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272 traveler—a Leopold von Buch, for instance—through the infernal regions.

It was not only by depreciating in the estimation of mankind the world of phenomena that Christianity, during this dreary period, discouraged the study of Nature, but also by proposing to them new and peculiar aims, before unheard of. Amid a darkness of their own procuring, men busied themselves with such problems that to them might well have been addressed the reproof of Romeo to Mercutio: "Peace, peace! thou talk'st of nothing." The best minds of the time expended no end of labor and ingenuity in distinguishing between absurdity and nonsense. Like a plant in the dark, the ancient philosophy put forth colorless and weakly sprouts which sought the light mainly in two directions, platonistic tendencies finding expression in an insane gnosticism, and Aristotelian tendencies in barren scholasticism. Scholasticism held the ground longest, and the scholastico-ascetic period will always remain as a warning to show to what length the unaided human mind, divorced from the world of reality, and without the revelation of Nature, can go astray.

Inasmuch as humanity recovered from this madness through the study of the ancients, revived by Petrarca and Boccaccio, the next ensuing stage of development is called the stage of humanism. In the dusty codices the mind of the Christian West, awakened as it were from a bewildering dream, got a glimpse of the grand old heathen world; and, hardly believing its own eyes, began to understand how deplorably narrow was the circle of ideas within which it had in some unaccountable way suffered itself to be confined for a thousand years. A flood of reawakened ideas coursed through school and castle and town, and even through the cloisters; and, as it might be increased, swept away the musty trumpery of mediæval hallucination. With the ideas of the ancients, their works of art, too, arose from the grave. To the newly-awakened antique spirit corresponded the new form of the beautiful; and in an instant, almost, art flourished as it never has flourished since, with a bloom which is to the bloom of Hellenic art what a flower, perhaps of less perfect form, but of heavenly sweet odor, is to a flower of perfect beauty but odorless.

This resurrection of the human mind, with its natural consequences—the reformation of the Church, and the new birth of philosophy and the other sciences of mind—has oftentimes been described at length. Still, one point has commonly been overlooked, which it is not so easy satisfactorily to deduce. As we have seen, the ancients knew nothing of natural science, in our sense of the term. Is it not, then, a very curious circumstance that the resuscitation of classical studies should have given the impulse to the development of modern natural science?—that the ancients, who themselves could not think scientifically, nor