The Age of the Reformation | Page 5

the clergy were wasting in
supine indolence and were riddled by the mockery of humanists, there
arose a new class, eager and able to take the helm of civilization, the
moneyed men of city and of trade. Nouveaux riches as they were, they

had an appetite for pleasure and for ostentation unsurpassed by any, a
love for the world and an impatience of the meek and lowly church,
with her ideal of poverty and of chastity. In their luxurious and leisured
homes they sheltered the arts that made life richer and the philosophy,
or religion, that gave them a good conscience in the work they loved.
Both Renaissance and Reformation were dwellers in the cities and in
the marts of commerce.
[Sidenote: National states]
It was partly the rise of the third estate, but partly also cultural factors,
such as the perfecting of the modern tongues, that made the national
state one of the characteristic products of modern times. Commerce
needs order and strong government; the men who paid the piper called
the tune; police and professional soldiery made the state, once so
racked by feudal wars, peaceful at home and dreaded abroad. If the
consequence of this was an increase in royal power, the kings were
among those who had greatness thrust upon them, rather than achieving
it for themselves. {6} They were but the symbols of the new, proudly
conscious nation, and the police commissioners of the large bankers
and traders.
[Sidenote: Individualism]
The reaction of nascent capitalism on the individual was no less
marked than on state and society, though it was not the only cause of
the new sense of personal worth. Just as the problems of science and of
art became most alluring, the man with sufficient leisure and resource
to solve them was developed by economic forces. In the Middle Ages
men had been less enterprising and less self-conscious. Their thought
was not of themselves as individuals so much as of their membership in
groups. The peoples were divided into well-marked estates, or classes;
industry was co-operative; even the great art of the cathedrals was
rather gild-craft than the expression of a single genius; even learning
was the joint property of universities, not the private accumulation of
the lone scholar. But with every expansion of the ego either through the
acquisition of wealth or of learning or of pride in great exploits, came a
rising self-consciousness and self-confidence, and this was the essence

of the individualism so often noted as one of the contrasts between
modern and medieval times. The child, the savage, and to a large extent
the undisciplined mind in all periods of life and of history, is conscious
only of object; the trained and leisured intellect discovers, literally by
"reflection," the subjective. He is then no longer content to be anything
less than himself, or to be lost in anything greater.
Just as men were beginning again to glory in their own powers came a
series of discoveries that totally transformed the world they lived in. So
vast a change is made in human thought and habit by some apparently
trivial technical inventions that it sometimes {7} seems as if the race
were like a child that had boarded a locomotive and half accidentally
started it, but could neither guide nor stop it. Civilization was born with
the great inventions of fire, tools, the domestication of [Sidenote:
Inventions] animals, writing, and navigation, all of them, together with
important astronomical discoveries, made prior to the beginnings of
recorded history. On this capital mankind traded for some millenniums,
for neither classic times nor the Dark Ages added much to the practical
sciences. But, beginning with the thirteenth century, discovery
followed discovery, each more important in its consequences than its
last. One of the first steps was perhaps the recovery of lost ground by
the restoration of the classics. Gothic art and the vernacular literatures
testify to the intellectual activity of the time, but they did not create the
new elements of life that were brought into being by the inventors.
What a difference in private life was made by the introduction of
chimneys and glass windows, for glass, though known to antiquity, was
not commonly applied to the openings that, as the etymology of the
English word implies, let in the wind! By the fifteenth century the
power of lenses to magnify and refract had been utilized, as mirrors,
then as spectacles, to be followed two centuries later by telescopes and
microscopes. Useful chemicals were now first applied to various
manufacturing processes, such as the tinning of iron. The compass,
with its weird power of pointing north, guided the mariner on uncharted
seas. The obscure inventor of gunpowder revolutionized the art of war
more than all the famous conquerors had done, and the polity of