The Venetian government
afterwards appointed him professor of this subject at Padua.
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. 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. In one of his writings he makes 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.
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