ABSTRACT
The dawnings of modern thought are first visible in humanism. Beneath the blows dealt by humanism, scholasticism was beginning to crumble. N. Machiavelli’s concept of the state, as De Sanctis remarks, is too like the old transcendent God, and absorbs in itself religion, morality and individuality. T. Campanella is more vacillating than Giordano Bruno, although he represents a new demand of speculative thought. The intellectual outlook of Vico is separated from that of Machiavelli by two centuries of development. Vico’s intuition of a metaphysic of the human mind was a presentiment of the critical philosophy developed in the following century by Galluppi, Rosmini and Gioberti. Machiavelli treated humanity as nature, as substance; and thus its development was rigidly determined by its own inner logic. Giambattista Vico introduces the true concept of mind when he expounds his doctrine of the providence immanent in the development of nations.
