mythology.

Science was born, and the warfare between scientific positivism and
religious metaphysics was declared. Henceforth God could not be
worshipped under the forms and idols of a sacerdotal fancy; a new
meaning had been given to the words "God is a Spirit, and they that
worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." The reason of man
was at last able to study the scheme of the universe, of which he is a
part, and to ascertain the actual laws by which it is governed. Three
centuries and a half have elapsed since Copernicus revolutionized
astronomy. It is only by reflecting on the mass of knowledge we have
since acquired, knowledge not only infinitely curious, but also
incalculably useful in its application to the arts of life, and then
considering how much ground of this kind was acquired in the ten
centuries which preceded the Renaissance, that we are at all able to
estimate the expansive force which was then generated. Science, rescued
from the hands of astrology, geomancy, alchemy, began her real life with
the Renaissance. Since then, as far as to the present moment, she has
never ceased to grow. Progressive and durable, science may be called the
first-born of the spirit of the modern world.

Thus by the discovery of the world is meant on the one hand the
appropriation by civilized humanity of all corners of the habitable
world, and on the other the conquest by science of all that we now know
about the nature of the universe. In the discovery of man, again, it is
possible to trace a twofold process. Man in his temporal relations,
illustrated by pagan antiquity, and man in his spiritual relations,
illustrated by biblical antiquity: these are the two regions, at first
apparently distinct, afterward found to be interpenetrative, which the
critical and inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for
investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at
work--art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like
philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism--a
frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without
inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically
connected with the religious feelings of the people, formulas from which
to deviate would be impious in the artist and confusing to the
worshipper. Superstitious reverence bound the painter to copy the almond
eyes and stiff joints of the saints whom he had adored from