Page:The Function of Reason.pdf/49

 of a civilization is the understanding of its limits. The penetration of the generations from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries worked within the limits of the ideas provided by scholasticism. These five centuries represent a period of the broadening of interests rather than a period of intellectual growth. Scholasticism had exhausted its possibilities. It had provided a capital of fundamental ideas and it had wearied mankind in its efforts to provide a final dogmatic system by the method of meditating on those ideas. New interests crept in, slowly at first and finally like an avalanche — Greek literature, Greek art, Greek mathematics, Greek science. The men of the Renaissance wore their learning more lightly than did the scholastics. They tempered it with the joy of direct experience. Thus another ancient secret was discovered, a secret never wholly lost, but sadly in the background among the learned section of the medievals, — the habit of looking for oneself, the habit of observation.

The first effect was confusion. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries give an impression of more enlightenment, but of less intellectual power than does the thirteenth century. In some ways it suggests an intellectual throw back to the tenth century. There is the sense of dazed men groping, so far as concerns intellectual interests. The men of the early Renaissance never seem quite clear in their minds whether they should sacrifice a cock or celebrate the mass. They compromised by doing both.