science, at the very core of what is the world of Man and Nature; then a moral licentiousness, remorseless because unconscious, therefore shameless and cynical. Ariosto’s fancy is displayed to such an extent that it mostly aroused mere irony from his contemporaries. Machiavelli brings realism and logic to their ultimate consequence, arousing thereby a sense of repulsion in men far more wicked than he was. Aretino’s cynicism reaches such a monstrous pitch that the most dissolute men turn away sickly from his books.