Again, Machiavelli follows his ancient masters in assuming as evident that a good organisation of society can be effected only by the deliberate design of a wise legislator. [Footnote:  Ib. iii. 1.  The lawgiver must assume for his purposes that all men are bad:  ib. i. 3.  Villari has useful remarks on these principles in his Machiavelli, Book ii. cap. iii.] Forms of government and religions are the personal creations of a single brain; and the only chance for a satisfactory constitution or for a religion to maintain itself for any length of time is constantly to repress any tendencies to depart from the original conceptions of its creator.

It is evident that these two assumptions are logically connected.  The lawgiver builds on the immutability of human nature; what is good for one generation must be good for another.  For Machiavelli, as for Plato, change meant corruption.  Thus his fundamental theory excluded any conception of a satisfactory social order gradually emerging by the impersonal work of successive generations, adapting their institutions to their own changing needs and aspirations.  It is characteristic, and another point of resemblance with ancient thinkers that he sought the ideal state in the past—­republican Rome.

These doctrines, the sameness of human nature and the omnipotent lawgiver, left no room for anything resembling a theory of Progress.  If not held afterwards in the uncompromising form in which Machiavelli presented them, yet it has well been pointed out that they lay at the root of some of the most famous speculations of the eighteenth century. [Footnote:  Villari, loc. cit.]

Machiavelli’s sameness of human nature meant that man would always have the same passions and desires, weaknesses and vices.  This assumption was compatible with the widely prevailing view that man had degenerated in the course of the last fifteen hundred years.  From the exaltation of Greek and Roman antiquity to a position of unattainable superiority, especially in the field of knowledge, the degeneration of humanity was an easy and natural inference.  If the Greeks in philosophy and science were authoritative guides, if in art and literature they were unapproachable, if the Roman republic, as Machiavelli thought, was an ideal state, it would seem that the powers of Nature had declined, and she could no longer produce the same quality of brain.  So long as this paralysing theory prevailed, it is manifest that the idea of Progress could not appear.

But in the course of the sixteenth century men began here and there, somewhat timidly and tentatively, to rebel against the tyranny of antiquity, or rather to prepare the way for the open rebellion which was to break out in the seventeenth.  Breaches were made in the proud citadel of ancient learning.  Copernicus undermined the authority of Ptolemy and his predecessors; the anatomical researches of Vesalius injured the prestige of Galen; and Aristotle was attacked