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 [41] 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 creative Logos, by whom the Father made all things, in one
of the earlier frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa. How different
from this childish dream is our own conception of nature, with its
unlimited space, its innumerable suns, and the earth but a mote in
the beam; how different the strange new awe, or superstition,
with which it fills our minds! "The silence of those infinite
spaces," [42] says Pascal, contemplating a starlight night, the