[Sidenote: Ancient masters of literary style]

This is the service by which the ancients have put the moderns in their debt. Another gift of distinct, though lesser value, was that of literary style. So close is the correspondence between expression and thought that it is no small advantage to any man or to any age to sit at the feet of those supreme masters of the art of saying things well, the Greeks. The danger here was from literal imitation. Erasmus, with habitual wit, ridiculed the Ciceronian who spent years in constructing sentences that might have been written {578} by his master, who speaks of Jehovah as Jupiter and of Christ as Cecrops or Iphigenia, and who transmutes the world around him into a Roman empire with tribunes and augurs, consuls and allies. It is significant that the English word "pedant" was coined in the sixteenth century.

What the classics had to teach directly was not only of less value than their indirect influence, but was often positively harmful. Those who, intoxicated with the pagan spirit, sought to regulate their lives by the moral standards of the poets, fell into the same error, though into the opposite vices, as those who deified the letter of the Bible. Like the Bible the classics were, and are, to some extent obstacles to the march of science, and this not only because they take men's interest from the study of nature, but because most ancient philosophers from the time of Socrates spoke contemptuously of natural experiment and discovery as things of little or no value to the soul.

If for the finer spirits of the age a classical education furnished a noble instrument of culture, for all too many it was prized simply as a badge of superiority. Among a people that stands in awe of learning—and this is more true of Europe than of America and was more true of the sixteenth than it is of the twentieth century—a classical education offers a man exceptional facilities for delicately impressing inferiors with their crudity.

[Sidenote: Vernaculars]

The period that marked high water in the estimation of the classics, also saw the turn of the tide. In all countries the vernacular crowded the classics ever backward from the field. The conscious cultivation of the modern tongues was marked by the publication of new dictionaries and by various works such as John Bale's history of English literature, written itself, to be sure, in Latin. The finest work of the kind was {579} Joachim du Bellay's Defence et Illustration de la langue francaise published in 1549 as part of a concerted effort to raise French as a vehicle of poetry and prose to a level with the classics. This was done partly by borrowing from Latin. One of the characteristic words of the sixteenth century, "patrie," was thus formally introduced.

SECTION 2. HISTORY

For the examination of the interests and temper of a given era, hardly any better gauge can be found than the history it produced. In the period under consideration there were two great schools, or currents, of historiography, the humanistic, sprung from the Renaissance, and church history, the child of the Reformation.

[Sidenote: Humanistic school of historiography]

The devotees of the first illustrate most aptly what has just been said about the influence of the classics. Their supreme interest was style, generally Latin. To clothe a chronicle in the toga of Livy's periods, to deck it out with the rhetoric of Sallust and to stitch on a few antitheses and epigrams in the manner of Tacitus, seemed to them the height of art. Their choice of matter was as characteristic as their manner, in that their interest was exclusively political and aristocratic. Save the doings of courts and camps, the political intrigues of governments and the results of battles, together with the virtues and vices of the rulers, they saw little in history. What the people thought, felt and suffered, was beyond their purview. Nor did most of them have much interest in art, science or literature, or even in religion. When George Buchanan, a man in the thick of the Scottish Reformation, who drafted the Book of Articles, came to write the history of his own time, he was so obsessed with the desire to imitate the ancient Romans that he hardly mentioned the {580} religious controversy at all. One sarcasm on the priests who thought the New Testament was written by Luther, and demanded their good Old Testament back again, two brief allusions to Knox, and a few other passing references are all of the Reformation that comes into a bulky volume dealing with the reigns of James V and Mary Stuart. His interest in political liberty, his conception of the struggle as one between tyranny and freedom, might appear modern were it not so plainly rooted in antique soil.

The prevailing vice of the humanists—to see in the story of a people nothing but a political lesson—is carried to its extreme by Machiavelli. [Sidenote: Machiavelli] Writing with all the charm that conquers time, this theorist altered facts to suit his thesis to the point of composing historical romances. His Life of Castruccio is as fictitious and as didactic as Xenophon's Cyropaedia; his Commentary on Livy is as much a treatise on politics as is The Prince; the History of Florence is but slightly hampered by the events.

[Sidenote: Guicciardini]

If Guicciardini's interest in politics is not less exclusive than that of his compatriot, he is vastly superior as a historian to the older man in that, whereas Machiavelli deduced history a priori from theory, Guicciardini had a real desire to follow the inductive method of deriving his theory from an accurate mastery of the facts. With superb analytical reasoning he presents his data, marshals them and draws from them the conclusions they will bear. The limitation that vitiates many of his deductions is his taking into account only low and selfish motives. Before idealists he stands helpless; he leaves the reader uncertain whether Savonarola was a prophet or an extremely astute politician.

[Sidenote: Jovius]

The advance that Paul Jovius marks over the Florentines lies in the appeal that he made to the {581} interests of the general public. History had hitherto been written for the greater glory of a patron or at most of a city; Jovius saw that the most generous patron of genius must henceforth be the average reader. It is true that he despised the public for whom he wrote, stuffing them with silly anecdotes. Both as the first great interviewer and reporter for the history of his own times, and in paying homage to Mrs. Grundy by assuming an air of virtue not natural to him, he anticipated the modern journalist.

[Sidenote: Polydore Vergil]

So much more modern in point of view than his contemporaries was Polydore Vergil—whose English History appeared in 1534—that the generalizations about humanist historiography are only partially true of him. Though his description of land and people is perhaps modelled on Herodotus, it shows a genuine interest in the life of the common man, even of the poor. He noted the geography, climate and fauna of the island; his eyes saw London Bridge with its rows of shops on either side, and they admired the parks full of game, the apple orchards, the fat hens and pheasants, the ploughs drawn by mixed teams of horses and oxen; he even observed the silver salt-cellars, spoons and cups used by the poor, and their meals of meat. His description of the people as brave, hospitable and very religious is as true now as it was then. With an antiquary's interest in old manuscripts Vergil combined a philosopher's skepticism of old legends. This Italian, though his patron was Henry VIII, balanced English and French authorities and told the truth even in such delicate matters as the treatment of Joan of Arc. Political history was for him still the most important, although to one branch of it, constitutional history, he was totally blind. So were almost all Englishmen then, even Shakespeare, whose King John contains no allusion to Magna Charta. In his work On the Inventors {582} of Things Vergil showed the depth of his insight into the importance in history of culture and ideas. While his treatment of such subjects as the origin of myths, man, marriage, religion, language, poetry, drama, music, sciences and laws is unequal to his purpose, the intention itself bears witness to a new and fruitful spirit.

[Sidenote: French Memoirs]

Neither France nor England nor Germany produced historians equal to those of Italian or of Scottish birth. France was the home of the memoir, personal, chatty, spicy and unphilosophic. Those of Blaise de Montluc are purely military, those of Brantome are mostly scandalous. Martin du Bellay tried to impart a higher tone to his reminiscences, while with Hotman a school of pamphleteers arose to yoke history with political theory. John Bodin attempted without much success the difficult task of writing a philosophy of history. His chief contribution was the theory of geography and climate as determinant influences.

[Sidenote: English chronicles]

It is hard to see any value, save occasionally as sources, in the popular English chronicles of Edward Hall, Raphael Hollinshed and John Stow. Full of court gossip and of pageantry, strongly royalist, conservative and patriotic, they reflect the interests of the middle-class cockney as faithfully as does a certain type of newspaper and magazine today.

[Sidenote: Biographies]

The biography and autobiography were cultivated with considerable success. Jovius and Brantome both wrote series of lives of eminent men and women. Though the essays of Erasmus in this direction are both few and brief, they are notable as among the most exquisite pen-portraits in literature. More ambitious and more notable were the Lives of the Best Painters, Sculptors and Architects by George Vasari, in which the whole interest was personal and practical, with no attempt to write a history or a philosophy of art. Even criticism was confined almost entirely to {583} variations of praise. In the realm of autobiography Benvenuto Cellini attained to the non plus ultra of self-revelation. If he discloses the springs of a rare artistic genius, with equal naivete he lays bare a ruffianly character and a colossal egotism.

[Sidenote: Church history]

One immense field of human thought and action had been all but totally ignored by the humanist historians—that of religion. To cultivate this field a new genre, church history, sprang into being, though the felt want was not then for a rational explanation of important and neglected phenomena, but for material which each side in the religious controversy might forge into weapons to use against the other. The natural result of so practical a purpose was that history was studied through colored spectacles, and was interpreted with strong tendency. In the most honest hands, such as those of Sleidan, the scale was unconsciously weighted on one side; by more passionate or less honorable advocates it was deliberately lightened with suppression of the truth on one side and loaded with suggestion of the false on the other.

If the mutual animosity of Catholic and Protestant narrowed history, their common detestation of all other religions than Christianity, as well as of all heresies and skepticisms, probably impoverished it still more. Orthodox Christianity, with its necessary preparation, ancient Judaism, was set apart as divinely revealed over against all other faiths and beliefs, which at best were "the beastly devices of the heathen" and at worst the direct inspiration of the devils. Few were the men who, like Erasmus, could compare Christ with Socrates, Plato and Seneca; fewer still those who could say with Franck, "Heretic is a title of honor, for truth is always called heresy." The names of Marcion and Pelagius, Epicurus and Mahomet, excited a passion of hatred hardly comprehensible to us. The {584} refutation of the Koran issued under Luther's auspices would have been ludicrous had it not been pitiful.

