The word Renaissance has of late years received a more extended significance than that which is implied in our English equivalent—the Revival of learning. We use it to denote the whole transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world;【F1】
though it is possible to assign certain limits to the period during which this transition took place, we cannot fix on any dates so positively as to say between this year and that the movement was accomplished.
To do so would be like trying to name the days on which spring in any particular season began and ended. The evolution has not been completed.
In like manner we cannot refer the whole phenomena of the Renaissance to any one cause or circumstance, or limit them within the field of any one department of human knowledge.【F2】
Students of literature and philosophy see in the Renaissance that discovery of manuscripts, that progress in philology and criticism, which led to a correct knowledge of the classics, to a fresh taste in poetry, to new systems of thought, to more accurate analysis, and finally to the emancipation of the conscience.
Men of science will discourse about the discovery of the solar system by Copernicus and Galileo, the anatomy of Vesalius. Men whose attention has been turned to the history of discoveries and inventions will point to the benefits conferred upon the world by the arts of printing and engraving, by the compass and the telescope.【F3】
They will insist that at the moment of the Renaissance all the instruments of mechanical utility started into existence, to aid the dissolution of what was rotten and must perish, to strengthen and perpetuate the new and useful and life-giving.
Yet neither any one of these answers, taken separately, nor indeed all of them together, will offer a solution of the problem.【F4】
By the term "renaissance," or new birth, is indicated a natural movement, not to be explained by this or that characteristic, but to be accepted as an effort of humanity in the onward progress in which we still participate.
The history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts or of sciences or of literature or even of nations.【F5】
It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races.