Perhaps nothing is more expressive of the life of the mind than this temporary intellectual dearth and sterility of a race whose faculties were, even then, far above the average. Reduced to political non-existence and therefore to speculative unproductiveness, the whole country seemed to have gone to pieces just on purpose to let the new nations shake off the yoke of history, of a history too heavy with its pagan heritance to allow full play to the new forces of modern, that is to say Christian, civilisation. For modern thought and modern politics seemed to reject authority and history, in order to have the possibility of displaying what they held virtually in their mediæval and Christian youth. They rid themselves of the past just as the Church had done at her start, throwing overboard Pagan culture. But is it not allowable to think that just as the Church ceased to be anti-philosophical as soon as it had asserted its original intuition, modern nations will cease to be anti-historic now that the value of man as a man has been asserted, and has even been over-asserted? For if such were the case then Italy’s standing out of the game, in order to elaborate slowly the historical forces that may contribute to give back to the world the ballast it seems to have lost, would appear to be in harmony with the developing process of Mind. Nations have their dawn, their twilight, and their night, but Mind never rests or sleeps, and through their individual characteristics all the races tell more or less directly on the whole life of mankind. If Italy had to stand aside to let England and France assert the individual worth of the most inferior human beings, and work up systems where the weakest may be heard in legal circles, then her attitude all through the sixteenth century is that of a boxer training for his next match. To rid politics and law of the idea that legitimised all authority by appeal to the Will of God (as it was commonly understood to be a kind of _Deux ex Machina_) something had to be appealed to that could be considered as a religious support on the modern side. Nature was upheld as antagonistic to superior authority and religious interference. Yet Nature, at least to the men of the seventeenth century, was the work of God, and if mankind was endowed with a longing, or beset with a necessity for society, surely the Creator of mankind was responsible for it. The fact is that it was not of the will of God that the jurists and philosophers wanted to be rid, for they could have found cogent arguments to uphold the thesis, so dear a century later to Rousseau, that God had created man free, and that he was therefore at liberty to choose the political constitution that suited him best—conforming by so doing to the Will of God: it was the authority of men, the authority of tradition, which taught that it had always been the natural lot of some men to obey, and the natural lot of others to command; and that is far more Pagan