accumulated, before the indispensable conditions for a resurrection of
the free spirit of humanity could exist. The first nation which
fulfilled these conditions was the first to inaugurate the new era. The
reason why Italy took the lead in the Renaissance was, that Italy
possessed a language, a favorable climate, political freedom, and
commercial prosperity, at a time when other nations were still
semi-barbarous. Where the human spirit had been buried in the decay of
the Roman Empire, there it arose upon the ruins of that Empire; and the
Papacy, called by Hobbes the ghost of the dead Roman Empire, seated,
throned and crowned, upon the ashes thereof, to some extent bridged over
the gulf between the two periods.

Keeping steadily in sight the truth that the real quality of the
Renaissance was intellectual, that it was the emancipation of the reason
for the modern world, we may inquire how feudalism was related to it.
The mental condition of the Middle Ages was one of ignorant prostration
before the idols of the Church--dogma and authority and scholasticism.
Again, the nations of Europe during these centuries were bound down by
the brute weight of material necessities. Without the power over the
outer world which the physical sciences and useful arts communicate,
without the ease of life which wealth and plenty secure, without the
traditions of a civilized past, emerging slowly from a state of utter
rawness, each nation could barely do more than gain and keep a difficult
hold upon existence. To depreciate the work achieved during the Middle
Ages would be ridiculous. Yet we may point out that it was done
unconsciously--that it was a gradual and instinctive process of
becoming. The reason, in one word, was not awake; the mind of man was
ignorant of its own treasures and its own capacities. It is pathetic to
think of the mediæval students poring over a single ill-translated
sentence of Porphyry, endeavoring to extract from its clauses whole