if it wants to borrow the experimental method of natural science must take history for its basis, with all the limitations that this implies, in order to reach positive conclusions. The political thinkers of the seventeenth century thought and acted as men of deep convictions, but of very faulty methods; the world they cast into shape reposed on an assumption which is the most metaphysic of all the metaphysic axioms they hated so much; it will be more and more obvious through the eighteenth century. Italy stood aside. Italian minds could not have made such a position theirs. The attitude of a Bacon, of a Descartes, of a Hobbes, could not be assumed in the land of Machiavelli and Bruno, the fathers of the idea of history understood as a constructive process of Science and Society, of Campanella, the man who foreshadowed in the sixteenth century the phenomenologic conception of reality and the notion of immanence: which may have been, which was in fact heretic, but is undoubtedly the offspring of Christianity, and knows that it is. The race whose energy and virility had been maimed by the constant contemplation of the past, by thorough identification with the past, had been politically stunned like the people of the Bible who turned back when they should have been looking and proceeding forward. Italian scholars kept assimilating and admiring the philosophical production of foreigners, and the more readily praised and the more truly appreciated the new theories that they felt farther from imitating them. What they could give they gave, in legal and historical erudition, preparing the materials on which Vico was to build his imposing Scienza Nuova and preparing the historical ground for the philosophy that flourishes two centuries after him, just as Scholasticism had prepared the abstract ground on which the theories, that were to give their democratic or individualistic impulsion to the modern world, flourished two centuries after a reaction had started against the abstractness of Scholasticism.