Nevertheless, the belief in the effectivity or possibility of such a return was, as we have said, an illusion; nothing of what has been returns, nothing of what has been can be abolished; even when we return to an old thought the new adversary makes the defence new and the thought itself new. I read some time ago the work of a learned French Catholic. While clearing the Middle Ages of certain absurd accusations and confuting errors commonly circulated about them, he maintained that the Middle Ages are the truly modern time, modern with the eternal modernity of the true, and that therefore they should not be called the Middle Ages, which term should be applied to the period that has elapsed between the fifteenth century and our own day, between the Reformation and positivism. As I read, I reflected that such a theory is the worthy pendant to that other theory, which places the Middle Ages beneath antiquity, and that both had some time ago shown themselves false to historical thought, which knows nothing of returns, but knows that the Middle Ages preserved antiquity deep in its heart as the Renaissance preserved the Middle Ages. And what is 'humanism' but a renewed formula of that 'humanity' of which the ancient world knew little or nothing, and which Christianity and the Middle Ages had so profoundly felt? What is the word 'renaissance' or 'renewal' but a metaphor taken from the language of religion? And setting aside the word, is not the conception of humanism perhaps the affirmation of a spiritual and universal value, and in so far as it is that, altogether foreign, as we know, to the mind of antiquity, and an intrinsic continuation of the 'ecclesiastical' and 'spiritual' history which appeared with Christianity? The conception of spiritual value had without doubt become changed or enriched, for it contained within itself more than a thousand years of mental experiences, thoughts, and actions. But while it thus grew more rich, it preserved its original character, and constituted the religion of the new times, with its priests and martyrs, its polemic and its apologetic, its intolerance (it destroyed or allowed to perish the monuments of the Middle Ages and condemned its writers to oblivion), and sometimes even imitated the forms of its worship (Navagaro used to burn a copy of Martial every year as a holocaust to pure Latinity). And since humanity, philosophy, science, literature, and especially art, politics, activity in all its forms, now fill that conception of value which the Middle Ages had placed in Christian religious faith alone, histories or outlines of histories continue to appear as the outcome of these determinations, which were certainly new in respect to medieval literature, but were not less new in respect to Græco-Roman literature, where there was nothing to compare to them, or only treatises composed in an empirical and extrinsic manner. The new histories of values presented them selves timidly, imitating in certain respects the few indent examples, but they gave evidence of a fervour, an intelligence, an afflatus, which led to a hope for that increase and development wanting to their predecessors, which, instead of developing, had gradually become more superficial and finally disappeared again into vagueness. Suffice it to mention as representative of them all Vasari's _Lives of the Painters,_ which are connected with the meditations and the researches upon art contained in so many treatises, dialogues, and letters of Italians, and are here and there shot through with flashes such as never shone in antiquity. The same may be said of treatises on poetry and rhetoric, and of the judgments which they contain as to poetry and of the new history of poetry, then being attempted with more or less successful results. The 'state' too, which forms the object of the meditations of Machiavelli, is not the simple state of antiquity, city or empire, but is almost the national state felt as something divine, to which even the salvation of the soul must be sacrificed--that is to say, as the institution in which the true salvation of the soul is to be found. Even the pagan virtue which he and others opposed to Christian virtue is very different from the pure Græco-Roman disposition of mind. At that time a start was also made in the direction of investigating the theory of rights, of political forms, of myths and beliefs, of philosophical systems, to-day in full flower.