Principles of western civilisation

ix THE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 293

the beginning of our era, without being able to supply any new life-principle to a system of society the governing causes of which they antagonised.*

In all the earlier movements of the Renaissance we may distinguish, accordingly, that we have the same characteristic stand-point. The effort which these movements represent is an effort, not to accentuate that antithesis which has been opened in the Western mind,—and to which we have seen the characteristic potentiality of our civilisation to be related,—but an effort to close it again.” As in the theories of Neo-Platonism, the tendency in nearly all the movements of the Italian Renaissance is only to bring the world back to a stand-point beyond which the evolutionary process has, in reality, moved.’

Vanini, indeed, towards the close of the Renais-

1 Cf. History of Modern Philosophy, by Kuno Fischer, ch. v.

2 Cf. The Ethic of Free Thought, by Karl Pearson, ii. viii.

’ The name of world-wide renown which has come down through history as representative of this tendency in politics is that of Machiavelli. To Machiavelli, in the midst of the wretchedness and the debased circumstances of the time, the return to the study of the ancient civilisations had been a kind of intoxication. The old Roman State contrasted with the prevailing condition of the world became to him a pattern, an ideal, an inspiration. The religion of the ancient Romans was the State; the State was the end of all human effort; the State represented the ultimate meaning of all human morals. The sense of opposition between the secular State and something which had since been introduced into the world presented itself to Machiavelli, in the end, as a kind of abnormality in nature. (Compare the influence in this connection of his contemporary, Pzetro Pomponatius.) If only the State could be made again the supreme end of human effort, the overruling object of human morals! (Compare the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius and The Prince, in which the ethics, the aims, the ideals, and polity of the ancient Roman State are the examples held up for imitation.) This was the ideal for which Machiavelli stood, so far as it can be expressed in so few words. But of the deeper tendency which these principles involved as their influence was to be mingled with that of other causes in the historical development in our civilisation—the tendency to the separation of the theory of the State from the principles of ethics and religion—Machiavelli himself remained entirely unconscious.