During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in a cowl.  He had not seen the beauty of the world or had seen it only to cross himself, and turn aside and tell his beads and pray.  Like S. Bernard traveling along the shores of the Lake Leman, and noticing neither the azure of the waters, nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the mountains with their robe of sun and snow, but bending a thought-burdened forehead over the neck of his mule; even like this monk, humanity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had scarcely known that they were sightworthy, or that life is a blessing.  Beauty is a snare, pleasure a sin, the world a fleeting show, man fallen and lost, death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting, heaven hard to win; ignorance is acceptable to God as a proof of faith and submission; abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of life:  these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediaeval Church.  The Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick veil which they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world, and flashing the light of reality upon the darkened places of his own nature.  For the mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture in the classical humanities; a new ideal was established, whereby man strove to make himself the monarch of the globe on which it is his privilege as well as destiny to live.  The Renaissance was the liberation of the reason from a dungeon, the double discovery of the outer and the inner world.

An external event determined the direction which this outburst of the spirit of freedom should take.  This was the contact of the modern with the ancient mind which followed upon what is called the Revival of Learning.  The fall of the Greek Empire in 1453, while it signalized the extinction of the old order, gave an impulse to the now accumulated forces of the new.  A belief in the identity of the human spirit under all previous manifestations and in its uninterrupted continuity was generated.  Men found that in classical as well as Biblical antiquity existed an ideal of human life, both moral and intellectual, by which they might profit in the present.  The modern genius felt confidence in its own energies when it learned what the ancients had achieved.  The guesses of the ancients stimulated the exertions of the moderns.  The whole world’s history seemed once more to be one.

The great achievements of the Renaissance were the discovery of the world and the discovery of man.[1] Under these two formulae may be classified all the phenomena which properly belong to this period.  The discovery of the world divides itself into two branches—­the exploration of the globe, and that systematic exploration of the universe which is in fact what we call Science.  Columbus made known America in 1492; the Portuguese rounded the Cape in 1497; Copernicus explained the solar system