92 HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF SCIENCE 



were the natural extensions of the scientific and rationalistic 

 developments which had their beginnings in Italy during the 

 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These religious and 

 political revolutions were a contribution by the northern 

 peoples to the larger movement. We must have in mind the 

 whole social complex, material as well as intellectual, if we 

 are to reach a proper evaluation of the Renaissance in rela- 

 tion to science and human affairs. 



The two outstanding features of the period were the dis- 

 covery of the human mind and the discovery of the world 

 of nature. Knowledge of antiquity was important, because 

 it helped the humanist to discover himself and to feel his 

 kinship with the minds of other days; knowledge of nature, 

 because it brought into being the modern scientific spirit. 

 Once set in motion, these factors and many others became 

 inextricably interwoven. In art, the human body was re- 

 discovered as a thing of beauty, while nature lost its " taint 

 of sin" and became again beautiful to the eyes of man. 

 Having passed that painful period in which doubt is not yet 

 regarded as innocent and having undergone the sufferings of 

 suspended judgment, the human mind was liberated as from 

 a dungeon during this wonderful intellectual outpouring 

 that was, as Symonds puts it, "the first transcendent 

 spring-tide of the modern world." A sense of human 

 dignity appeared, different from anything in evidence during 

 the Middle Ages and on an even higher level than the sense 

 of human worth of ancient times. Excessive individualism 

 and worldliness were vices of the period, but were not 

 necessary adjuncts of the new and scientific humanism. 

 The distinctive feature was not the recovery of the older arts 

 and inventions nor the discovery of the new, but "the 

 attainment of self-conscious freedom by the European 

 peoples." In science, we may catalogue the specific dis- 

 coveries of these centuries of the awakening, but the more 

 important factor was the establishment of the modern 

 scientific spirit. Freedom and self-consciousness found ex- 



