MODERN CIVILIZATION.
One is puzzled, in considering that distinctive period of the world's history which includes the present day, whether to assign it three centuries, or one, or fifty years. So rapid has been material progress, such an impulse and expansion have been given to intellectual activity, so sharply drawn have been the stages of that general movement, and so specially marked have been its results within the past two generations, that it is not easy to make a hard and fast definition of Modern Culture and of the field of time which it covers.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, that birth-period of the modern age which is aptly styled the Renaissance had reached its close. When we think of it we are wont to think chiefly of its achievements in the fine arts and elegant literature. Lapped in fancy, "of imagination all compact," the new world was enjoying its youth. The printing-press, just placed in its hands, it used, for the most part, as a toy. Meta physics and theology were topics discussed in a dead language, and poetry, though highly valuable to us as illustrating manners, and to contemporaries as training and elevating literary taste, was not partic ularly promotive of practical research or the advancement of human well-being. Long after the close of the sixteenth century the use of a dead tongue still impeded the popularization of scientific inquiry, which thus remained the exclusive province of a few—a select few, who wrought alone and builded on a narrow basis. The Church, at least in Northern Europe, had set them the example of partly abandoning the vehicle of expression which they had borrowed from her. Had they fol lowed that example and invoked the aid and sympathy of the laity, prog ress would have been expedited. A century separates Copernicus from Kepler, Harvey, and Galileo, and the minor coadjutors who joined them in heralding, nearly another century in advance, Newton and Leibnitz.
Gradually, with the spread of popular intelligence and the polishing of the vernacular tongues, investigation drew recruits from a wider field, and became correspondingly more effective. Bacon told his
contemporaries—what they well knew before, and had been practising in the affairs of every-day life—that the way to use facts was to observe and compare them. The task of so doing in the cause of science was entered upon as soon as the besetting obstacles began to disap pear. The difficulties encountered by Galileo stifled independent inquiry in his latitude for nearly two centuries, and it was not until the closing years of the eighteenth century that Italian acuteness was again enlisted in the pursuit of natural philosophy. Galvani, Spallanzani, and Volta then did much to redeem the long eclipse. Meanwhile, France and England strove in generous competition. Descartes and Boyle were coincident inventors of the science of chemistry, and they were followed in both countries by a throng of competitors in the analysis of matter. In astronomy, Newton, Flamsteed, and the Herschels did little more than keep step with the Bernouillis, Manpertuis, and Laplace. Mathematics, the indispensable ally of these two sciences and of most others, had, from its close approach to abstract philosophy, been a leading study throughout the historic period. It was cherished in the cloister when more concrete studies were, beyond a certain limit, repressed. It was therefore in a tol erable state of preparation for its new task. Progress, however, seized it as well as its fellows. Napier eliminated many of its practical intricacies by means of his logarithmic tables, and Descartes trained to working har ness the crude algebra of the Arabs. Still, advance in mathematics has been rather in method and application than in principles. Newton thought Euclid only a book for children, its propositions being self evident. But Euclid, more or less developed, is still a textbook, while Newton would not recognize his own ideas of light in the modern theo ries of it—electro-magnetic, undulatory, etc.—any more than his chro nology in the epochs of a modern geologist.