Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/396

376 mediævalism. Its confused transitional condition is obvious in the work of writers like Burton and Browne, even in the poetry of Donne and Milton. It is with Hobbes that rationalism appears in English thought, as an organised method and an aggressive force.

Hobbes, if not a Cartesian, yet follows the deductive, mathematical methods of Descartes rather than the experimental, inductive method adumbrated by Bacon, which was not applied in philosophy till Locke wrote. The first formulator of rationalism was Descartes; and the chief thinkers of the century, as Spinoza and Leibnitz, derive from Descartes. And as it was in France that rationalism was first formulated,—a consequence of the advance of mathematical studies, in which England lagged behind,—it was in France that rationalism first became a force in letters. It is in our period that the classicism of the Augustan ages is taking shape; and the two shaping forces are the organisation of polite society, and the rationalist ideal of precision in the use of words, logical and lucid order. From the opening of the Hôtel de Rambouillet dates the organisation of polite society as a conscious force in life and letters, the beginning of the process which was to make literature, poetry and prose, the finest flower of social intercourse, its greatest beauties that elegance and dignity which are the adornment of aristocratic manners. It is only a beginning that we have in these years. In the literature of the period there is still much of the ruder, freer, larger spirit of the sixteenth century. In the badinage