Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/740

 intuition of the truth, drives us ever upwards, that we may attain the perfect rest where understanding and will are unified.

Bruno's speculations were those of a poet as well as a philosopher; and were in various ways prophetic. His death by fire at Rome signified that Italy had neither the wit nor the will to understand men of his kind; that for her the Renaissance had run its course, so that men must pursue its problems elsewhere in the hope of a more satisfactory solution. Descartes' "de omnibus dubitandum est" was but the negative expression of Bruno's positive effort after emancipation from authority, the freedom without which thought can accomplish nothing. Spinoza's substantia, with its twin attributes of thought and extension on the one hand, and Leibniz' monadology on the other, carried into more perfect forms the quest on which he had embarked. But to us he has an even higher significance; he is the leader of the noble army of thinkers who have tried at once to justify and to develop into a compléter system of the universe the dreams and the doctrines of modern science. It is this which makes him the fit close of the movement, which began by waking the old world from its grave and ended by saluting the birth of the thought that made the whole world new.

We have not as yet approached the French Renaissance, which has indeed an interest and character of its own. It was, while less philosophical, more strictly educational, literary, and juristic than the Italian; and may be described as both Teutonic and Latin in origin. It entered the north and penetrated as far as Paris with the Adagia of Erasmus, published in 1500; but it reached the south from Italy, crossing the Alps with the gentlemen of France who accompanied their Kings on those incursions which had, as Montaigne tells us, so fateful an influence on the French morals and mind. Correspondent to this difference in origin was a difference in spirit and in the field of activity. In the north the Renaissance made its home in the schools, and worked for the improvement of the education, the amelioration of the laws, and the reform of religion, as names like Bude, Pierre de la Ramée, and Beza, may help us to realise; but in the south it was more personal and less localised, its learning was nearer akin to culture than to education, and it loved literature more than philosophy. Hence the forms it assumed in France can hardly be said to call for separate discussion here. Especially is this true of its more northern form; a better case might be made out for the southern. To it belong the great names of Rabelais and Montaigne; but their place is in a history of literature rather than of thought, though both affected the course of the latter too profoundly to be left unmentioned here.

Coleridge has said that Rabelais was " among the deepest as well as boldest thinkers of his age"; that the rough stick he used yet " contained a rod of gold"; and that a treatise could be written " in praise of