continually increased in importance, until it has almost ousted theoretical science from men's
thoughts. The practical importance of science was first recognized in connection with war; Galileo
and Leonardo obtained government employment by their claim to improve artillery and the art of
fortification. From their time onwards, the part of the men of science in war has steadily grown
greater. Their part in developing machine production, and accustoming the population to the use,
first of steam, then of electricity, came later, and did not begin to have important political effects
until near the end of the eighteenth century. The triumph of science has been mainly due to its
practical utility, and there has been an attempt to divorce this aspect from that of theory, thus
making science more and more a technique, and less and less a doctrine as to the nature of the
world. The penetration of this point of view to the philosophers is very recent.
Emancipation from the authority of the Church led to the growth of individualism, even to the
point of anarchy. Discipline, intellectual, moral, and political, was associated in the minds of the
men of the Renaissance with the scholastic philosophy and ecclesiastical government. The
Aristotelian logic of the Schoolmen was narrow, but afforded a training in a certain kind of
accuracy. When this school of logic became unfashionable, it was not, at first, succeeded by
something better, but only by an eclectic imitation of ancient models. Until the seventeenth
century, there was nothing of importance in philosophy. The moral and political anarchy of
fifteenth-century Italy was appalling, and gave rise to the doctrines of Machiavelli. At the same
time, the freedom from mental shackles led to an astonishing display of genius in art and
literature. But such a society is unstable. The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation,
combined with the subjection of Italy to Spain, put an end to both the good and the bad of the
Italian Renaissance. When the movement spread north of the Alps, it had not the same anarchic
character.
Modern philosophy, however, has retained, for the most part, an individualistic and subjective
character. This is very marked in Descartes, who builds up all knowledge from the certainty of his
own existence, and accepts clearness and distinctness (both subjective) as criteria of truth. It is not
prominent in Spinoza, but reappears in Leibniz's windowless monads. Locke, whose temperament
is thor-