Note 87 — Chapter X · FREETHOUGHT IN THE RENAISSANCE

Medicine was nearly as dogmatic as theology. Even philosophy was in large part shouldered aside by the financial motives which led men to study law in preference;87 and when the revival of ancient literature gained ground it absorbed energy to the detriment of scientific study,88 the wealthy amateurs being ready to pay high prices for manuscripts of classics, and for classical teaching; but not for patient investigation of natural fact. The humanists, so-called, were often forces of enlightenment and reform; witness such a type as the high-minded Pomponio Leto (Pomponius Laetus), pupil and successor of Lorenzo Valla, and one of the many “pagan” scholars of the later Renaissance;89 but the discipline of mere classical culture was insufficient to make them, as a body, qualified leaders either of thought or action,90 in such a society as that of decaying Italy. Only after the fall of Italian liberties, the decay of the Church’s wealth and power, the loss of commerce, and the consequent decline of the arts, did men turn to truly scientific pursuits. From Italy, indeed, long after the Reformation, came a new stimulus to freethought which affected all the higher civilization of northern Europe. But the failure to solve the political problem, a failure which led to the Spanish tyranny, meant the establishment of bad conditions for the intellectual as for the social life; and an arrest of freethought in Italy was a necessary accompaniment of the arrest of the higher literature. What remained was the afterglow of a great and energetic period rather than a spirit of inquiry; and we find the old Averroïst scholasticism, in its most pedantic form, lasting at the university of Padua till far into the seventeenth century. “A philosophy,” remarks in this connection an esteemed historian, “a mode of thought, a habit of mind, may live on in the lecture-rooms of Professors for a century after it has been abandoned by the thinkers, the men of letters, and the men of the world.”91 The avowal has its bearings nearer home than Padua.