ts most discerning interpreter, shows us, was
constructing a model for the whole western world.

The word "renaissance" has of late years received a more extended
significance than that which is implied in our English equivalent--the
"revival of learning." We use it to denote the whole transition from the
Middle Ages to the modern world; and though it is possible to assign
certain limits to the period during which this transition took place, we
cannot fix on any dates so positively as to say between this year and
that the movement was accomplished. To do so would be like trying to
name the days on which spring in any particular season began and ended.
Yet we speak of spring as different from winter and from summer.

The truth is that in many senses we are still in mid-Renaissance. The
evolution has not been completed. The new life is our own and is
progressive. As in the transformation scene of some pantomime, so here
the waning and the waxing shapes are mingled; the new forms, at first
shadowy and filmy, gain upon the old; and now both blend; and now the
old scene fades into the background; still, who shall say whether the
new scene be finally set up?

In like manner we cannot refer the whole phenomena of the Renaissance to
any one cause or circumstance, or limit them within the field of any one
department of human knowledge. If we ask the students of art what they
mean by the Renaissance, they will reply that it was the revolution
effected in architecture, painting, and sculpture by the recovery of
antique monuments. Students of literature, philosophy, and theology see
in the Renaissance that discovery of manuscripts, that passion for
antiquity, that progress in philology and criticism, which led to a
correct knowledge of the classics, to a fresh taste in poetry, to new
systems of thought, to more accurate analysis, and finally to the
Lutheran schism and the emancipation of the conscience. Men of science
will discourse about the discovery of the solar system by Copernicus and
Galileo, the anatomy of Vesalius, and Harvey's theory of the circulation
of the blood. The origination of a truly scientific method is the point
which interests them most in the Renaissance. The political historian,
again, has his own answer to the question. The extinction of feudalism,
the development of the great nationalities of Europe, the growth of
monarchy, the limitation of the ecclesiastical authority, and the
erection of the papacy i