Iconographic Encyclopaedia of the Arts and Sciences Volume 2 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1886 Excerpt: ... MODERN CIVILIZATION. (Plate 60.) ONE is puzzled, in considering that distinctive period of the world's history which includes the present day, whether to assign it three centuries, or one, or fifty years. So rapid has been material progress, such an impulse and expansion have been given to intellectual activity, so sharply drawn have been the stages of that general movement, and so specially marked have been its results within the past two generations, that it is not easy to make a hard and fast definition of Modern Culture and of the field of time which it covers. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, that birth-period of the modern age which is aptly styled the Renaissance had reached its close. When we think of it we are wont to think chiefly of its achievements in the fine arts and elegant literature. Lapped infancy, "of imagination all compact," the new world was enjoying its youth. The printing-press, just placed in its hands, it used, for the most part, as a toy. Metaphysics and theology were topics discussed in a dead language, and poetry, though highly valuable to us as illustrating manners, and to contemporaries as training and elevating literary taste, was not particularly promotive of practical research or the advancement of human well-being. Long after the close of the sixteenth century the use of a dead tongue still impeded the popularization of scientific inquiry, which thus remained the exclusive province of a few--a select few, who wrought alone and builded on a narrow basis. The Church, at least in Northern Europe, had set them the example of partly abandoning the vehicle of expression which they had borrowed from her. Had they followed that example and invoked the aid and sympathy of the laity, progress would have been expedited. A...