OPTIMISTIC WORLD-VIEW AND ETHICS IN THE RENAISSANCE AND POST-RENAISSANCE PERIODS Belief in Progress and Ethics THE essential characteristic of the modern age is this, that it thinks and acts in the spirit of a world- and life-affirmation which has never before shown itself with such active strength. This world-view breaks through in the Renaissance, first at the end of the fourteenth century, and it arises as a protest against the mediæval enslavement of the human spirit. The movement is helped to victory by the increasing knowledge of Greek philosophy in its original form which is the result of the migration to Italy about the middle of the fifteenth century of learned Greeks from Constantinople. Among the thinking men of that time there arises the belief that philosophy must be something more elemental and more living than Scholasticism made it. But the thought of antiquity would not have been sufficient by itself to keep alive this new world- and life-affirmation which appealed to it. It has not, in truth, the mentality required. But another kind of fuel is in time brought for the fire. Taking refuge from book-learning in nature, the men of that time discover the world. As seamen they reach countries whose very existence was not suspected, and they measure the size of the earth. As inquirers they press on into the infinite and the secrets of the universe, and learn by experience that forces governed by uniform laws are at work in it, and that man has power to make them serviceable to himself. The knowledge and power won by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Copernicus [pg 062] (1473-1543), Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo (1564-1642), and others are decisive for the current world-view. As a movement which draws its life solely from spiritual forces, the Renaissance passes its bloom-time comparatively quickly, and without forming much fruit. With Paracelsus (1493-1541), Bernardino Telesio (1508-1588), Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), and others, an enthusiastic nature-philosophy announces itself. It does not, however, reach full growth. The Renaissance has not strength enough to bring to birth a world- and life-affirming philosophy corresponding to their spirit. Here and there their thought surges for a time, like a rough sea, against the world-denying world-view of the Church. Then all is still. What we know definitely as the philosophy of modern times begins almost without any reference to the Renaissance. It springs not from any nature-philosophy, but from the problem of the theory of knowledge which was raised by Descartes, and from that starting-point philosophy has once more had laboriously to seek its way to a nature-philosophy.