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THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION
THUS all over Europe commercialism 93 was rising. New needs were being discovered by men who were gaining fresh mastery over nature, and were set free from old restraints to struggle for individual pre-eminence. A fresh intelligence and mental energy was shedding its light over the more sordid side of the period of change. The study of the Greek literature at first hand was aiding this new intelligence among cultivated men, and also, since they did but half understand its spirit, was warping their minds into fresh error. For the science of history and the critical observation of events had not yet been born; and to 94 the ardent spirits of the Renaissance, there had never been but two peoples worth notice—to wit, the Greeks and Romans, whom their new disciples strove to imitate in every thing which was deemed of importance at the time.
Now also, as at all periods of intellectual ferment, Occultism, that is the magical conception of nature, obtained a numerous following. This, of course, was partly the result of the study of the recently-discovered writings of the last period of transition,—that of the early Christian centuries,—the Neo-Platonic and other Hermetic literature, joined to the fact that science, in the modern acceptation of the word, was in its first dawning. The science of the Renaissance is mainly a systematisation of medieval traditional science, with an admixture of the later classical and oriental theories, to which no doubt is added a certain amount of the results of genuine observation. It is represented by such men as Paracelsus, Nostradamus, and Cornelius Agrippa, and, we may add, by the mythical Dr. Faustus.