But those ideas are nevertheless maintained, even among the imperialists and adversaries of the Church, and it is only in rare spirits that we find a partly sceptical and partly mocking negation of them. Transcendency, the prescience of God, Who ordains, directs, and disposes of everything according to His will, bestows rewards and punishments, and intervenes mysteriously, always maintains its place in the distant background, in Dante as in Giovanni Villani, as in all the historians and chroniclers. Toward the close of the fifteenth century the theological conception makes a curious appearance in the French historian Comines, arm in arm with the most alert and unprejudiced policy of success at all costs. Worldliness, so rich, so various, and so complex, was yet without an ideal standard of comparison, and for this reason it was rather lived than thought, showing itself rather in richness of detail than systematically. The ancient elements of culture, which had passed from Aristotelianism into scholasticism, failed to act powerfully, because that part of Aristotelianism was particularly selected which was in harmony with Christian thought already translated into Platonic terms and dogmatized in a transcendental form by the fathers of the Church. Hence it has even been possible to note a pause in historiographical interest, where scholasticism has prevailed, a compendium of the type of that of Martin Polonus being held sufficient to serve the end of quotations for demonstration or for legal purposes. What was required upon entering a new period of progress (there is always progress, but 'periods of progress' are those in which the motion of the spirit seems to become accelerated and the fruit that has been growing ripe for centuries is rapidly plucked) was a direct conscious negation of transcendency and of Christian miracle, of ascesis and of eschatology, both in life and in thought a negation whose terms (heavenly and earthly life) had certainly been noted by medieval historiography, but had been allowed to endure and to progress, the one beside the other, without true and proper contact and conflict arising between them. IV THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE RENAISSANCE