We must here linger for a moment over Pico della Mirandola, before passing on to the general effects of humanism. He was the only man who loudly and vigorously defended the truth and science of all ages against the one-sided worship of classical antiquity.[469] He knew how to value not only Averroes and the Jewish investigators, but also the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages, according to the matter of their writings. He seems to hear them say, ‘We shall live for ever, not in the schools of word-catchers, but in the circle of the wise, where they talk not of the mother of Andromache or of the sons of Niobe, but of the deeper causes of things human and divine; he who looks closely will see that even the barbarians had intelligence (_mercurium_), not on the tongue but in the breast.’ Himself writing a vigorous and not inelegant Latin, and a master of clear exposition, he despised the purism of pedants and the current over-estimate of borrowed forms, especially when joined, as they often are, with one-sidedness, and involving indifference to the wider truth of the things themselves. Looking at Pico, we can guess at the lofty flight which Italian philosophy would have taken had not the counter-reformation annihilated the higher spiritual life of the people. CHAPTER IV. HUMANISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. Who now were those who acted as mediators between their own age and a venerated antiquity, and made the latter a chief element in the culture of the former? They were a crowd of the most miscellaneous sort, wearing one face to-day and another to-morrow; but they clearly felt themselves, and it was fully recognised by their time, that they formed a wholly new element in society. The ‘clerici vagantes’ of the twelfth century, whose poetry we have already referred to (p. 174), may perhaps be taken as their forerunner--the same unstable existence, the same free and more than free views of life, and the germs at all events of the same pagan tendencies in their poetry. But now, as competitor with the whole culture of the Middle Ages, which was essentially clerical and was fostered by the Church, there appeared a new civilisation, founding itself on that which lay on the other side of the Middle Ages. Its active representatives became influential[470] because they knew what the ancients knew, because they tried to write as the ancients wrote, because they began to think, and soon to feel, as the ancients thought and felt. The tradition to which they devoted themselves passed at a thousand points into genuine reproduction.