THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



these; the Italians awoke to the power and beauty 

 of classical antiquity with the acquisition of Greek 

 and Roman manuscripts; the new and amazing geo- 

 graphical discoveries exalted the imagination; the 

 crusades had brought strange stirrings for freedom; 

 and the vigour of the human body was capable of 

 great draughts on it of both work and pleasure; but 

 we can have all these, and they, apparently, might 

 have contributed just as readily to a cultivation of 

 material despotism, to luxury, to pleasure, and to gross 

 wantonness. It is true we find all these baser charac- 

 teristics; young men, like Pico della Mirandola, al- 

 most wearied out from "wandering over the crooked 

 hills of delicious pleasure" because they had loved 

 much and had been beloved by women; yet we find 

 also that these same young votaries of pleasure swift- 

 ly climbed the rugged hills of thought and art. So, too, 

 we fail to understand how men like da Vinci could 

 combine life at a luxurious and wanton court with an 

 inexhaustible, unrivalled thirst for knowledge and 

 art. 



Much emphasis might be laid on the indirect in- 

 fluence which the revival of literature and art during 

 the fifteenth century exerted upon the later develop- 

 ment of science. The assurance which came that life 

 was in itself a noble thing, that the cultivation of in- 

 tellectual powers was not destructive to the soul, and 

 that admiration of physical perfection was not antag- 



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