In large part this vicious interpretation of history was bequeathed to the Reformers by the Middle Ages. As Augustine set the City of God over against the city of destruction, so the Protestant historians regarded the human drama as a puppet show in which God and the devil pulled the strings. Institutions of which they disapproved, such as the papacy and monasticism, were thought to be adequately explained by the suggestion of their Satanic origin. A thin, wan line of witnesses passed the truth down, like buckets of water at a fire, from its source in the Apostolic age to the time of the writer.

Even with such handicaps to weigh it down, the study of church history did much good. A vast body of new sources were uncovered and ransacked. The appeal to an objective standard slowly but surely forced its lesson on the litigants before the bar of truth. Writing under the eye of vigilant critics one cannot forever suppress or distort inconvenient facts. The critical dagger, at first sharpened only to stab an enemy, became a scalpel to cut away many a foreign growth. With larger knowledge came, though slowly, fairer judgment and deeper human interest. In these respects there was vast difference between the individual writers. To condemn them all to the Malebolge deserved only by the worst is undiscriminating.

[Sidenote: Magdeburg Centuries, 1559-74]

Among the most industrious and the most biassed must certainly be numbered Matthew Flacius Illyricus and his collaborators in producing the Magdeburg Centuries, a vast history of the church to the year 1300, which aimed at making Protestant polemic independent of Catholic sources. Save for the accumulation of much material it deserves no praise. Its critical principles are worse than none, for its only criterion of {585} sources is as they are pro- or anti-papal. The latter are taken and the former left. Miracles are not doubted as such, but are divided into two classes, those tending to prove an accepted doctrine which are true, and those which support some papal institution which are branded as "first-class lies." The correspondence between Christ and King Abgarus is used as not having been proved a forgery, and the absurd legend of the female Pope Joan is never doubted. The psychology of the authors is as bad as their criticism. All opposition to the pope, especially that of the German Emperors, is represented as caused by religion.

[Sidenote: Annales of Baronius, 1583-1607]

However poor was the work of the authors of the Magdeburg Centuries, they were at least honest in arraying their sources. This is more than can be said of Caesar Baronius, whose Annales Ecclesiastici was the official Catholic counterblast to the Protestant work. Whereas his criticism is no whit better than theirs, he adopted the cunning policy, unfortunately widely obtaining since his day, of simply ignoring or suppressing unpleasant facts, rather than of refuting the inferences drawn from them. His talent for switching the attention to a side-issue, and for tangling instead of clearing problems, made the Protestants justly regard him as "a great deceiver" though even the most learned of them, J. J. Scaliger, who attempted to refute him, found the work difficult.

Naturally the battle of the historians waxed hottest over the Reformation itself. A certain class of Protestant works, of which Crespin's Book of Martyrs, [Sidenote: 1554] Beza's Ecclesiastical History [Sidenote: 1589] and John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (first English edition, 1563), are examples, catered to the passions of the multitude by laying the stress of their presentation on the heroism and sufferings of the witnesses to the faith and the cruelty of the persecutors. For many men the {586} detailed description of isolated facts has a certain "thickness" of reality—if I may borrow William James's phrase—that is found by more complex minds only in the deduction of general causes. Passionate, partisan and sometimes ribald, Foxe [Sidenote: Foxe] won the reward that waits on demagogues. When it came to him as an afterthought to turn his book of martyrs into a general history, he plagiarized the Magdeburg Centuries. The reliability of his original narrative has been impugned with some success, though it has not been fully or impartially investigated. Much of it being drawn from personal recollection or from unpublished records, its solo value consists for us in its accuracy. I have compared a small section of the work with the manuscript source used by Foxe and have made the rather surprising discovery that though there are wide variations, none of them can be referred to partisan bias or to any other conceivable motive. In this instance, which is too small to generalize, it is possible that Foxe either had supplementary information, or that he wrote from a careless memory. In any case his work must be used with caution.

[Sidenote: Knox]

Much superior to the work of Foxe was John Knox's History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland (written 1559-71). In style it is rapid, with a rare gift for seizing the essential and a no less rare humor and command of sarcasm. Its intention to be "a faithful rehearsal of such personages as God has made instruments of his glory," though thus equivocally stated, is carried out in an honorable sense. It is true that the writer never harbored a doubt that John Knox himself was the chiefest instrument of God's glory, nor that "the Roman Kirk is the synagogue of Satan and the head thereof, called the pope, that man of sin of whom the apostle speaketh." If, in such an avowed apology, one does not get impartiality, {587} neither is one misled by expecting it. Knox's honor consists only in this that, as a party pamphleteer, he did not falsify or suppress essential facts as he understood them himself.

[Sidenote: Bullinger]

In glaring contrast to Knox's obtrusive bias, is the fair appearance of impartiality presented in Henry Bullinger's History of the Reformation 1519-32. Here, too, we meet with excellent composition, but with a studied moderation of phrase. It is probable that the author's professions of fairness are sincere, though at times the temptation to omit recording unedifying facts, such as the sacramentarian schism, is too strong for him.

[Sidenote: Sleidan]

Before passing judgment on anything it is necessary to know it at its best. Probably John Sleidan's Religious and political History of the reign of Charles V [Sidenote: 1555] was the best work on the German Reformation written before the eighteenth century. Bossuet was more eloquent and acute, Seckendorf more learned, Gilbert Burnet had better perspective, but, none of these writers was better informed than Sleidan, or as objective. For the first and only time he really combined the two genres then obtaining, the humanistic and the ecclesiastical. He is not blind to some of the cultural achievements of the Reformation. One of the things for which he praises Luther most is for ornamenting and enriching the German language. Sleidan's faults are those of his age. He dared not break the old stiff division of the subject by years. He put in a number of insignificant facts, such as the flood of the Tiber and the explosion of ammunition dumps, nor was he above a superstitious belief in the effects of eclipses and in monsters. He cited documents broadly and on the whole fairly, but not with painstaking accuracy. He offered nothing on the causes leading up to the Reformation, nor on the course of the development of {588} Protestantism, nor on the characters of its leaders nor on the life and thought of the people. But he wrote fluently, acceptably to his public, and temperately.

On the whole, save for Baronius, the Catholics had less to offer of notable histories than had the Protestants. A succes de scandale was won by Nicholas Sanders' [Sidenote: Sanders 1585] Origin and Progress of the English Schism. Among the nasty bits of gossip with which "Dr. Slanders," as he was called, delighted to regale his audience, some are absurd, such as that Anne Boleyn was Henry VIII's daughter. As the books from which he says he took these anecdotes are not extant, it is impossible to gauge how far he merely copied from others and how far he gave rein to his imagination.

[Sidenote: Loyola]

The one brilliant bit of Catholic church history that was written in the sixteenth century is the autobiography of Ignatius Loyola, dictated by him to Lewis Gonzalez [Sidenote: 1553-6] and taken down partly in Spanish and partly in Italian. The great merit of this narrative is its insight into the author's own character gained by long years of careful self-observation. Its whole emphasis is psychological, on the inner struggle and not on the outward manifestations of saintliness, such as visions. It was taken over in large part verbatim in Ribadeneira's biography of Loyola. Compared to it, all other attempts at ecclesiastical biography in the sixteenth century, notably the lives of Luther by the Catholic Cochlaeus and by the Protestant Mathesius, lag far in the dusty rear.

SECTION 3. POLITICAL THEORY

[Sidenote: Premises]

The great era of the state naturally shone in political thought. Though there was some scientific investigation of social and economic laws, thought was chiefly conditioned by the new problems to be faced. From the long medieval dream of a universal empire {589} and a universal church, men awoke to find themselves in the presence of new entities, created, to be sure, by their own spirits, but all unwittingly. One of these was the national state, whose essence was power and the law of whose life was expansion to the point of meeting equal or superior force. No other factor in history, not even religion, has produced so many wars as has the clash of national egotisms sanctified by the name of patriotism. Within the state the shift of sovereignty from the privileged orders to the bourgeoisie necessitated the formulation of a new theory. It was the triumph, with the rich, of the monarchy and of the parliaments, that pointed the road of some publicists to a doctrine of the divine right of kings, and others to a distinctly republican conclusions. There were even a few egalitarians who claimed for all classes a democratic regime. And, thirdly, the Reformation gave a new turn to the old problem of the relationship of church and state. It was on premises gathered from these three phenomena that the publicists of that age built a dazzling structure of political thought.

