from the heart, not the head, and all elaborate theology is superfluous. This point of view has
become increasingly common, and is now pretty generally accepted among Protestants. It is,
essentially, a rejection of Hellenic intellectualism by the sentimentalism of the North.
Erasmus on his second visit to England, remained for five years ( 1509-14), partly in London,
partly at Cambridge. He had a considerable influence in stimulating English humanism. The
education at English public schools remained, until recently, almost exactly what he would have
wished: a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin, involving not only translation, but verse and
prose composition. Science, although intellectually dominant since the seventeenth century, was
thought unworthy the attention of a gentleman or a divine; Plato should be studied, but not the
subjects which Plato thought worth studying. All this is in line with the influence of Erasmus.
The men of the Renaissance had an immense curiosity; "these minds," says Huizinga, "never had
their desired share of striking incidents, curious details, rarities and anomalies." But at first they
sought these things, not in the world, but in old books. Erasmus was interested in the world, but
could not digest it in the raw: it had to be dished up in Latin or Greek before he could assimilate
it. Travellers' tales were discounted, but any marvel in Pliny was believed. Gradually, however,
curiosity became transferred from books to the real world; men became interested in the savages
and strange animals that were actually discovered, rather than in those described by classical
authors. Caliban comes from Montaigne, and Montaigne's cannibals come from travellers. "The
anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders" had been seen by Othello,
not derived from antiquity.
And so the curiosity of the Renaissance, from having been literary, gradually became scientific.
Such a cataract of new facts overwhelmed men that they could, at first, only be swept along with
the current. The old systems were evidently wrong; Aristotle's physics and Ptolemy's astronomy
and Galen's medicine could not be stretched to include the discoveries that had been made.
Montaigne and Shakespeare are content with confusion: discovery is delightful, and system is its
enemy. It was not till the seventeenth century that the systembuilding faculty caught up with the
new knowledge of matters of