" This sceptical story became famous in the eighteenth
century, when the German poet, Lessing, built upon it his drama Nathan
the Sage, which was intended to show the unreasonableness of
intolerance.
CHAPTER IV
PROSPECT OF DELIVERANCE
(THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION)
THE intellectual and social movement which was to dispel the darkness of
the
[72] Middle Ages and prepare the way for those who would ultimately
deliver reason from her prison, began in Italy in the thirteenth
century. The misty veil woven of credulity and infantile naivete which
had hung over men's souls and protected them from understanding either
themselves or their relation to the world began to lift. The individual
began to feel his separate individuality, to be conscious of his own
value as a person apart from his race or country (as in the later ages
of Greece and Rome); and the world around him began to emerge from the
mists of mediaeval dreams. The change was due to the political and
social conditions of the little Italian States, of which some were
republics and others governed by tyrants.
To the human world, thus unveiling itself, the individual who sought to
make it serve his purposes required a guide; and the guide was found in
the ancient literature of Greece and Rome. Hence the whole
transformation, which presently extended from Italy to Northern Europe,
is known as the Renaissance, or rebirth of classical antiquity.
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