[Sidenote: Machiavelli, 1469-1527]

It was chiefly the first of these problems that absorbed the attention of Nicholas Machiavelli, the most brilliant, the most studied and the most abused of political theorists. As between monarchy and a republic he preferred, on the whole, the former, as likely to be the stronger, but he clearly saw that where economic equality prevailed political equality was natural and inevitable. The masses, he thought, desired only security of person and property, and would adhere to either form of government that offered them the best chance of these. For republic and monarchy alike Machiavelli was ready to offer maxims of statecraft, those for the former embodied in his Discourses on Livy, those for the latter in his Prince. In erecting a new science of statecraft, by which a people might {590} arrive at supreme dominion, Machiavelli's great merit is that he looked afresh at the facts and discarded the old, worn formulas of the schoolmen; his great defect is that he set before his mind as a premise an abstract "political man" as far divorced from living, breathing, complex reality as the "economic man" of Ricardo. Men, he thought, are always the same, governed by calculable motives of self-interest. In general, he thought, men are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly and covetous, to be ruled partly by an appeal to their greed, but chiefly by fear.

[Sidenote: Politics divorced from morality]

Realist as he professed to be, Machiavelli divorced politics from morality. Whereas for Aristotle[1] and Aquinas alike the science of politics is a branch of ethics, for Machiavelli it is an abstract science as totally dissociated from morality as is mathematics or surgery. The prince, according to Machiavelli, should appear to be merciful, faithful, humane, religious and upright, but should be able to act otherwise without the least scruple when it is to his advantage to do so. His heroes are Ferdinand of Aragon, "a prince who always preaches good faith but never practises it," and Caesar Borgia, "who did everything that can be done by a prudent and virtuous man; so that no better precepts can be offered to a new prince than those suggested by the example of his actions." What the Florentine publicist especially admired in Caesar's statecraft were some examples of consummate perfidy and violence which he had the opportunity of observing at first hand. Machiavelli made a sharp distinction between private and public virtue. The former he professed to regard as binding on the individual, as it was necessary to the public good. It is noteworthy that this advocate of all hypocrisy and guile {591} and violence on the part of the government was in his own life gentle, affectionate and true to trust. [Sidenote: Public vs. private life] Religion Machiavelli regarded as a valuable instrument of tyranny, but he did not hold the view, attributed by Gibbon to Roman publicists, that all religions, though to the philosopher equally false, were to the statesman equally useful. Christianity he detested, not so much as an exploded superstition, as because he saw in it theoretically the negation of those patriotic, military virtues of ancient Rome, and because practically the papacy had prevented the union of Italy. Naturally Machiavelli cherished the army as the prime interest of the state. In advocating a national militia with universal training of citizens he anticipated the conscript armies of the nineteenth century.

This writer, speaking the latent though unavowed ideals of an evil generation of public men, was rewarded by being openly vilified and secretly studied. He became the manual of statesmen and the bugbear of moralists. While Catharine de' Medici, Thomas Cromwell and Francis Bacon chewed, swallowed and digested his pages, the dramatist had only to put in a sneer or an abusive sarcasm at the expense of the Florentine—and there were very many such allusions to him on the Elizabethan stage—to be sure of a round of applause from the audience. While Machiavelli found few open defenders, efforts to refute him were numerous. When Reginald Pole said that his works were written by the evil one a chorus of Jesuits sang amen and the church put his writings on the Index. The Huguenots were not less vociferous in opposition. Among them Innocent Gentillet attacked not only his morals but his talent, saying that his maxims were drawn from an observation of small states only, and that his judgment of the policy suitable to large nations was of the poorest.

{592} It is fair to try The Prince by the author's own standards. He did not purpose, in Bacon's phrase, to describe what men ought to be but what they actually are; he put aside ethical ideas not as false but as irrelevant. But this rejection was fatal even to his own purpose, "for what he put aside . . . were nothing less than the living forces by which societies subsist and governments are strong." [2] Calvin succeeded where the Florentine failed, as Lord Morley points out, because he put the moral ideal first.

[Sidenote: Erasmus]

The most striking contrast to Machiavelli was not forthcoming from the camp of the Reformers, but from that of the northern humanists, Erasmus and More. The Institution of a Christian Prince, by the Dutch scholar, is at the antipodes of the Italian thesis. Virtue is inculcated as the chief requisite of a prince, who can be considered good only in proportion as he fosters the wealth and the education of his people. He should levy no taxes, if possible, but should live parsimoniously off his own estate. He should never make war, save when absolutely necessary, even against the Infidel, and should negotiate only such treaties as have for their principal object the prevention of armed conflict.

Still more noteworthy than his moral postulates, is Erasmus's preference for the republican form of government. In the Christian Prince, dedicated as it was to the emperor, he spoke as if kings might and perhaps ought to be elected, but in his Adages he interpreted the spirit of the ancients in a way most disparaging to monarchy. Considering how carefully this work was studied by promising youths at the impressionable age, it is not too much to regard it as one of the main sources of the marked republican current of thought throughout the century. Under the heading, "Fools {593} and kings are born such," he wrote: "In all history, ancient and recent, you will scarcely find in the course of several centuries one or two princes, who, by their signal folly, did not bring ruin on humanity." In another place, after a similar remark, he continues:

I know not whether much of this is not to be imputed to ourselves. We trust the rudder of a vessel, where a few sailors and some goods alone are in jeopardy, to none but skilful pilots; but the state, wherein is comprised the safety of so many thousands, we leave to the guidance of any chance hands. A charioteer must learn, reflect upon and practice his art; a prince needs only to be born. Yet government is the most difficult, as it is the most honorable, of sciences. Shall we choose the master of a ship and not choose him who is to have the care of so many cities and so many souls? . . . Do we not see that noble cities are erected by the people and destroyed by princes? that a state grows rich by the industry of its citizens and is plundered by the rapacity of its princes? that good laws are enacted by elected magistrates and violated by kings? that the people love peace and the princes foment war?

There is far too much to the same purpose to quote, which in all makes a polemic against monarchy not exceeded by the fiercest republicans of the next two generations. It is true that Erasmus wrote all this in 1515, and half took it back after the Peasants' War. "Princes must be endured," he then thought, "lest tyranny give place to anarchy, a still greater evil."

[Sidenote: Reformation]

As one of the principal causes of the Reformation was the strengthening of national self-consciousness, so conversely one of the most marked results of the movement was the exaltation of the state. The Reformation began to realize, though at first haltingly, the separation of church and state, and it endowed the latter with much wealth, with many privileges and with high prerogatives and duties up to that time {594} belonging to the former. It is true that all the innovators would have recoiled from bald Erastianism, which is not found in the theses of Thomas Erastus, [Sidenote: Erastus, 1524-83] but in the free-thinker Thomas Hobbes. [Sidenote: Hobbes, 1588-1679] Whereas the Reformers merely said that the state should be charged with the duty of enforcing orthodoxy and punishing sinners, Hobbes drew the logical inference that the state was the final authority for determining religious truth. That Hobbes's conclusion was only the reductio ad absurdum of the Reformation doctrine was hidden from the Reformers themselves by their very strong belief in an absolute and ascertainable religious truth.

The tendency of both Luther and Calvin to exalt the state took two divergent forms according to their understanding of what the state was. Lutheranism became the ally of absolute monarchy, whereas Calvinism had in it a republican element. It is no accident that Germany developed a form of government in which a paternal but bureaucratic care of the people supplied the place of popular liberty, whereas America, on the whole the most Calvinistic of the great states, carried to its logical conclusion the idea of the rule of the majority. The English Reformation was at first Lutheran in this respect, but after 1580 it began to take the strong Calvinistic tendency that led to the Commonwealth.

[Sidenote: Luther]

While Luther cared enormously for social reform, and did valiant service in its cause, he harbored a distrust of the people that grates harshly on modern ears. Especially after the excesses of the Peasants' War and the extravagance of Muenzer, he came to believe that "Herr Omnes" was capable of little good and much evil. "The princes of this world are gods," he once said, "the common people are Satan, through whom God sometimes does what at other times he does {595} directly through Satan, i.e., makes rebellion as a punishment for the people's sins." And again: "I would rather suffer a prince doing wrong than a people doing right." Passive obedience to the divinely ordained "powers that be" was therefore the sole duty of the subject. "It is in no wise proper for anyone who would be a Christian to set himself up against his government, whether it act justly or unjustly," he wrote in 1530.

That Luther turned to the prince as the representative of the divine majesty in the state is due not only to Scriptural authority but to the fact that there was no material for any other form of government to be found in Germany. He was no sycophant, nor had he any illusions as to the character of hereditary monarchs. In his Treatise on Civil Authority, [Sidenote: 1523] dedicated to his own sovereign, Duke John of Saxony, he wrote: "Since the foundation of the world a wise prince has been a rare bird and a just one much rarer. They are generally the biggest fools and worst knaves on earth, wherefore one must always expect the worst of them and not much good, especially in divine matters." They distinctly have not the right, he adds, to decide spiritual things, but only to enforce the decisions of the Christian community.

