the private accumulation of
the lone scholar. But with every expansion of the ego either through
the acquisition of wealth or of learning or of pride in great exploits,
came a rising self-consciousness and self-confidence, and this was the
essence of the individualism so often noted as one of the contrasts
between modern and medieval times. The child, the savage, and to a
large extent the undisciplined mind in all periods of life and of
history, is conscious only of object; the trained and leisured
intellect discovers, literally by "reflection," the subjective. He is
then no longer content to be anything less than himself, or to be lost
in anything greater.

Just as men were beginning again to glory in their own powers came a
series of discoveries that totally transformed the world they lived in.
So vast a change is made in human thought and habit by some apparently
trivial technical inventions that it sometimes {7} seems as if the race
were like a child that had boarded a locomotive and half accidentally
started it, but could neither guide nor stop it. Civilization was born
with the great inventions of fire, tools, the domestication of
[Sidenote: Inventions] animals, writing, and navigation, all of them,
together with important astronomical discoveries, made prior to the
beginnings of recorded history. On this capital mankind traded for
some millenniums, for neither classic times nor the Dark Ages added
much to the practical sciences. But, beginning with the thirteenth
century, discovery followed discovery, each more important in its
consequences than its last. One of the first steps was perhaps the
recovery of lost ground by the restoration of the classics. Gothic art
and the vernacular literatures testify to the intellectual activity of
the time, but they did not create the new elements of life that were
brought into being by the inventors.

What a difference in private life was made by the introduction of
chimneys and glass windows, for glass, though known to antiquity, was
not commonly applied to the openings that, as the etymology of the
English word implies, let in the wind! By the fifteenth century the
power of lenses to magnify and refract had been utilized, as mirrors,
then as spectacles, to be followed two centuries later by telescopes
and microscopes. Useful chemicals were now first applied to various
manufacturing processes, such as the tinning of iron. The compass,
with its weird power of poi