sculpture and painting had performed their task of developing mediaeval motives by the light of classic models, and were now entering on the stage of academical inanity.  Yet the mental vigor of the Italians was by no means exhausted.  Early in the sixteenth century Machiavelli had inaugurated a new method for political philosophy; Pompanazzo at Padua and Telesio at Cosenza disclosed new horizons for psychology and the science of nature.  It seemed as though the Renaissance in Italy were about to assume a fresh and more serious character without losing its essential inspiration.  That evolution of intellectual energy which had begun with the assimilation of the classics, with the first attempts at criticism, with the elaboration of style and the perfection of artistic form, now promised to invade the fields of metaphysical and scientific speculation.  It is true, as we have seen, that the theological problems of the German Reformation took but slight hold on Italians.  Their thinkers were already too far advanced upon the paths of modern rationalism to feel the actuality of questions which divided Luther from Zwingli, Calvin from Servetus, Knox from Cranmer.  But they promised to accomplish master-works of incalculable magnitude in wider provinces of exploration and investigation.  And had this progress not been checked, Italy would have crowned and completed the process commenced by humanism.  In addition to the intellectual culture already given to Europe, she might have revealed right methods of mental analysis and physical research.  For this further step in the discovery of man and of the world, the nation was prepared to bring an army of new pioneers into the field—­the philosophers of the south, and the physicists of the Lombard universities.

Humanism effected the emancipation of intellect by culture.  It called attention to the beauty and delightfulness of nature, restored man to a sense of his dignity, and freed him from theological authority.  But in Italy, at any rate, it left his conscience, his religion, his sociological ideas, the deeper problems which concern his relation to the universe, the subtler secrets of the world in which he lives, untouched.

These novi homines of the later Renaissance, as Bacon called them, these novatori, as they were contemptuously styled in Italy, prepared the further emancipation of the intellect by science.  They asserted the liberty of thought and speech, proclaimed the paramount authority of that inner light or indwelling deity which man owns in his brain and breast, and rehabilitated nature from the stigma cast on it by Christianity.  What the Bible was for Luther, that was the great Book of Nature for Telesio, Bruno, Campanella.  The German reformer appealed to the reason of the individual as conscience; the school of southern Italy made a similar appeal to intelligence.  In different ways Luther and these speculative thinkers maintained the direct illumination of the human soul by God, man’s immediate dependence on his Maker, repudiating ecclesiastical intervention, and refusing to rely on any principle but earnest love of truth.