Feeling the necessity for some bridle in the mouth of the emperor and finding no warrant for the people to curb him, Luther groped for the notion of some legal limitation on the monarch's power. The word "constitution" so familiar to us, was lacking then, but that the idea was present is certain. The German Empire had a constitution, largely unwritten but partly statutory. The limitations on the imperial power were then recognized by an Italian observer, Quirini. [Sidenote: 1507] When they were brought to Luther's attention he admitted the right of the German states to resist by force {597} imperial acts of injustice contrary to positive laws. Moreover, he always maintained that no subject should obey an order directly contravening the law of God. In these limitations on the government's power, slight as they were, were contained the germs of the later Calvinistic constitutionalism.

[Sidenote: Reformed Church]

While many of the Reformers—Melanchthon, Bucer, Tyndale—were completely in accord with Luther's earlier doctrine of passive obedience, the Swiss, French and Scotch developed a consistent body of constitutional theory destined to guide the peoples into ordered liberty. Doubtless an influence of prime importance in the Reformed as distinct from the Lutheran church, was the form of ecclesiastical government. Congregationalism and Presbyterianism are practical object-lessons in democracy. Many writers have justly pointed out in the case of America the influence of the vestry in the evolution of the town meeting. In other countries the same cause operated in the same way, giving the British and French Protestants ample practice in representative government. [Sidenote: Zwingli] Zwingli asserted that the subject should refuse to act contrary to his faith. From the Middle Ages he took the doctrine of the identity of spiritual and civil authority, but he also postulated the sovereignty of the people, as was natural in a free-born Switzer. In fact, his sympathies were republican through and through.

[Sidenote: Calvin]

The clear political thinking of Calvin and his followers was in large part the result of the exigencies of their situation. Confronted with established power they were forced to defend themselves with pen as well as with sword. In France, especially, the ember of their thought was blown into fierce blaze by the winds of persecution. Not only the Huguenots took fire, but all their neighbors, until the kingdom of {597} France seemed on the point of anticipating the great Revolution by two centuries.

With the tocsins ringing in his ears, jangling discordantly with the servile doctrines of Paul and Luther, Calvin set to work to forge a theory that should combine liberty with order. Carrying a step further than had his masters the separation of civil and ecclesiastical authority, he yet regarded civil government as the most sacred and honorable of all merely human institutions. The form he preferred was an aristocracy, but where monarchy prevailed, Calvin was not prepared to recommend its overthrow, save in extreme cases. Grasping at Luther's idea of constitutional, or contractual, limitations on the royal power, he asserted that the king should be resisted, when he violated his rights, not by private men but by elected magistrates to whom the guardianship of the people's rights should be particularly entrusted. The high respect in which Calvin was held, and the clearness and comprehensiveness of his thought made him ultimately the most influential of the Protestant publicists. By his doctrine the Dutch, English, and American nations were educated to popular sovereignty.

[Sidenote: French republicans]

The seeds of liberty sown by Calvin might well have remained long hidden in the ground, had not the soil of France been irrigated with blood and scorched by the tyranny of the last Valois. Theories of popular rights, which sprang up with the luxuriance of the jungle after the day of St. Bartholomew, were already sprouting some years before it. The Estates General that met at Paris in March, 1561, demanded that the regency be put in the hands of Henry of Navarre and that the members of the house of Lorraine and the Chancellor L'Hopital be removed from all offices as not having been appointed by the Estates. In August {598} of the same year, thirty-nine representatives of the three Estates of thirteen provinces met, contemporaneously with the religious Colloquy of Poissy, at Pontoise, and there voiced with great boldness the claims of constitutional government. They demanded the right of the Estates to govern during the minority of the king; they claimed that the Estates should be summoned at least biennially; they forbade taxation, alienation of the royal domain or declaration of war without their consent. The further resolution that the persecution of the Huguenots should cease, betrayed the quarter from which the popular party drew its strength.

But if the voices of the brave deputies hardly carried beyond the senate-chamber, a host of pamphlets, following hard upon the great massacre, trumpeted the sounds of freedom to the four winds. Theodore Beza [Sidenote: Beza] published anonymously his Rights of Magistrates, developing Calvin's theory that the representatives of the people should be empowered to put a bridle on the king. The pact between the people and king is said to be abrogated if the king violates it.

[Sidenote: Hotman, 1573]

At the same time another French Protestant, Francis Hotman, published his Franco-Gallia, to show that France had an ancient and inviolable constitution. This unwritten law regulates the succession to the throne; by it the deputies hold their privileges in the Estates General; by it the laws, binding even on the king, are made. The right of the people can be shown, in Hotman's opinion, to extend even to deposing the monarch and electing his successor.

[Sidenote: Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, 1577]

A higher and more general view was taken in the Rights against Tyrants published under the pseudonym of Stephen Junius Brutus the Celt, and written by Philip du Plessis-Mornay. This brief but comprehensive survey, addressed to both Catholics and Protestants, {599} and aimed at Machiavelli as the chief supporter of tyranny, advanced four theses: 1. Subjects are bound to obey God rather than the king. This is regarded as self-evident. 2. If the king devastates the church and violates God's law, he may be resisted at least passively as far as private men are concerned, but actively by magistrates and cities. The author, who quotes from the Bible and ancient history, evidently has contemporary France in mind. 3. The people may resist a tyrant who is oppressing or ruining the state. Originally, in the author's view, the people either elected the king, or confirmed him, and if they have not exercised this right for a long time it is a legal maxim that no prescription can run against the public claims. Laws derive their sanction from the people, and should be made by them; taxes may only be levied by their representatives, and the king who exacts imposts of his own will is in no wise different from an enemy. The kings are not even the owners of public property, but only its administrators, are bound by the contract with the governed, and may be rightly punished for violating it. 4. The fourth thesis advanced by Mornay is that foreign aid may justly be called in against a tyrant.

[Sidenote: La Boetie, 1530-63]

Not relying exclusively on their own talents the Huguenots were able to press into the ranks of their army of pamphleteers some notable Catholics. In 1574 they published as a fragment, and in 1577 entire, The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, commonly called the Contr'un, by Stephen de la Boetie. This gentleman, dying at the age of thirty-three, had left all his manuscripts to his bosom friend Montaigne. The latter says that La Boetie composed the work as a prize declamation at the age of sixteen or eighteen. [Sidenote: 1546-8] But along with many passages in the pamphlet, which might have been suggested by Erasmus, are several {600} allusions that seem to point to the character of Henry III—in 1574 king of Poland and in 1577 king of France—and to events just prior to the time of publication. According to an attractive hypothesis, not fully proved, these passages were added by Montaigne himself before he gave the work to one of his several Huguenot friends or kinsmen. La Boetie, at any rate, appealed to the passions aroused by St. Bartholomew in bidding the people no longer to submit to one man, "the most wretched and effeminate of the nation," who has only two hands, two eyes, and who will fall if unsupported. And yet, he goes on rhetorically, "you sow the fruits of the earth that he may waste them; you furnish your houses for him to pillage them; you rear your daughters to glut his lust and your sons to perish in his wars; . . . you exhaust your bodies in labor that he may wallow in vile pleasures."

As Montaigne and La Boetie were Catholics, it is pertinent here to remark that tyranny produced much the same effect on its victims, whatever their religion. The Sorbonne, [Sidenote: The Sorbonne] consulted by the League, unanimously decided that the people of France were freed from their oath of allegiance to Henry III and could with a good conscience take arms against him. One of the doctors, Boucher, wrote to prove that the church and the people had the right to depose an assassin, a perjurer, an impious or heretical prince, or one guilty of sacrilege or witchcraft. A tyrant, he concluded, was a wild beast, whom it was lawful for the state as a whole or even for private individuals, to kill.

So firmly established did the doctrine of the contract between prince and people become that towards the end of the century one finds it taken for granted. The Memoires of the Huguenot soldier, poet and historian Agrippa d'Aubigne are full of republican sentiments, as, for example, "There is a binding obligation {601} between the king and his subjects," and "The power of the prince proceeds from the people."

But it must not be imagined that such doctrines passed without challenge. The most important writer on political science after Machiavelli, John Bodin, [Sidenote: Bodin, 1530-96] was on the whole a conservative. In his writings acute and sometimes profound remarks jostle quaint and abject superstitions. He hounded the government and the mob on witches with the vile zeal of the authors of the Witches' Hammer; and he examined all existing religions with the coolness of a philosopher. He urged on the attention of the world that history was determined in general by natural causes, such as climate, but that revolutions were caused partly by the inscrutable will of God and partly by the more ascertainable influence of planets.

His most famous work, The Republic, [Sidenote: 1576] is a criticism of Machiavelli and an attempt to bring politics back into the domain of morality. He defines a state as a company of men united for the purpose of living well and happily; he thinks it arose from natural right and social contract. For the first time Bodin differentiates the state from the government, defining sovereignty (majestas) as the attribute of the former. He classifies governments in the usual three categories, and refuses to believe in mixed governments. Though England puzzles him, he regards her as an absolute monarchy. This is the form that he decidedly prefers, for he calls the people a many-headed monster and says that the majority of men are incompetent and bad. Preaching passive obedience to the king, he finds no check on him, either by tyrannicide or by constitutional magistrates, save only in the judgment of God.

