HUMANISM A N D T H E N E W ORDER
In spite of its ideal of a purely human perfection and its cult of classical form, there was in humanism something excessive, a kind of hubris which led it to destruction. We see this already in the brilliant culture of fifteenth-century Italy, where the unbridled individualism of princes and cities led to the loss of national independence. But that is only a superficial instance of the instability of the new order. It is not in any obvious material failure, but in its very triumphs and successes, that the real weakness of the movement is to be found. For each fresh victory of the humanistic spirit undermined the foundations of its own vitality.
The Renaissance has its beginning in the self-discovery, the self-realisation and the self-exaltation of Man. Mediaeval man had attempted to base his life on the supernatural. His ideal of knowledge was not the adventurous quest of the human mind exploring its own kingdom ; it was an intuition of the eternal verities which is itself an emanation from the Divine Intellect— irradiatio et participatio primae lucis. The men of the Renaissance, on the other hand, turned away from the eternal and the absolute to the world of nature and human experience. They rejected their dependence on the supernatural, and vindicated their independence and supremacy in the temporal order. But thereby they were