the bourgeois classes a self-satisfied positivism, vividly portrayed in the person of Cosimo de’ Medici, superseded the passions and enthusiasms of a previous age.  Thus force, craft, and practical materialism formed the basis of Italian immorality.  Vehement contention in the sphere of politics, restless speculation, together with the loosening of every tie that bound society together in the Middle Ages, emancipated personality and substituted the freedom of self-centered vigor and virility (Virtu) for the prescriptions of civil or religions order.  In the nation that had shaken off both Papal and Imperial authority no conception of law remained to control caprice.  Instead of law men obeyed the instincts of their several characters, swayed by artistic taste or tyrannous appetite, or by the splendid heroism of extinct antiquity.  The Church had alienated the people from true piety.  Yet no new form of religious belief arose; and partly through respect for the past, partly through the convenience of clinging to existing institutions, Catholicism was indulgently tolerated.  At the same time the humanists introduced an ideal antagonistic to Christianity of the monastic type.  Without abruptly severing themselves from the communion of the Church, and while in form at least observing all its ordinances, they thought, wrote, spoke, felt, and acted like Pagans.  To the hypocrisies of obsolete asceticism were added the affectations of anachronistic license.  Meanwhile, the national genius for art attained its fullest development, simultaneously with the decay of faith, the extinction of political liberty, and the anarchy of ethics.  So strong was the aesthetic impulse that it seemed for a while capable of drawing all the forces of the nation to itself.  A society that rested upon force and fraud, corroded with cynicism, cankered with hypocrisy recognizing no standard apart from success in action and beauty in form, so conscious of its own corruption that it produced no satirist among the many who laughed lightly at its vices, wore the external aspect of exquisite refinement, and was delicately sensitive to every discord.  Those who understood the contradictions of the age most deeply were the least capable of rising above them Consequently we obtain in Machiavelli’s works the ideal picture of personal character, moving to calculated ends by scientifically selected means, none of which are sanctioned by the unwritten code of law that governs human progress.  Cosimo’s positivism is reduced to theory.  Fraud becomes a rule of conduct.  Force is advocated, when the dagger or the poisoned draught or the extermination of a city may lead the individual straight forward to his object.  Religion is shown to be a political engine.  Hypocrisy is a mask that must be worn.  The sanctities of ancient use and custom controlling appetite have no place assigned them in the system.  Action is analyzed as a branch of the fine arts; and the spirit of the age, of which the philosopher makes himself the hierophant, compels him to portray it as a sinister and evil art.