It is singular that after Bodin had removed all effective checks on the tyrant in this world, he should lay it down as a principle that no king should levy {602} taxes without his subjects' consent. Another contradiction is that whereas he frees the subject from the duty of obedience in case the monarch commands aught against God's law, he treats religion almost as a matter of policy, advising that, whatever it be, the statesman should not disturb it. Apart from the streak of superstition in his mind, his inconsistencies are due to the attempt to reconcile opposites—Machiavelli and Calvin. For with all his denunciation of the former's atheism and immorality, he, with his chauvinism, his defence of absolutism, his practical opportunism, is not so far removed from the Florentine as he would have us believe.

[Sidenote: Dutch republicans]

The revolution that failed in France succeeded in the Netherlands, and some contribution to political theory can be found in the constitution drawn up by the States General in 1580, when they recognized Anjou as their prince, and in the document deposing Philip in 1581. Both assume fully the sovereignty of the people and the omnicompetence of their elected representatives. As Oldenbarnevelt commented, "The cities and nobles together represent the whole state and the whole people." The deposition of Philip is justified by an appeal to the law of nature, and to the example of other tortured states, and by a recital of Philip's breaches of the laws and customs of the land.

[Sidenote: Knox]

Scotland, in the course of her revolution, produced almost as brilliant an array of pamphleteers as had France. John Knox maintained that, "If men, in the fear of God, oppose themselves to the fury and blind rage of princes, in doing so they do not resist God, but the devil, who abuses the sword and authority of God," and again, he asked, "What harm should the commonwealth receive if the corrupt affections of ignorant rulers were moderated and bridled by the {603} wisdom and discretion of godly subjects?" But the duty, he thought, to curb princes in free kingdoms and realms, does not belong to every private man, but "appertains to the nobility, sworn and born counsellors of the same." Carrying such doctrines to the logical result, Knox hinted to Mary that Daniel might have resisted Nebuchadnezzar and Paul might have resisted Nero with the sword, had God given them the power.

Another Scotch Protestant, John Craig, in support of the prosecution of Mary, said that it had been determined and concluded at the University of Bologna [Sidenote: 1554] that "all rulers, be they supreme or inferior, may be and ought to be reformed or deposed by them by whom they were chosen, confirmed and admitted to their office, as often as they break that promise made by oath to their subjects." Knox and Craig both argued for the execution of Mary on the ground that "it was a public speech among all peoples and among all estates, that the queen had no more liberty to commit murder nor adultery than any other private person." Knollys also told Mary that a monarch ought to be deposed for madness or murder.

To the zeal for religion animating Knox, George Buchanan [Sidenote: Buchanan] joined a more rational spirit of liberty and a stronger consciousness of positive right. His great work On the Constitution of Scotland derived all power from the people, asserted the responsibility of kings to their subjects and pleaded for the popular election of the chief magistrate. In extreme cases execution of the monarch was defended, though by what precise machinery he was to be arraigned was left uncertain; probably constitutional resistance was thought of, as far as practicable, and tyrannicide was considered as a last resort. "If you ask anyone," says our author, "what he thinks of the punishment of {604} Caligula, Nero or Domitian, I think no one will be so devoted to the royal name as not to confess that they rightly paid the penalty of their crimes."

[Sidenote: English monarchists]

In England the two tendencies, the one to favor the divine right of kings, the other for constitutional restraint, existed side by side. The latter opinion was attributed by courtly divines to the influence of Calvin. Matthew Hutton blamed the Reformer because "he thought not so well of a kingdom as of a popular state." "God save us," wrote Archbishop Parker, "from such a visitation as Knox has attempted in Scotland, the people to be orderers of things." This distinguished prelate preached that disobedience to the queen was a greater crime than sacrilege or adultery, for obedience is the root of all virtues and the cause of all felicity, and "rebellion is not a single fault, like theft or murder, but the cesspool and swamp of all possible sins against God and man." Bonner was charged by the government of Mary to preach that all rebels incurred damnation. Much later Richard Hooker warned his countrymen that Puritanism endangered the prerogatives of crown and nobility.

[Sidenote: and republicans]

But there were not wanting champions of the people. Reginald Pole asserted the responsibility of the sovereign, though in moderate language. Bishop John Ponet wrote A Treatise on Politic Power to show that men had the right to depose a bad king and to assassinate a tyrant. The haughty Elizabeth herself often had to listen to drastic advice. When she visited Cambridge she was entertained by a debate on tyrannicide, in which one bold clerk asserted that God might incite a regicide; and by a discussion of the respective advantages of elective and hereditary monarchy, one speaker offering to maintain the former with his life and, if need be, with his death. When Elizabeth, after hearing a refractory Parliament, complained to the {605} Spanish ambassador that "she could not tell what those devils were after" his excellency replied, "They want liberty, madam, and if princes do not look to themselves" they will soon find that they are drifting to revolution and anarchy. Significant, indeed, was the silent work of Parliament in building up the constitutional doctrine of its own omnicompetence and of its own supremacy.

[Sidenote: Tyrannicide]

One striking aberration in the political theory of that time was the prominence in it of the appeal to tyrannicide. Schooled by the ancients who sang the praises of Harmodius and Aristogiton, by the biblical example of Ehud and Eglon, and by various medieval publicists, and taught the value of murder by the princes and popes who set prices on each other's heads, an extraordinary number of sixteenth century divines approved of the dagger as the best remedy for tyranny. Melanchthon wished that God would raise up an able man to slay Henry VIII; John Ponet and Cajetan and the French theologian Boucher admitted the possible virtue of assassination. But the most elaborate statement of the same doctrine was put by the Spanish Jesuit Mariana, in a book On the King and his Education published in 1599, with an official imprimatur, a dedication to the reigning monarch and an assertion that it was approved by learned and grave men of the Society of Jesus. It taught that the prince holds sway solely by the consent of the people and by ancient law, and that, though his vices are to be borne up to a certain point, yet when he ruins the state he is a public enemy, to slay whom is not only permissible but glorious for any man brave enough to despise his own safety for the public good.

If one may gather the official theory of the Catholic church from the contradictory statements of her doctors, she advocated despotism tempered by {606} assassination. No Lutheran ever preached the duty of passive obedience more strongly than did the Catechism of the Council of Trent.

[Sidenote: Radicals]

A word must be said about the more radical thought of the time. All the writers just analysed saw things from the standpoint of the governing and propertied classes. But the voice of the poor came to be heard now and then, not only from their own mouths but from that of the few authors who had enough imagination to sympathize with them. The idea that men might sometime live without any government at all is found in such widely different writers as Richard Hooker and Francis Rabelais. But socialism was then, as ever, more commonly advocated than anarchy. The Anabaptists, particularly, believed in a community of goods, and even tried to practice it when they got the chance. Though they failed in this, the contributions to democracy latent in their egalitarian spirit must not be forgotten. They brought down on themselves the severest animadversions from defenders of the existing order, by whatever confession they were bound. [Sidenote: 1535] Vives wrote a special tract to refute the arguments of the Anabaptists on communism. Luther said that the example of the early Christians did not authorize communism for, though the first disciples pooled their own goods, they did not try to seize the property of Pilate and Herod. Even the French Calvinists, in their books dedicated to liberty, referred to the Anabaptists as seditious rebels worthy of the severest repression.

[Sidenote: Utopia, 1516]

A nobler work than any produced by the Anabaptists, and one that may have influenced them not a little, was the Utopia of Sir Thomas More. He drew partly on Plato, on Tacitus's Germania, on Augustine and on Pico della Mirandola, and for the outward framework of his book on the Four Voyages of Americus Vespuccius. {607} But he relied mostly on his own observation of what was rotten in the English state where he was a judge and a ruler of men. He imagined an ideal country, Utopia, a place of perfect equality economically as well as politically. It was by government an elective monarchy with inferior magistrates and representative assembly also elected. The people changed houses every ten years by lot; they considered luxury and wealth a reproach. "In other places they speak still of the common wealth but every man procureth his private wealth. Here where nothing is private the common affairs be earnestly looked upon." "What justice is this, that a rich goldsmith or usurer should have a pleasant and wealthy living either by idleness or by unnecessary occupation, when in the meantime poor laborers, carters, ironsmiths, carpenters and plowmen by so great and continual toil . . . do yet get so hard and so poor a living and live so wretched a life that the condition of the laboring beasts may seem much better and wealthier?" "When I consider and weigh in my mind all these commonwealths which nowadays anywhere do flourish, [Sidenote: The commonwealth] so God help me, I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth." More was convinced that a short day's labor shared by everyone would produce quite sufficient wealth to keep all in comfort. He protests explicitly against those who pretend that there are two sorts of justice, one for governments and one for private men. He repudiates the doctrine that bad faith is necessary to the prosperity of a state; the Utopians form no alliances and carry out faithfully the few and necessary treaties that they ratify. Moreover they dishonor war above all things.

In the realm of pure economic and social theory {608} something, though not much, was done. Machiavelli believed that the growth of population in the north and its migration southwards was a constant law, an idea derived from Paulus Diaconus and handed on to Milton. He even derived "Germany" from "germinare." A more acute remark, anticipating Malthus, was made by the Spanish Jesuit John Botero [Sidenote: Botero, 1589] who, in his Reason of State, pointed out that population was absolutely dependent on means of subsistence. He concluded a priori that the population of the world had remained stationary for three thousand years.

