Principles of western civilisation

294 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

sance, like Plethon at its beginning, like Porphyry in the Neo-Platonism of the third century, was still imagining the return of our civilisation to the stand-point of the ancient philosophy. Nay, like so many who had preceded him, he was dreaming of the abandonment by the Western mind of that system of religious belief with which it became associated at the beginning of our era. To many leaders of the Italian Renaissance—as to Voltaire in the seventeenth century, as to James Mill in the nineteenth century, as to many minds still amongst us—that element in the concepts of the system of belief associated with our civilisation which projects the principles of human conduct beyond any possible equilibrium in the present had simply no meaning.' The absolutely cosmic significance of the antithesis which these concepts had opened in the human mind; the infinite reach of a

1 Compare the two in Machiavelli's Dzscourses on the First Decade of Tttus Lrvius, i. xi.-xv. and iii. xv.-xvii. On its intellectual side the Italian Renaissance in many of its representatives expressed a development towards a kind of nature philosophy, a movement resembling in many of its deeper intellectual features the earlier Neo-Platonism discussed in a previous chapter. We recognise this characteristic feature under many forms—literary, artistic, philosophical, and religious—in the early Gemzstos Plethon as in the later Campanella, in the mystical von Netteshezm as in the naturalistic Zelesio. Beneath the surface of the humanist movement there is, in short, to be always distinguished the ultimate conception of the sufficiency of existing human nature, and the longing for the free and unrestrained expression of it as in the ancient civilisations, this tendency rising in some of its forms to a kind of deifying of nature. The difference between this phase of the movement and the Neo-Platonism of an earlier period has often been discussed at length. But the leading fact of the movement as a whole, with which we are here concerned, stands out clearly. It is that in this feature of the Renaissance, as in that political phase represented by Machiavelli, we see the human mind on the threshold of a new era, already indeed feeling the vast stirrings of its spirit, but as yet dreaming only of carrying forward the process at work in our civilisation, by entirely closing that characteristic antithesis which we have throughout regarded as the evolutionary cause which divides the significance of our era from that of all the past history of the race. _