of experience which made these men the earlier leaders o this movement.

In this recovered literature the three new tendencies of thought previously mentioned find their basis and through it they first work themselves out. These tendencies lie at the foundation of the various conceptions of education prevalent during the following centuries. Opposed to the formal Aristotelianism of scholasticism there arose first a Platonism, or rather a Neoplatonism, that was wholly contradictory to every aspect of accepted thought and that expressed itself most thoroughly in the earlier stages of the Renaissance. Starting from the ultra-Platonic development of the last stages of Greek thought, it revealed itself in an extreme individualism which furnished the philosophical basis of the ideal of self-culture and self-development, in the efforts toward a purely self-centered education, and in the idea of human or collective immortality, or that aspiration to "live in minds made better by their presence" as a substitute for the heaven of the monastic rules. According to this view of life, all knowledge of the world, yes, even all knowledge of Goa, was locked up in man's knowledge of himself and was to be revealed through contemplation, introspection, self-analysis, just as the heaven it contemplated was one of its own creation. A second literary revival was that of a purer Aristotle, one shorn of much of the Oriental gloss of the Arabic commentators and one revealed rather in his physics than in the fragment of his metaphysics possessed by the Schoolmen. Through this Aristotle there was a working back to the point of view of the earlier Greek philosophers, concerned as they were in the theory of a natural universe rather than in one of knowledge or of man, and a working forward to that search for the knowledge of reality made by modern science. A third phase of this literary revival centered chiefly around Latin literature, and was opposed to the scholastic literature on account of its inferiority of form. Essentially individual

and concrete, hence æsthetic in its tendencies, the Renaissance temper rejected all dealing with abstract conceptions, and demanded the concrete, the real, that which appealed to the imagination and the heart, even though it was no more than the beauty of literary form alone. While all of these tendencies were apparent from the first, and while no definite schools represent this analysis of thought tendencies, yet the Platonic and individualistic tendency was characteristic of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries; the inductive Aristotelian and scientific aspect did not become dominant until the seventeenth; while the Ciceronian literary phase was virtually in control during all the intervening period.

We have spoken of all of this as a result of the discovery of the first of the Renaissance worlds-that of the ancients. In reality, what has been mentioned as the outcome of the revival of the scientific works of Aristotle and of the early Greek philosophers, while it was but one aspect of the world of ancient thought, led to this discovery of the world of nature. Through the beliefs and methods of the Greeks, the Renaissance students were led to direct observation and experimentation with natural phenomena, and through that to geographical discovery and exploration both by land and sea, and to those astronomical discoveries that were to become

the basis of modern scientific thought. Thus this aspect of Renaissance thought led in time to a modification of all aspects of thought, and connects directly with the work of Bacon and Descartes in the seventeenth century and with the physical and biological investigations of modern science. The combination of the first and second of these great world discoveries, the world portrayed in classical literature and the world revealed by introspective analysis of the emotional life, led to the production of art and literature, including poetry, the drama, and romance, to an interest in new motives as revealed in history and in contemporary life, and consequently to the formulation of the historical and social sci

ences.

While at first this development seems to be through the exclusion of the previously absorbing religious interest, yet during the sixteenth century it again becomes dominantly religious, but now on a humanistic rather than on a scholastic basis.

While all of these changes influenced educational ideals and practices and are operative in the formation of all modern conceptions of education, a full presentation of their meaning belongs rather to the history of the human intellect and of human society than to the narrower field of the history of education. Nevertheless, a brief historical sketch of the progress of the Renaissance is desirable as a basis for the discussion of the strictly educational bearing of the revival, since no great historical movement has ever been so thor oughly educational in its character.

The transition from the old learning to the new was not an abrupt one; the clear definition of the new spirit came about very gradually. Even its triumph did not involve the disappearance of the old spirit. Both in educational interests and in those wider ones involving the human intellect and the human spirit, old methods of thought as well as old ideas and ideals continued active for many centuries; in fact, they have persisted even to the present day. But the dominant thought, that which gives character to the period, soon came to be that aroused by the new knowledge.

THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.-As the political, religious, and intellectual life of the times centered in Italy, so also did the Renaissance movement. The period was the latter half of the fourteenth and all of the fifteenth century. The causes of this movement, as discoverable in the influence of the universities and the intensity of the intellectual activity of the thirteenth century, have been mentioned previously. The personal connecting link is found in Dante (1264-1321), whose partly medieval, partly modern, spirit has already

been noticed. But the man who earned the title of "the first modern man" was Petrarch (1304-1374). He it was who first broke completely with the medieval, who devoted him self to the study of the classics and to a reproduction of the classical spirit in literature, both in the vernacular and in classical Latin, with such a passion as soon to carry with him a great following of the leading minds of Italy. Petrarch was the first to choose Cicero as a master. He looked upon Cicero and his compeers as living personages. Much of Petrarch's epistolary work, the earliest embodiment of the new spirit, was imaginary correspondence with these ancient authors. So vitally did he seek to enter into their spirit that reciprocally their spirit in time became that of the Renaissance. Petrarch himself said that he stood between two ages, being the first to look back to the age of Augustine and realize all that had been lost, and the first to point out the way for its recovery.

During the later mediæval centuries a knowledge of the Latin classics was not an unknown thing, for the manuscript copies of many of these were in existence, and Vergil at least was quite well known. But there was little appreciation for their beauty as literature, little sympathy with the interests of the classical times, and little toleration of the study of these classics to the detriment of the study of dialectic based upon Aristotle, the study of the Sentences of Peter the Lombard, and of the patristic and scholastic literature in general. Against the dominant educational ideas of the times, against scholasticism and Aristotelianism, Petrarch strove with all his might. With his genius for leadership and his power of stimulating enthusiasm, he created a general interest in the classics in direct opposition to the ordinarily accepted interests of students, of institutions of learning, of the Church and of Churchmen. Petrarch was not alone in this; his significance here is merely as a repre sentative of a movement. But he holds a place in the history

of education as the first great representative of a new type of intellectual life. To-day, when we can readily obtain a knowledge of the best that has been thought and done with out going back to antiquity, it is difficult to realize the importance of this work. At that time there was no vernacular literature to speak of, and the human interests of the Greek and Latin literatures had been replaced by the narrow religious and ecclesiastical interests of the Middle Ages. Consequently there is no parallel between the importance of the study of Latin and Greek in recent centuries and its importance during these centuries of the Renaissance period.

The Work of Petrarch and his confrères possessed, not only this negative value of protest against the restrictive mediævalism, the perfectly adjusted world of thought and action, but it possessed also the positive merit of emphasizing the value of the opportunities of this life for self-development through the greatest variety of experiences and efforts wholly forbidden by the asceticism and self-abnegation of the mediæval spirit. His writings are the first in modern times to reveal the human soul in the whole gamut of passions, sufferings, and aspirations. Here is first found that attitude of selfanalysis that becomes a characteristic note in modern literature and thought.

As a reaction against the all-controlling, "other worldliness" of the Middle Ages, one aspect of this new motive was the substitution of the idea of a worldly immortality which later gave rise to that recrudescence of paganism character. istic of the Italian Renaissance. In the narrower sense none of Petrarch's writings are educational. The more important of them are his Sonnets in the vernacular, characterized by their introspective emotionalism, which give them an important place in the history of modern literature; his Lives of Ancient Men, wherein both the Greeks and Romans become alive to modern men; and his very numerous Letters, wherein are revealed the development and the dissemination of the