§ 3. At the same time another movement was going on, principally in Germany. Here too, men were endeavouring to throw off the immediate past in order to revive the remote past. The religious reformers, like the scholars, wished to restore a golden age, only a different age, not the age of the Antigone, but the age of the Apostles’ Creed. Thus it happened that the scholars and the reformers joined in attaching the very highest importance to the ancient languages. Through these languages, and, as they thought, through them alone, was it possible to get a glimpse into the bygone world in which their soul delighted.
§ 4. But though all joined in extolling the ancient writings, we find at the Renascence great differences in the way of regarding these writings and in the objects for which they were employed. A consideration of these differences will help us to understand the course of education when the Renascence was a force no longer.
§ 5. Very powerful in education were the great scholars, of whom Erasmus was perhaps the greatest, certainly the most celebrated. In devoting their lives to the study of the ancients their object was not merely to appreciate literary style, though this was a source of boundless delight to them, but also to _understand_ the classical writings and the ancient world through them. These men, whom we may call _par excellence_ the Scholars, cared indeed before all things for literature; but with all their delight in the form they never lost sight of the substance. They knew the truth that Milton afterwards expressed in these memorable words: “Though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only.” (Tractate to Hartlib, § 4).
So Erasmus and the scholars would have all the educated _understand_ the classical authors. But to understand words you must know the things to which the words refer. Thus the Scholars were led to advocate a partial study of things a kind of realism. But we must carefully observe a peculiarity of this scholastic realism which distinguished it from the realism of a later date—the realism of Bacon. The study of things was undertaken not for its own sake, but simply in order to understand books. Perhaps some of us are conscious that this kind of literary realism has not wholly passed away. We may have observed wild flowers, or the changes in tree or cloud, because we find that the best way to understand some favourite author, as Wordsworth or Tennyson. This will help us to understand the realism of the sixteenth century. The writings of great authors have been compared to the plaster globes (“celestial globes” as we call them), which assist us in understanding the configuration of the stars (_Guesses at Truth_, j. 47). Adopting this simile we may say that the Scholars loved to study the globe for its own sake, and when they looked at stars they did so with the object of understanding the globe. Thus we read of doctors who recommended their pupils to look at actual cases of disease as the best commentary on the works of Hippocrates and Galen. This kind of realism was good as far as it went, but it did not go far. Of course the end in view limited the study, and the Scholars took no interest in things except those which were mentioned in the classics. They had no desire to investigate the material universe and make discoveries for themselves. This is why Galileo could not induce them to look through his telescope; for the ancients had no telescopes, and the Scholars wished to see nothing that had not been seen by their favourite authors. First then we have the Scholars, headed by Erasmus.