Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/25

Rh formal beginnings in the Italian schools of the early years of the twelfth century.

The history of the first half of the thirteenth century is a proof that the leaven of a revival was then working at Oxford, at Paris, in Robert of Lincoln, in Roger Bacon, at other places, and in many other companies of men. Long years before the savants of the renaissance. Bacon urged the study of the dead languages, of philosophy, of mathematics, of classic literature. Centuries before Luther he pointed out the errors of the Vulgate, and of the fathers of the church. The way was prepared for Petrarch, though in fact he only appeared a full century later. What is the reason of this sudden check to a vigorous and healthy movement? No single cause was more efficient than the rehabilitation of Aristotle as the apostle of orthodoxy towards the year 1250. The advent of 'the first modern man' was delayed for a hundred years, and the later renaissance for three centuries. The wars of the fourteenth century drowned European learning in blood. The history of the promising beginnings of a real revival of learning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is not yet written, and the share that the scientific thought of Bacon and his contemporaries had in such a revival has been strangely undervalued. Science, as one of the motive forces of the whole movement, has been neglected. It is the rarest thing to find in the indexes of professed histories of the renaissance the name of any scientific man—even that of Copernicus almost never appears.

The earliest stir of the renaissance was in Italy. Petrarch was the first great man of the new world, as Dante was the last of the old. Germany, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, felt the impulse quickly on account of its close connection with Italy, and each one of its semi-independent courts was a focus favorable to the new spirit.

The discoveries of Columbus in 1493 were a mighty aid in freeing men's thoughts from the shackles of prescription and custom. The voyages of Vasco da Gama to India (1497-99) and of Magellan around the world (1519-21) came to confirm the larger view and to excite curiosity and hope. New things are within our reach; search and find—these were the lessons of the time. They were lessons for all mankind. Even the peasant heard of the new wonders and felt himself more a man. The philosopher, in his study, was incited to new efforts. A new spirit was born throughout civilized Europe.

To estimate an epoch, something must be known of its arts and inventions. During the middle ages gunpowder, clocks, telescopes, parchment, paper, the mariner's compass were invented or adopted; mathematics received great developments—especially algebra and trigonometry; perspective was studied and perfected; experimental chemistry, not yet a science, was cultivated; surgery was brought to an equal standing with medicine; music, as we know it, began with the notation