Frederick of Prussia said that Joseph always took the second step without having taken the first. In the end the emperor revoked all his changes and innovations except the abolition of serfdom and religious toleration.[115] Some of his measures were gradually realized through the nineteenth century. Others are now an object of political effort. +98. Adoption of mores of another age.+ The Renaissance was a period in which an attempt was made by one age to adopt the mores of another, as the latter were known through literature and art. The knowledge was very imperfect and mistaken, as indeed it necessarily must be, and the conceptions which were formed of the model were almost as fantastic as if they had been pure creations of the imagination. The learning of the Renaissance was necessarily restricted to the selected classes, and the masses either remained untouched by the faiths and fads of the learned, or accepted the same in grotesquely distorted forms. A phrase of a classical writer, or a fanciful conception of some hero of Plutarch, sufficed to enthuse a criminal, or to upset the mental equilibrium of a political speculator. The jumble of heterogeneous mores, and of ideas conformable to different mores, caused numbers to lose their mental equilibrium and to become victims either of enthusiasm or of melancholy.[116] The phenomena of suggestion were astounding and incalculable.[117] The period was marked by the dominion of dogmatic ideas, accepted as regulative principles for the mores. The result was the dominion of the phrase and the prevalence of hollow affectation. The men who were most thoroughly interested in the new learning, and had lost faith in the church and the religion of the Middle Ages, kept up the ritual of the traditional system. The Renaissance never made any new ritual. That is why it had no strong root and passed away as a temporary fashion. Hearn[118] is led from his study of Japan to say that "We could no more mingle with the old Greek life, if it were resurrected for us, no more become a part of it, than we could change our mental identities." The modern classicists have tried to resuscitate Greek standards, faiths, and ways. Individuals have met with a measure of success in themselves, and university graduates have to some extent reached common views of life and well living, but they have necessarily selected what features they would imitate, and so they have arbitrarily overruled their chosen authority. They have never won wide respect for it in modern society. The New England Puritans, in the seventeenth century, tried to build a society on the Bible, especially the books of Moses. The attempt was in every way a failure. It may well be doubted if any society ever existed of which the books referred to were a description, and the prescriptions were found ill adapted to seventeenth-century facts. The mores made by any age for itself are good and right for that age, but it follows that they can suit another age