[Sidenote: Mercantile economics]

Statesmen then labored under the vicious error, drawn from the analogy of a private man and a state, that national wealth consisted in the precious metals. The stringent and universal laws against the export of specie and intended to encourage its import, proved a considerable burden on trade, though as a matter of fact they only retarded and did not stop the flow of coin. The striking rise in prices during the century attracted some attention. Various causes were assigned for it, among others the growth of population and the increase of luxury. Hardly anyone saw that the increase in the precious metals was the fundamental cause, but several writers, among them Bodin, John Hales and Copernicus, saw that a debased currency was responsible for the acute dearness of certain local markets.

[Sidenote: Usury]

The lawfulness of the taking of usury greatly exercised the minds of men of that day. The church on traditional grounds had forbidden it, and her doctors stood fast by her precept, though an occasional individual, like John Eck, could be found to argue for it. Luther was in principle against allowing a man "to sit behind his stove and let his money work for him," but he weakened enough to allow moderate interest in given circumstances. Zwingli would allow interest to {609} be taken only as a form of profit-sharing. Calvin said: "If we forbid usury wholly we bind consciences by a bond straiter than that of God himself. But if we allow it the least in the world, under cover of our permission someone will immediately make a general and unbridled licence." The laws against the taking of interest were gradually relaxed throughout the century, but even at its close Bacon could only regard usury as a concession made on account of the hardness of men's hearts.



[1] In Greek the words "politics" and "ethics" both have a wider meaning than they have in English.

[2] Lord Morley.



SECTION 4. SCIENCE

[Sidenote: Inductive method]

The glory of sixteenth-century science is that for the first time, on a large scale, since the ancient Greeks, did men try to look at nature through their own eyes instead of through those of Aristotle and the Physiologus. Bacon and Vives have each been credited with the discovery of the inductive method, but, like so many philosophers, they merely generalized a practice already common at their time. Save for one discovery of the first magnitude, and two or three others of some little importance, the work of the sixteenth century was that of observing, describing and classifying facts. This was no small service in itself, though it does not strike the imagination as do the great new theories.

[Sidenote: Mathematics]

In mathematics the preparatory work for the statement and solution of new problems consisted in the perfection of symbolism. As reasoning in general is dependent on words, as music is dependent on the mechanical invention of instruments, so mathematics cannot progress far save with a simple and adequate symbolism. The introduction of the Arabic as against the Roman numerals, and particularly the introduction of the zero in reckoning, for the first time, in the later Middle Ages, allowed men to perform conveniently the four fundamental processes. The use of the signs + {610} and - for plus and minus (formerly written p. and m.), and of the sign = for equality and of V [square root symbol] for root, were additional conveniences. To this might be added the popularization of decimals by Simon Stevin in 1586, which he called "the art of calculating by whole numbers without fractions." How clumsy are all things at their birth is illustrated by his method of writing decimals by putting them as powers of one-tenth, with circles around the exponents; e.g., the number that we should write 237.578, he wrote 237(to the power 0) 5(to the power 1) 7(to the power 2) 8 (to the power 3). He first declared for decimal systems of coinage, weights and measures.

[Sidenote: Algebra 1494]

Algebraic notation also improved vastly in the period. In a treatise of Lucas Paciolus we find cumbrous signs instead of letters, thus no. (numero) for the known quantity, co. (cosa) for the unknown quantity, ce. (censo) for the square, and cu. (cubo) for the cube of the unknown quantity. As he still used p. and m. for plus and minus, he wrote 3co.p.4ce.m.5cu.p.2ce.ce.m.6no. for the number we should write 3x + 4x(power 2) - 5x(power 3) + 2x(power 4) - 6a. The use of letters in the modern style is due to the mathematicians of the sixteenth century. The solution of cubic and of biquadratic equations, at first only in certain particular forms, but later in all forms, was mastered by Tartaglia and Cardan. The latter even discussed negative roots, whether rational or irrational.

[Sidenote: Geometry]

Geometry at that time, as for long afterwards, was dependent wholly on Euclid, of whose work a Latin translation was first published at Venice. [Sidenote: 1505] Copernicus with his pupil George Joachim, called Rheticus, and Francis Vieta, made some progress in trigonometry. Copernicus gave the first simple demonstration of the fundamental formula of spherical trigonometry; Rheticus made tables of sines, tangents and secants {611} of arcs. Vieta discovered the formula for deriving the sine of a multiple angle.

[Sidenote: Cardan, 1501-76]

As one turns the pages of the numerous works of Jerome Cardan one is astonished to find the number of subjects on which he wrote, including, in mathematics, choice and chance, arithmetic, algebra, the calendar, negative quantities, and the theory of numbers. In the last named branch it was another Italian, Maurolycus, who recognized the general character of mathematics as "symbolic logic." He is indeed credited with understanding the most general principle on which depends all mathematical deduction.[1] Some of the most remarkable anticipations of modern science were made by Cardan. He believed that inorganic matter was animated, and that all nature was a progressive evolution. Thus his statement that all animals were originally worms implies the indefinite variability of species, just as his remark that inferior metals were unsuccessful attempts of nature to produce gold, might seem to foreshadow the idea of the transmutation of metals under the influence of radioactivity. It must be remembered that such guesses had no claim to be scientific demonstrations.

The encyclopaedic character of knowledge was then, perhaps, one of its most striking characteristics. Bacon was not the first man of his century to take all knowledge for his province. In learning and breadth of view few men have ever exceeded Conrad Gesner, [Sidenote: Gesner] called by Cuvier "the German Pliny." His History of Animals (published in many volumes 1551-87) was the basis of zooelogy until the time of Darwin. [Sidenote: Zooelogy] He {612} drew largely on previous writers, Aristotle and Albertus Magnus, but he also took pains to see for himself as much as possible. The excellent illustrations for his book, partly drawn from previous works but mostly new, added greatly to its value. His classification, though superior to any that had preceded it, was in some respects astonishing, as when he put the hippopotamus among aquatic animals with fish, and the bat among birds. Occasionally he describes a purely mythical animal like "the monkey-fox." It is difficult to see what criterion of truth would have been adequate for the scholar at that time. A monkey-fox is no more improbable than a rhinoceros, and Gesner found it necessary to assure his readers that the rhinoceros really existed in nature and was not a creation of fancy.

[Sidenote: Leonardo]

As the master of modern anatomy and of several other branches of science, stands Leonardo da Vinci. It is difficult to appraise his work accurately because it is not yet fully known, and still more because of its extraordinary form. Ho left thousands of pages of notes on everything and hardly one complete treatise on anything. He began a hundred studies and finished none of them. He had a queer twist to his mind that made him, with all his power, seek byways. The monstrous, the uncouth, fascinated him; he saw a Medusa in a spider and the universe in a drop of water. He wrote his notes in mirror-writing, from right to left; he illustrated them with a thousand fragments of exquisite drawing, all unfinished and tantalizing alike to the artist and to the scientist. His mind roamed to flying machines and submarines, but he never made one; the reason given by him in the latter case being his fear that it would be put to piratical use. He had something in him of Faust; in some respects he reminds us of William James, who also started as a {613} painter and ended as an omniverous student of outre things and as a psychologist.

[Sidenote: Anatomy]

If, therefore, the anatomical drawings made by Leonardo from about twenty bodies that he dissected, are marvellous specimens of art, he left it to others to make a really systematic study of the human body. His contemporary, Berengar of Carpi, professor at Bologna, first did this with marked success, classifying the various tissues as fat, membrane, flesh, nerve, fibre and so forth. So far from true is it that it was difficult to get corpses to work upon that he had at least a hundred. Indeed, according to Fallopius, another famous scientist, the Duke of Tuscany would occasionally send live criminals to be vivisected, thus making their punishment redound to the benefit of science. The Inquisitors made the path of science hard by burning books on anatomy as materialistic and indecent.

[Sidenote: Servetus]

Two or three investigators anticipated Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. Unfortunately, as the matter is of interest, Servetus's treatment of the subject, found in his work on The Trinity, is too long to quote, but it is plain that, along with various fallacious ideas, he had really discovered the truth that the blood all passes through heart and lungs whence it is returned to the other organs.

[Sidenote: Physics]

While hardly anything was done in chemistry, a large number of phenomena in the field of physics were observed now for the first time. Leonardo da Vinci measured the rapidity of falling bodies, by dropping them from towers and having the time of their passage at various stages noted. He thus found, correctly, that their velocity increased. It is also said that he observed that bodies always fell a little to the eastward of the plumb line, and thence concluded that the earth revolved on its axis. He made careful experiments with billiard balls, discovering that the {614} momentum of the impact always was preserved entire in the motion of the balls struck. He measured forces by the weight and speed of the bodies and arrived at an approximation of the ideas of mechanical "work" and energy of position. He thought of energy as a spiritual force transferred from one body to another by touch. This remarkable man further invented a hygrometer, explained sound as a wave-motion in the air, and said that the appearance known to us as "the old moon in the new moon's lap" was due to the reflection of earth-light.

