RENAISSANCE, THE. The "Renaissance" or "Renas cence" is a term used to indicate a well-known but indefinite space of time and a certain phase in the development of Europe. On the one hand it denotes the transition from that period of history which we call the middle ages (q.v.) to that which we call modern. On the other hand it implies those changes in the in tellectual and moral attitude of the Western nations by which the transition was characterized. If we insist upon the literal and ety mological meaning of the word, the Renaissance was a re-birth; and it is needful to inquire of what it was the re-birth. The meta phor of Renaissance may signify the entrance of the European na tions upon a fresh stage of vital energy in general, implying a fuller consciousness and a freer exercise of faculties than had be longed to the mediaeval period. Or it may mean the resuscitation of simply intellectual activities, stimulated by the revival of an tique learning and its application to the arts and literatures of modern peoples. Upon our choice between these two interpreta tions of the word depend important differences in any treatment of the subject. The former has the disadvantage of making it diffi cult to separate the Renaissance from other historical phases—the Reformation for example—with which it ought not to be con founded. The latter has the merit of assigning a specific name to a limited series of events and group of facts, which can be distin guished for the purpose of analysis from other events and facts with which they are intimately but not indissolubly connected. In other words, the one definition of Renaissance makes it denote the whole change which came over Europe at the close of the middle ages. The other confines it to what was known by our ancestors as the Revival of Learning. Yet, when we concentrate attention on the recovery of antique culture, we become aware that this was only one phenomenon or symptom of a far wider and more com prehensive alteration in the conditions of the European races. We find it needful to retain both terms, Renaissance and Revival of Learning, and to show the relations between the series of events and facts which they severally imply. The Revival of Learning must be regarded as a function of that vital energy, an organ of that mental evolution, which brought into existence the modern world, with its new conceptions of philosophy and religion, its re awakened arts and sciences, its firmer grasp on the realities of human nature and the world, its manifold inventions and discov eries, its altered political systems, its expansive and progressive forces. Important as the Revival of Learning undoubtedly was, there are essential factors in the complex called the Renaissance with which it can but remotely be connected. When we analyse the whole group of phenomena which have to be considered, we perceive that some of the most essential have nothing or little to do with the recovery of the classics. These are, briefly speaking, the decay of those great fabrics, church and empire, which ruled the middle ages both as ideas and as realities ; the development of nationalities and languages; the enfeeblement of the feudal sys tem throughout Europe; the invention and application of paper, the mariner's compass, gunpowder, and printing; the exploration of continents beyond the ocean; and the substitution of the Co pernican for the Ptolemaic system of astronomy. Europe in fact
had been prepared for a thorough-going metamorphosis before that new idea of human life and culture which the Revival of Learning brought to light had been made manifest. It had recov ered from the confusion consequent upon the dissolution of the ancient Roman empire. The Teutonic tribes had been Christian ized, civilized and assimilated to the previously Latinized races over whom they exercised the authority of conquerors. Compara tive tranquillity and material comfort had succeeded to discord and rough living. Modern nationalities, defined as separate fac tors in a common system, were ready to co-operate upon the basis of European federation. The ideas of universal monarchy and of indivisible Christendom, incorporated in the Holy Roman empire and the Roman Church, had so far lost their hold that scope was offered for the introduction of new theories both of state and church which would have seemed visionary or impious to the me diaeval mind. It is, therefore, obvious that some term, wider than Revival of Learning, descriptive of the change which began to pass over Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, has to be adopted. That of Renaissance, Rinascimento, or Renascence is sufficient for the purpose, though we have to guard against the tyranny of what is after all a metaphor. We must not suffer it to lead us into rhetoric about the deadness and the darkness of the middle ages, or hamper our inquiry with preconceived assump tions that the re-birth in question was in any true sense a return to the irrecoverable pagan past. Nor must we imagine that there was any abrupt break with the middle ages. On the contrary, the Renaissance was rather the last stage of the middle ages emerging from ecclesiastical and feudal despotism, developing what was original in mediaeval ideas by the light of classic arts and letters, holding in itself the promise of the modern world. It was, there fore, a period and a process of transition, fusion, preparation, ten tative endeavour. And just at this point the real importance of the Revival of Learning may be indicated. That rediscovery of the classic past restored the confidence in their own faculties to men striving after spiritual freedom ; revealed the continuity of his tory and the identity of human nature in spite of diverse creeds and different customs ; held up for emulation master-works of lit erature, philosophy and art ; provoked inquiry ; encouraged criti cism; shattered the narrow mental barriers imposed by mediaeval orthodoxy. Humanism', a word which will of ten recur in the en suing paragraphs, denotes a specific bias which the forces liberated in the Renaissance took from contact with the ancient world— the particular form assumed by human self-esteem at that epoch —the ideal of life and civilization evolved by the modern nations. It indicates the endeavour of man to reconstitute himself as a free being, not as the thrall of theological despotism, and the pe culiar assistance he derived in this effort from Greek and Roman literature, the litterae humaniores, letters leaning rather to the side of man than of divinity.