But the power of conception and representation lay in
the age and in the people.
The facts which we shall quote in evidence of our thesis will be few in
number. Here, if anywhere in the course of this discussion, the author
is conscious that he is treading on the perilous ground of conjecture,
and that what seems to him a clear, if delicate and gradual, transition
in the intellectual movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
may not be equally plain to others. The gradual awakening of the soul
of a people is a phenomenon which may produce a different impression on
each spectator. Time will judge which impression is the most faithful.
Happily the study of the intellectual side of human nature began, not
with the search after a theoretical psychology--for that, Aristotle
still sufficed--but with the endeavor to observe and to describe. The
indispensable ballast of theory was limited to the popular doctrine of
the four temperaments, in its then habitual union with the belief in
the influence of the planets. Such conceptions may remain ineradicable
in the minds of individuals, without hindering the general progress of
the age. It certainly makes on us a singular impression, when we meet
them at a time when human nature in its deepest essence and in all its
characteristic expressions was not only known by exact observation, but
represented by an immortal poetry and art.
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