Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/44

22 the human mind, as expressions of the varying phases of its sentiment concerning the unseen world; that every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and people in which it was produced. He might go on to observe that each has contributed something to the development of the religious sense, and ranging them as so many stages in the gradual education of the human mind, justify the existence of each. The basis of the reconciliation of the religions of the world would thus be the inexhaustible activity and creativeness of the human mind itself, in which all religions alike have their root, and in which all alike are laid to rest; just as the fancies of childhood and the thoughts of old age meet and are reconciled in the experience of an individual. Far different was the method followed by the scholars of the fifteenth century. They lacked the very rudiments of the historic sense, which by an imaginative act throws itself back into a world unlike one's own, and judges each intellectual product in connection with the age which produced it; they had no idea of development, of the differences of ages, of the gradual education of the human race. In their attempts to reconcile the religions of the world they were thus thrown back on the quicksand of allegorical interpretation. The religions of the world were to be reconciled, not as successive stages