Download Pioneer humanists by J. M. Robertson (1907) PDF book





The following essays, those on Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, Gibbon, and Mary Wollstonecraft were contributed originally to The Reformer, and I have to thank Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner for permission to reprint them. That on Shaftesbury was first printed as an introduction to the edition of the Characteristics published in 1900 by Mr. Grant Richards. That on Mandeville appeared first in Our Corner, and later in a volume of Essays towards a Critical Method^ published in 1889 and now out of print. All alike have been revised and expanded.Some reputations are branded, for whole ages, by an ancestral pre-judgment, a traditionary malediction. Ascertain historic names stand signally for virtue or patriotism or human kindness, others carry a connotation of wickedness, which for the multitude is their net significance. Of such names, Italy has perhaps more than her share.It is she who has given men their angel of humanity. Saint Francis; and to her belongs the counter figure, the outstanding human synonym for Mephistopheles. To that bad eminence Niccolo Machiavelli was raised by the men of other lands, not solely for his doctrine, of which they knew little when they maligned him, but largely because of his surroundings. He was, as it were, the pen or mouthpiece of the age of the Borgias, a name which carries still I know not what sinister aroma of crime and splendor, power and sin, dominating in the thought of many the whole multiform tradition of the Renaissance.