He thought it fatal to all
discipline: "The confounding of persons hath ever been the beginning of
sickness in the state."[223] It is the same thought which Shakespeare
puts in the mouth of Ulysses:--
"Degree being vizarded,
The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask,
When degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick."[224]
Yet no one can read Dante without feeling that he had a high sense of the
worth of freedom, whether in thought or government. He represents,
indeed, the very object of his journey through the triple realm of shades
as a search after liberty.[225] But it must not be that scramble after
undefined and indefinable rights which ends always in despotism, equally
degrading whether crowned with a red cap or an imperial diadem. His
theory of liberty has for its corner-stone the Freedom of the Will, and
the will is free only when the judgment wholly controls the
appetite.[226] On such a base even a democracy may rest secure, and on
such alone.
Rome was always the central point of Dante's speculation. A shadow of her
old sovereignty was still left her in the primacy of the Church, to which
unity of faith was essential. He accordingly has no sympathy with
heretics of whatever kind.
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