And what is here of importance is the relation of these mental presuppositions with the life of the time, with the general culture of the period, with the historical phase through which the human spirit was then passing. In these respects, Shakespeare was truly, as he has appeared to those who have best understood him, a man of the Renaissance, of that age, which, with its navigation, its commerce, its philosophies, its religious strifes, its natural science, its poems, its pictures, its statues, its graceful architecture, had set earthly life in full relief, and no longer permitted it to lose its colours, become pallid and dissolve in the rays of another world external to it, as had happened through the long period of the Middle Ages. But Shakespeare did not belong to the pleasure-seeking, joyous and pagan Renaissance, which is but a small aspect of the great movement, but rather to that side of it which was animated with new wants, with new religious tendencies, with the spirit of new philosophical research, full of doubts, permeated with flashes from the future. These flashes, which appeared only in the great thinkers, who were not yet able to arrest them and make of them distributors of a calm and equable light, were also irreducible to a radiant centre in its greatest poet, in whom philosophy served as a presupposition and did not form the essence of his mental life. It is therefore vain to seek in Shakespeare for what neither Bruno nor Campanella attained, nor even Descartes and Spinoza at a later date, namely the historical concept, of which we have already spoken, and it is also vain to talk of his Spinozistic or Shellingian pantheism.