Nicholas Tartaglia first showed that the course of a projectile was a parabola, and that the maximum range of a gun would be at an angle of 45 degrees.

Some good work was done in optics. John Baptist della Porta described, though he did not invent, the camera obscura. Burning glasses were explained. Leonard Digges even anticipated the telescope by the use of double lenses.

Further progress in mechanics was made by Cardan who explained the lever and pulley, and by Simon Stevin who first demonstrated the resolution of forces. He also noticed the difference between stable and unstable equilibrium, and showed that the downward pressure of a liquid is independent of the shape of the vessel it is in and is dependent only on the height. He and other scholars asserted the causation of the tides by the moon.

[Sidenote: Magnetism]

Magnetism was much studied. When compasses were first invented it was thought that they always pointed to the North Star under the influence of some stellar compulsion. But even in the fifteenth century it was noticed independently by Columbus and by German experimenters that the needle did not point true north. As the amount of its declination varies at {615} different places on the earth and at different times, this was one of the most puzzling facts to explain. One man believed that the change depended on climate, another that it was an individual property of each needle. About 1581 Robert Norman discovered the inclination, or dip of the compass. These and other observations were summed up by William Gilbert [Sidenote: Gilbert] in his work on The Magnet, Magnetic Bodies and the Earth as a great Magnet. [Sidenote: 1600] A great deal of his space was taken in that valuable destructive criticism that refutes prevalent errors. His greatest discovery was that the earth itself is a large magnet. He thought of magnetism as "a soul, or like a soul, which is in many things superior to the human soul as long as this is bound by our bodily organs." It was therefore an appetite that compelled the magnet to point north and south. Similar explanations of physical and chemical properties are found in the earliest and in some of the most recent philosophers.

[Sidenote: Geography]

As might be expected, the science of geography, nourished by the discoveries of new lands, grew mightily. Even the size of the earth could only be guessed at until it had been encircled. Columbus believed that its circumference at the equator was 8000 miles. The stories of its size that circulated after Magellan were exaggerated by the people. Thus Sir David Lyndsay in his poem The Dreme [Sidenote: 1528] quotes "the author of the sphere" as saying that the earth was 101,750 miles in circumference, each mile being 5000 feet. The author referred to was the thirteenth century Johannes de Sacro Bosco (John Holywood). Two editions of his work, De Sphaera, that I have seen, one of Venice, 1499, and one of Paris, 1527, give the circumference of the earth as 20,428 miles, but an edition published at Wittenberg in 1550 gives it as 5,400, probably an {616} attempt to reduce the author's English miles to German ones. [Sidenote: 1551] Robert Recorde calculated the earth's circumference at 21,300 miles.[2]

Rough maps of the new lands were drawn by the companions of the discoverers. Martin Waldseemuller [Sidenote: 1507] published a large map of the world in twelve sheets and a small globe about 4 1/2 inches in diameter, in which the new world is for the first time called America. The next great advance was made by the Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator [Sidenote: Mercator, 1512-94] whose globes and maps—some of them on the projection since called by his name—are extraordinarily accurate for Europe and the coast of Africa, and fairly correct for Asia, though he represented that continent as too narrow. He included, however, in their approximately correct positions, India, the Malay peninsula, Sumatra, Java and Japan. America is very poorly drawn, for though the east coast of North America is fairly correct, the continent is too broad and the rest of the coasts vague. He made two startling anticipations of later discoveries, the first that he separated Asia and America by only a narrow strait at the north, and the second that he assumed the existence of a continent around the south pole. This, however, he made far too large, thinking that the Tierra del Fuego was part of it and drawing it so as to come near the south coast of Africa and of Java. His maps of Europe were based on recent and excellent surveys.

[Sidenote: Astronomy]

Astronomy, the oldest of the sciences, had made much progress in the tabulation of material. The apparent orbits of the sun, moon, planets, and stars had been correctly observed, so that eclipses might be predicted, conjunction of planets calculated, and that {617} gradual movement of the sun through the signs of the zodiac known as the precession of the equinoxes, taken account of. To explain these movements the ancients started on the theory that each heavenly body moved in a perfect circle around the earth; the fixed stars were assigned to one of a group of revolving spheres, the sun, moon and five planets each to one, making eight in all. But it was soon observed that the movements of the planets were too complicated to fall into this system; the number of moving spheres was raised to 27 before Aristotle and to 56 by him. To these concentric spheres later astronomers added eccentric spheres, moving within others, called epicycles, and to them epicycles of the second order; in fact astronomers were compelled:

To build, unbuild, contrive, To save appearances, to gird the sphere With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.

The complexity of this system, which moved the mirth of Voltaire and, according to Milton, of the Almighty, was such as to make it doubted by some thinkers even in antiquity. Several men thought the earth revolved on its axis, but the hypothesis was rejected by Aristotle and Ptolemy. Heracleides, in the fourth century B. C., said that Mercury and Venus circled around the sun, and in the third century Aristarchus of Samos actually anticipated, though it was a mere guess, the heliocentric theory.

Just before Copernicus various authors seemed to hint at the truth, but in so mystical or brief a way that little can be made of their statements. Thus, Nicholas of Cusa [Sidenote: Nicholas of Cusa, 1400-64] argued that "as the earth cannot be the center of the universe it cannot lack all motion." Leonardo believed that the earth revolved on its axis, and stated that it was a star and would look, to a man on {618} the moon, as the moon does to us. In one place he wrote, "the sun does not move,"—only that enigmatical sentence and nothing more.

[Sidenote: Copernicus, 1473-1543]

Nicholas Copernicus was a native of Thorn in Poland, himself of mixed Polish and Teutonic blood. At the age of eighteen he went to the university of Cracow, where he spent three years. In 1496 he was enabled by an ecclesiastical appointment to go to Italy, where he spent most of the next ten years in study. He worked at the universities of Bologna, Padua and Ferrara, and lectured—though not as a member of the university—at Rome. His studies were comprehensive, including civil law, canon law, medicine, mathematics, and the classics. At Padua, on May 31, 1503, he was made doctor of canon law. He also studied astronomy in Italy, talked with the most famous professors of that science and made observations of the heavens.

Copernicus's uncle was bishop of Ermeland, a spiritual domain and fief of the Teutonic Order, under the supreme suzerainty, at least after 1525, of the king of Poland. Here Copernicus spent the rest of his life; the years 1506-1512 in the bishop's palace at Heilsberg, after 1512, except for two not long stays at Allenstein, as a canon at Frauenburg.

This little town, near but not quite on the Baltic coast, is ornamented by a beautiful cathedral. On the wall surrounding the close is a small tower which the astronomer made his observatory. Here, in the long frosty nights of winter and in the few short hours of summer darkness, he often lay on his back examining the stars. He had no telescope, and his other instruments were such crude things as he put together himself. The most important was what he calls the Instrumentum parallacticum, a wooden isosceles triangle with legs eight feet long divided into 1000 {619} divisions by ink marks, and a hypotenuse divided into 1414 divisions. With this he determined the height of the sun, moon and stars, and their deviation from the vernal point. To this he added a square (quadrum) which told the height of the sun by the shadow thrown by a peg in the middle of the square. A third instrument, also to measure the height of a celestial body, was called the Jacob's staff. His difficulties were increased by the lack of any astronomical tables save those poor ones made by Greeks and Arabs. The faults of these were so great that the fundamental star, i.e., the one he took by which to measure the rest, Spica, was given a longitude nearly 40 degrees out of the true one.

[Sidenote: Copernican hypothesis]

Nevertheless with these poor helps Copernicus arrived, and that very early, at his momentous conclusion. His observations, depending as they did on the weather, were not numerous. His time was spent largely in reading the classic astronomers and in working out the mathematical proofs of his hypothesis. He found hints in quotations from ancient astronomers in Cicero and Plutarch that the earth moved, but he, for the first time, placed the planets in their true position around the sun, and the moon as a satellite of the earth. He retained the old conception of the primum mobile or sphere of fixed stars though he placed it at an infinitely greater distance than did the ancients, to account for the absence of any observed alteration (parallax) in the position of the stars during the year. He also retained the old conception of circular orbits for the planets, though at one time he considered the possibility of their being elliptical, as they are. Unfortunately for his immediate followers the section on this subject found in his own manuscript was cut out of his printed book.

The precise moment at which Copernicus {620} formulated his theory in his own mind cannot be told with certainty, but it was certainly before 1516. He kept back his books for a long time, but his light was not placed under a bushel nevertheless. [Sidenote: 1520] The first rays of it shown forth in a tract by Celio Calcagnini of which only the title, "That the earth moves and the heaven is still," has survived. Some years later Copernicus wrote a short summary of his book, for private circulation only, entitled "A Short commentary on his hypotheses concerning the celestial movements." A fuller account of them was given by his friend and disciple, [Sidenote: Narratio prima, 1540] George Joachim, called Rheticus, who left Wittenberg, where he was teaching, to sit at the master's feet, and who published what was called The First Account.

