Liberal Thought in America 125 



literature, art, and philosophy, the discovery of the 

 New World impressed upon them, as nothing had 

 ever done before, the feasibleness of doing things 

 in novel ways. With the wholesale displacement 

 of commercial relations, the European mind burst 

 the bounds of the snug little world to which its 

 habits and theories, its politics civil and ecclesias 

 tical, its science and its theology, had been adapted. 

 The sudden and unprecedented widening of the 

 environment soon set up a general fermentation of 

 ideas. There was nothing accidental in Martin 

 Luther s coming in the next generation after Co 

 lumbus. Nor was it strange that in the following 

 age the English mind, wrought to its highest ten 

 sion under the combined influences of Renaissance, 

 Reformation, and maritime adventure, should have 

 put forth a literature the boldest and grandest 

 that had ever appeared ; that the era of Raleigh 

 and Frobisher and the early Puritans should have 

 seen even the highest mark of Greek achievement 

 surpassed by Shakespeare. The gigantic revolu 

 tion set on foot by Copernicus was already in full 

 progress, the era of Descartes was just arriving, 

 and the next century was to see modern scientific 

 method receive its supreme illustration at the 

 hands of Newton, while the principles of freedom 

 in thought and speech were to find invincible 

 champions in Milton and Locke. 



