upon the world by the arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all these instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the new and useful and life-giving.  Yet neither any one of these answers taken separately, nor indeed all of them together, will offer a solution of the problem.  By the term Renaissance, or new birth, is indicated a natural movement, not to be explained by this or that characteristic, but to be accepted as an effort of humanity for which at length the time had come, and in the onward progress of which we still participate.  The history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts, or of sciences, or of literature, or even of nations.  It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races.  It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste.  The arts and the inventions, the knowledge and the books, which suddenly became vital at the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores of the Dead Sea which we call the Middle Ages.  It was not their discovery which caused the Renaissance.  But it was the intellectual energy, the spontaneous outburst of intelligence, which enabled mankind at that moment to make use of them.  The force then generated still continues, vital and expansive, in the spirit of the modern world.

How was it, then, that at a certain period, about fourteen centuries after Christ, to speak roughly, the intellect of the Western races awoke as it were from slumber and began once more to be active?  That is a question which we can but imperfectly answer.  The mystery of organic life defeats analysis; whether the subject of our inquiry be a germ-cell, or a phenomenon so complex as the commencement of a new religion, or the origination of a new disease, or a new phase in civilization, it is alike impossible to do more than to state the conditions under which the fresh growth begins, and to point out what are its manifestations.  In doing so, moreover, we must be careful not to be carried away by words of our own making.  Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution are not separate things, capable of being isolated; they are moments in the history of the human race which we find it convenient to name; while history itself is one and continuous, so that our utmost endeavors to regard some portion of it independently of the rest will be defeated.