Montaigne is not a hard and soulless sceptic. He is a well poised, modest thinker and an honest man. He is not a denier, but one whose mind is free from cant, humbug, pretentiousness. Historically he is one of the links between the best in modern education and the questioning Socrates whom he knew and loved. I trust that in presenting the Humanist tradition in this concrete manner, I have been able to suggest something of its spirit. It has a necessary place in liberal education because it helps liberate the mind from the clutches of opinionated ignorance, from the follies which prevail as truth in our own age, and from conceit and vanity to which our human nature is ever prone. CHAPTER XIII SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION--HUXLEY When the ancient Humanist, Protagoras, said, “Man is the measure of all things,” he probably did not mean that all things may be measured by man, for in his following sentence he is sceptical of our knowledge of many things. He meant rather that all our measurements are human. This independence of supernaturalism was not always characteristic of educated minds of antiquity, but it is one of the distinguishing features of the educational tradition which we have derived from Greece and Rome. Thus Aristotle would establish ethics in the life of reason. This same naturalistic bias also inspires those early attempts at science which were broken off under the influence of Christianity. The Renaissance was accompanied by a re-awakened interest in nature, and in human nature as part of nature as a whole. The trend toward naturalism is seen in art, in the resumption of scientific research and experimentation, and in the effort to supplant scholastic theology by the study of human letters. To Da Vinci, for instance, science, art, and letters were but the varied aspects of the same cultural awakening. But for the greater number of those who felt the influence of the Renaissance, science and letters became quite separate interests. The new learning of the Humanists was almost exclusively a literary scholarship. Erasmus and his followers had very little interest in natural science. They found in classic literature a body of mature wisdom ready to hand. Science on the contrary, was obliged to begin _de novo_, and slowly construct its instruments of thought, building, gradually a new system of knowledge. The brunt of the conflict with scholastic education fell upon the humanists. The real renaissance of science did not take place until the seventeenth century.