Principles of western civilisation

292 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

Renaissance he comes, however, sooner or later, to perceive that it is not really through this movement, in the first instance, that he has to follow the main stream of Western development as it descends through its principal current towards the future. Just as in the period at the beginning of our era in which a long, culminating epoch of absolutism under many phases had produced the tendencies of thought to be distinguished in the Roman world ; so now, in the earlier Renaissance, we have in sight the movements in which the minds of men attempt to rise above, or to separate themselves from, the extraordinary results which have been produced. And yet, as in the Roman world, without being in themselves representative, for the time being, of any new principle of life.

In the movements, accordingly, in which we see the Italian intellect turning again with enthusiasm, and a sense of awe, to the revived study of the literature, the art, and the knowledge of the ancient civilisations—in which we see the mind of Machiavelli captivated with the old Roman theory of the State and its inherent ideal of the secularisation of religion!; in which we see philosophy, in the theories of Pico della Mirandola, Telesio, and a crowd of others,” moving again, on the one hand, towards the concepts of Neo-Platonism, and, on the other, towards the ideals of a vague pantheistic humanism —we have much that suggests a close parallel to the period when the humanitarian ideals of the ancient philosophy held the mind of the Roman world at

1 Cf. Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, i. xi.-xv. and ili. xv. -xvil.

2 Ch History of Modern Philosophy, by Kuno Fischer, ch. v.

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