SOURCE: An introduction to The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the "New Science" upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry, revised edition, Columbia University Press, 1960, pp. 1-10.

In the excerpt that follows, Nicolson argues that full appreciation of English Renaissance literature is dependent upon an understanding of the cosmology of Renaissance poets.

Looking back with historical perspective, modern critics draw sharp lines of demarcation between three main epochs in European thought; the classical, the post-Renaissance, and the modern. Each of these had its own way of thinking about man, the world, and the universe. "Greek natural science," writes R. G. Collingwood in The Idea of Nature,

was based on the principle that the world of nature is saturated or permeated by mind…. Since the world of nature is a world not only of ceaseless motion and therefore alive, but also a world of orderly or regular motion, they...