' It is clearly some half-understood expression
of Savonarola which was troubling him.
If we had more confessions of this character the spiritual picture of
the time would be richer by many important features which no poem or
treatise has preserved for us. We should see more clearly how strong
the inborn religious instinct was, how subjective and how variable the
relation of the individual to religion, and what powerful enemies and
competitors religion had. That men whose inward condition is of this
nature, are not the men to found a new church, is evident; but the
history of the Western spirit would be imperfect without a view of that
fermenting period among the Italians, while other nations, who have had
no share in the evolution of thought, may be passed over without loss.
But we must return to the question of immortality.
If unbelief in this respect made such progress among the more highly
cultivated natures, the reason lay partly in the fact that the great
earthly task of discovering the world and representing it in word and
form, absorbed most of the higher spiritual faculties. We have already
spoken of the inevitable worldliness of the Renaissance. But this
investigation and this art were necessarily accompanied by a general
spirit of doubt and inquiry. If this spirit shows itself but little in
literature, if we find, for example, only isolated instances of the
beginnings of biblical criticism, we are not therefore to infer that it
had no existence.
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