The return to nature and the striving for scientific knowledge is expressed in great scholars like the mathematicians and astrono mers Nicholas von Cusa, Georg Peurbach, Regiomontanus (1436-76), famous for his ab Anno); Martin Staffler, and epoch-making Copernicus (1472-1543), whose discovery that the planets moved around the sun was worked out in Orbium Celestium Revolutionibus.' The movement culminated in Johann Keppler (1571-1630), who discovered that the planetary orbits are elliptic and that the squares of the periods of revolution of any two planets are to each other as the cubes of their mean distances from the sun.
Humanism thus brought to Germany ample results in the fields of philology and natural science, but seemed without such results in that field in which the other countries gained most by the Renaissance: philosophy. The German philosophical humanistic reaction against media valism (q.v.) and scholasticism (q.v.) was inhibited by the religious movement which ab sorbed Germany's metaphysical energies Protestantism (q.v.). The Protestant religion, no doubt, ultimately reinforces knowledge and scholarship. Its appeal to the sources, its at tack on authority, liberates the spirit of criticism and research. The great progress of Germany's scholarship in all fields in the 19th century is the work both of the Protestant parts of Germany and of the Catholic regions. German philosophy, more than any other branch of knowledge, shows the Protestant character from Leibnitz to Kant and Fichte and Hegel. But in the days of the new awakening, when Italy and France and Holland and England produced great philosophical systems, Protes tantism necessarily inhibited the metaphysical movement in Germany.
Scholasticism had been a union of Church theology with rationalistic philosophy, an effort to bring the religious belief into harmony with reason. The Reformation agreed, of course, with the new humanistic antagonism against those scholastic systems, but not in the interest of an independent philosophy, rather in the in terest of an independent theology—independent alike of the Church and of abstract logic, faithful only to the individual religious instinct and to the revelation of the Scriptures. Mar tin Luther, with his mystical tendency, had no sympathy with the logical definitions of human thought and no trust in the power of merely human intellect. The humanists who in the
first decades of the 16th century defeated the scholastic world and who fought for literary esthetic ideals and platonistic philosophy soon felt that the Lutheran movement was unfriendly to the cherished arguments. It is true, Zwingli stood nearer to philosophy, and Me lanchthon became a most influential teacher of philosophical doctrines; his philosophical writings, not only the commentaries to ancient philosophers, remained the best books of Prot estant Germany for a century. Yet Melanch thon, too, was more original as theologian than as philosopher. The theological discussions filled the time and reached the masses, and the humanistic movement, which fascinated the few, was necessarily the loser in Germany. The in crease of religious strife was accompanied by a decrease in independent interests of thought throughout the land. The lowest point was reached when the Thirty Years' War destroyed the power and prosperity of the commonwealth; the moral and mtellectual energies of Germany seemed paralyzed and German universities and German scholarly interest had never so little dignity and authority in the world as through the first two-thirds of the 17th century. Natu ralists and philosophers like J. E. Sturm or Joachim Jungis stood under the influence of the great French thinkers, and even the famous jurist Samuel Pufendorf (1632-94), the first German teacher of natural law, is under foreign leadership. Indeed, the neighboring countries had incomparably better conditions for scholarly activity than the devastated land of Germany, and while they did their utmost to reinforce the spirit of productive scholarship through the founding of academies and the high social posi tion of the scholars, Germany had no academies and no protectors of knowledge: university life itself became vulgar and barbaric.
The new spirit had thus to come from for eign lands. The French language and litera ture and philosophy entered at first the courts of Germany and soon after its universities; the humanistic neoclassical interests were replaced by the more °modem" efforts which had been developing in the neighboring country since the days of Descartes. The universal thinker who stands at the threshhold of a new and better time is Leibnitz.