And in the midst of all is placed man, nodus et vinculum mundi, the bond
or copula of the world, and the "interpreter of nature": that famous
expression of Bacon's really belongs to Pico. Tritum est in scholis, he
says, esse hominem minorem mundum, in quo mixtum ex elementis corpus et
spiritus coelestis et plantarum anima vegetalis et brutorum sensus et
ratio et angelica mens et Dei similitudo conspicitur.--"It is a
commonplace of the schools that man is a little world, in which we may
discern a body mingled of earthy elements, and ethereal breath, and the
vegetable life of plants, and the senses of the lower animals, and
reason, and the intelligence of angels, and a likeness to God."--A
commonplace of the schools! But perhaps it had some new significance and
authority, when men heard one like Pico reiterate it; and, false as its
basis was, the theory had its use. For this high dignity of man, thus
bringing the dust under his feet into sensible communion with the
thoughts and affections of the angels, was supposed to belong to him,
not as renewed by a religious system, but by his own natural right. The
proclamation of it was a counterpoise to the increasing tendency of
medieval religion to depreciate man's nature, to sacrifice this or that
element in it, to make it ashamed of itself, to keep the degrading or
painful accidents of it always in view. It helped man onward to that
reassertion of himself, that rehabilitation of human nature, the body,
the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the Renaissance fulfils.
And yet to read a page of one of Pico's forgotten books is like a glance
into one of those ancient sepulchres, upon which the wanderer in
classical lands has sometimes stumbled, with the old disused ornaments
and furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them. That
whole conception of nature is so different from our own. For Pico the
world is a limited place, bounded by actual crystal walls, and a
material firmament; it is like a painted toy, like that map or system of
the world, held, as a great target or shield, in the hands of the