the gradual emergence of that sense of popular freedom which exploded in
the Revolution; these are the aspects of the movement which engross his
attention. Jurists will describe the dissolution of legal fictions based
upon the false decretals, the acquisition of a true text of the Roman
Code, and the attempt to introduce a rational method into the theory of
modern jurisprudence, as well as to commence the study of international
law. Men whose attention has been turned to the history of discoveries
and inventions will relate the exploration of America and the East, or
will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of
printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope, by paper and
by gunpowder; and will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all
these instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid
the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and
perpetuate the new and useful and life-giving. Yet neither any one of
these answers taken separately, nor indeed all of them together, will
offer a solution of the problem. By the term Renaissance, or new birth,
is indicated a natural movement, not to be explained by this or that
characteristic, but to be accepted as an effort of humanity for which
at length the time had come, and in the onward progress of which we
still participate. The history of the Renaissance is not the history of
arts, or of sciences, or of literature, or even of nations. It is the
history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit
manifested in the European races. It is no mere political mutation, no
new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste. The
arts and the inventions, the knowledge and the books, which suddenly
became vital at the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on
the shores of the Dead Sea which we call the Middle Ages. It was not
their discovery which caused the Renaissance. But it was the
intellectual energy, the spontaneous outburst of intelligence, which
enabled mankind at that moment to make use of them. The force then