452 ANTHROPOLOGY 



the Naissance of Knowledge; and at the same time it sheds new 

 light on the origin of that group of modern sciences of which it is 

 itself the youngest. The early period of intellectual activity in 

 Babylon and Alexandria, Athens and Rome, may be likened to 

 the blossoming of a plant in springtime; it was the summing and 

 outshowing of a mentality shaped during uncounted generations 

 of experience along definite lines, in environments of distinctive 

 sort and the blossoming was fuller of promise than the ancients 

 dreamed. Then came the ages that were dark because energy was 

 diverted to new lines; for leaders of thought gave way to leaders 

 of action, and these became pioneers in new environments where 

 threads of new experience had to be spun from the lives of genera- 

 tions before they could be woven into the fabric of knowledge. 

 The forefathers of the joint founders of scholasticism and science 

 lived winterless lives in sunny lands, and the early science reveals 

 an elysian tinge; while the ancestry of the makers of modern (or 

 natural) science spent their force in conquering wood-lands and 

 wood-life in cloudy and wet and long-wintered Europe, and their 

 efforts finally yielded a harder and more practical product than 

 that of the earlier and easier time. During the nature-conquest 

 of a millennium and more, the ideals of the elder masters seemed 

 lost in a survival of astrology and alchemy, a survival so well re- 

 corded in growing literature as to simulate a revival; yet the 

 sense of the reality of things gained strength by exercise in the 

 ceaseless contact with nature, while the oft-told magic was rele- 

 gated to beldams and crones rather than reserved for rulers and 

 high-priests as of old. The Renaissance revealed the influence of 

 these centuries of nature-conquest and nation-planting which 

 made the Europe of history; and its dawn showed that the seat 

 of highest intellectual activity had slipped in the darkness from 

 the sensuous shores of the eastern Mediterranean to the remote 

 and rugged lands in which the world's richest blood and ripest 

 culture were blent and pent against northern seas. The closest 

 concentration of human strength was in Britain; the uttermost 

 goal of conquest, the last resting-place of the conquerors of con- 

 querors, where Caesar might have wept for worlds, like Alexander 

 long before; and here modern science began with Francis Bacon 

 (1561-1626) as expounder. The Britannian Renaissance, coming 

 so long after the Mediterranean Naissance, may be likened to the 

 ripe-fruiting of a plant in autumn; for it followed the vernal blos- 

 soming after a tedious interval of scarce-seen growth. 



With the Novum Organum of Bacon, the last vestige of magic 

 and mysticism fell away from the body of real knowledge; for 

 not only was the practicality of centuries summed in the new sys- 

 tem, but its author saw more clearly than any predecessor the 



