Thus by the discovery of the world is meant on the one hand the appropriation by civilized humanity of all corners of the habitable globe, and on the other the conquest by Science of all that we now know about the nature of the universe.  In the discovery of man, again, it is possible to trace a twofold process.  Man in his temporal relations, illustrated by Pagan antiquity, and man in his spiritual relations, illustrated by Biblical antiquity; these are the two regions, at first apparently distinct, afterwards found to be interpenetrative, which the critical and inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for investigation.  In the former of these regions we find two agencies at work, art and scholarship.  During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism—­a frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without inspiration from debased patterns.  Pictures became symbolically connected with the religious feelings of the people, formulae from which to deviate would be impious in the artist and confusing to the worshiper.  Superstitious reverence bound the painter to copy the almond eyes and stiff joints of the saints whom he had adored from infancy; and, even had it been otherwise, he lacked the skill to imitate the natural forms he saw around him.  But with the dawning of the Renaissance, a new spirit in the arts arose.  Men began to conceive that the human body is noble in itself and worthy of patient study.  The object of the artist then became to unite devotional feeling and respect for the sacred legend with the utmost beauty and the utmost fidelity of delineation.  He studied from the nude; he drew the body in every posture; he composed drapery, invented attitudes, and adapted the action of his figures and the expression of his faces to the subject he had chosen.  In a word, he humanized the altar-pieces and the cloister-frescoes upon which he worked.  In this way the painters rose above the ancient symbols, and brought heaven down to earth.  By drawing Madonna and her son like living human beings, by dramatizing the Christian history, they silently substituted the love of beauty and the interests of actual life for the principles of the Church.  The saint or angel became an occasion for the display of physical perfection, and to introduce ‘un bel corpo ignudo’ into the composition was of more moment to them than to represent the macerations of the Magdalen.  Men thus learned to look beyond the relique and the host, and to forget the dogma in the lovely forms which gave it expression.  Finally, when the classics came to aid this work of progress, a new world of thought and fancy, divinely charming, wholly human, was revealed to their astonished eyes.  Thus art, which had begun by humanizing the legends of the Church, diverted the attention of its students from the legend to the work of beauty, and lastly, severing itself from the religious tradition, became the exponent of the majesty and splendor of