Finally, Copernicus was persuaded to give his own work to the public. Foreseeing the opposition it was likely to call forth, he tried to forestall criticism by a dedication to the Pope Paul III. Friends at Nuremberg undertook to find a printer, and one of them, the Lutheran pastor Andrew Osiander, with the best intentions, did the great wrong of inserting an anonymous preface stating that the author did not advance his hypotheses as necessarily true, but merely as a means of facilitating astronomical calculations. At last the greatest work of the century, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, [Sidenote: De revolutionibus orbium caelestium, 1543] came from the press; a copy was brought to the author on his death bed.

The first of the six books examines the previous authorities, the second proposes the new theory, the third discusses the precession of the equinoxes, the fourth proves that the moon circles the earth, the fifth and most important proves that the planets, including the earth, move around the sun, and gives correctly the time of the orbits of all the planets then known, from Mercury with eighty-eight days to Saturn with thirty {621} years. The sixth book is on the determination of latitude and longitude from the fixed stars. Copernicus's proofs and reasons are absolutely convincing and valid as far as they go. It remained for Galileo and Newton to give further explanations and some modifications in detail of the new theory.

[Sidenote: Reception of the Copernican theory]

When one remembers the enormous hubbub raised by Darwin's Origin of Species, the reception of Copernicus's no less revolutionary work seems singularly mild. The idea was too far in advance of the age, too great, too paradoxical, to be appreciated at once. Save for a few astronomers like Rheticus and Reinhold, hardly anyone accepted it at first. It would have been miraculous had they done so.

Among the first to take alarm were the Wittenberg theologians, to whose attention the new theory was forcibly brought by their colleague Rheticus. Luther alludes to the subject twice or thrice in his table talk, most clearly on June 4, 1539, when

mention was made of a certain new astronomer, who tried to prove that the earth moved and not the sky, sun and moon, just as, when one was carried along in a boat or wagon, it seemed to himself that he was still and that the trees and landscape moved. "So it goes now," said Luther, "whoever wishes to be clever must not let anything please him that others do, but must do something of his own. Thus he does who wishes to subvert the whole of astronomy: but I believe the Holy Scriptures, which say that Joshua commanded the sun, and not the earth, to stand still."

In his Elements of Physics, written probably in 1545, but not published until 1549, Melanchthon said:

The eyes bear witness that the sky revolves every twenty-four hours. But some men now, either for love of novelty, or to display their ingenuity, assert that the earth moves. . . . But it is hurtful and dishonorable to {622} assert such absurdities. . . . The Psalmist says that the sun moves and the earth stands fast. . . . And the earth, as the center of the universe, must needs be the immovable point on which the circle turns.

Apparently, however, Melanchthon either came to adopt the new theory, or to regard it as possible, for he left this passage entirely out of the second edition of the same work. [Sidenote: 1550] Moreover his relations with Rheticus continued warm, and Rheinhold continued to teach the Copernican system at Wittenberg.

The reception of the new work was also surprisingly mild, at first, in Catholic circles. As early as 1533 Albert Widmanstetter had told Clement VII of the Copernican hypothesis and the pope did not, at least, condemn it. Moreover it was a cardinal, Schoenberg, who consulted Paul III on the matter [Sidenote: 1536] and then urged Copernicus to publish his book, though in his letter the language is so cautiously guarded against possible heresy that not a word is said about the earth moving around the sun but only about the moon and the bodies near it so doing. [Sidenote: 1579] A Spanish theologian, Didacus a Stunica (Zuniga) wrote a commentary on Job, which was licensed by the censors, accepting the Copernican astronomy.

But gradually, as the implications of the doctrine became apparent, the church in self-defence took a strong stand against it. [Sidenote: March 5, 1616] The Congregation of the Index issued a decree saying, "Lest opinions of this sort creep in to the destruction of Catholic truth, the book of Nicholas Copernicus and others [defending his hypothesis] are suspended until they be corrected." A little later Galileo was forced, under the threat of torture, to recant this heresy. Only when the system had become universally accepted, did the church, in 1822, first expressly permit the faithful to hold it.

The philosophers were as shy of the new light as {623} the theologians. Bodin in France and Bacon in England both rejected it; the former was conservative at heart and the latter was never able to see good in other men's work, whether that of Aristotle or of Gilbert or of the great Pole. Possibly he was also misled by Osiander's preface and by Tycho Brahe. Giordano Bruno, however, welcomed the new idea with enthusiasm, saying that Copernicus taught more in two chapters than did Aristotle and the Peripatetics in all their works.

Astronomers alone were capable of weighing the evidence scientifically and they, at first, were also divided. Erasmus Reinhold, of Wittenberg, accepted it and made his calculations on the assumption of its truth, as did an Englishman, John Field. [Sidenote: 1556] Tycho Brahe, [Sidenote: Tycho Brahe, 1546-1601] on the other hand, tried to find a compromise between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. He argued that the earth could not revolve on its axis as the centrifugal force would hurl it to pieces, and that it could not revolve around the sun as in that case a change in the position of the fixed stars would be observed. Both objections were well taken, of course, considered in themselves alone, but both could be answered by a deeper knowledge. Brahe therefore considered the earth as the center of the orbits of the moon, sun, and stars, and the sun as the center of the orbits of the planets.

The attention to astronomy had two practical corollaries, the improvement of navigation and the reform of the calendar. Several better forms of astrolabe, of "sun-compass" (or dial turnable by a magnet) and an "astronomical ring" for getting the latitude and longitude by observation of sun and star, were introduced.

[Sidenote: Reform of calendar]

The reform of the Julian calendar was needed on account of the imperfect reckoning of the length of the {624} year as exactly 365 1/4 days; thus every four centuries there would be three days too much. It was proposed to remedy this for the present by leaving out ten days, and for the future by omitting leap-year every century not divisible by 400. The bull of Gregory XIII, [Sidenote: February 24, 1582] who resumed the duties of the ancient Pontifex Maximus in regulating time, enjoined Catholic lands to rectify their calendar by allowing the fifteenth of October, 1582, to follow immediately after the fourth. This was done by most of Italy, by Spain, Portugal, Poland, most of Germany, and the Netherlands. Other lands adopted the new calendar later, England not until 1752 and Russia not until 1917.

[1] I.e. the principle thus formulated in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. "Mathematics": "If s is any class and zero a member of it, also if when x is a cardinal number and a member of s, also x + 1 is a member of s, then the whole class of cardinal numbers is contained in s."

[2] Eratosthenes (276-196 B.C.) had correctly calculated the earth's circumference at 25,000, which Poseidonius (c. 135-50 B.C.) reduced to 18,000, in which he was followed by Ptolemy (2d century A.D.).

SECTION 5. PHILOSOPHY

[Sidenote: Science, religion and philosophy]

The interrelations of science, religion, and philosophy, though complex in their operation, are easily understood in their broad outlines. Science is the examination of the data of experience and their explanation in logical, physical, or mathematical terms. Religion, on the other hand, is an attitude towards unseen powers, involving the belief in the existence of spirits. Philosophy, or the search for the ultimate reality, is necessarily an afterthought. It comes only after man is sophisticated enough to see some difference between the phenomenon and the idea. It draws its premises from both science and religion: some systems, like that of Plato, being primarily religious fancy, some, like that of Aristotle, scientific realism.

The philosophical position taken by the Catholic church was that of Aquinas, Aristotelian realism. [Sidenote: The Reformers] The official commentary on the Summa was written at this time by Cardinal Cajetan. Compared to the steady orientation of the Catholic, the Protestant philosophers wavered, catching often at the latest style in thought, be it monism or pragmatism. Luther was the {625} spiritual child of Occam, and the ancestor of Kant. His individualism stood half-way between the former's nominalism and the latter's transcendentalism and subjectivism. But the Reformers were far less interested in purely metaphysical than they were in dogmatic questions. The main use they made of their philosophy was to bring in a more individual and less mechanical scheme of salvation. Their great change in point of view from Catholicism was the rejection of the sacramental, hierarchical system in favor of justification by faith. This was, in truth, a stupendous change, putting the responsibility for salvation directly on God, and dispensing with the mediation of priest and rite.

[Sidenote: Attitude towards reason]

But it was the only important change, of a speculative nature, made by the Reformers. The violent polemics of that and later times have concealed the fact that in most of his ideas the Protestant is but a variety of the Catholic. Both religions accepted as axiomatic the existence of a personal, ethical God, the immortality of the soul, future rewards and punishments, the mystery of the Trinity, the revelation, incarnation and miracles of Christ, the authority of the Bible and the real presence in the sacrament. Both equally detested reason.

He who is gifted with the heavenly knowledge of faith [says the Catechism of the Council of Trent] is free from an inquisitive curiosity; for when God commands us to believe, he does not propose to have us search into his divine judgments, nor to inquire their reasons and causes, but demands an immutable faith. . . . Faith, therefore, excludes not only all doubt, but even the desire of subjecting its truth to demonstration.