I

B. A SURVEY OF RENAISSANCES
(I) A PLAN OF OPERATIONS

F we have now succeeded in establishing our thesis that :i Lat«
„ Medieval Italian renaissance of Hellenism which had been known as
'the Renaissance' in Modern Western parlance was, after all, not a
unique phenomenon but was one representative of one specie's within a
genus labelled 'encounters*, the next stop that suggests itself is to take
advantage of this widening of our horizon for the prosecution of our
inquiry along our customary empirical lines. Let us first sec how many
instances we can collect of renaissances within the meaning of the term
as we have now defined it, and then let us go on to use the results of this
survey as the basis for an analytical study of this species of encounter by
means of the comparative method of investigation.

In setting out to plan a survey of renaissances, we shall find at once
that our foregoing critique of'the Renaissance* has already placed in our
hands some clues to the discovery of a procedure. We have noticed that
this Italian resuscitation of Hellenism was neither comprehensive nor
indiscriminate; it was a recapture of certain particular faeets of the re-
suscitated culture's life. A literary and an artistic facet were two aspects
of this renaissance that were in the foreground of a latter-day Western
observer's retrospective picture of the phenomenon, and we: have also
noticed a political facet that had perhaps always been paramount in faett
and that was undoubtedly the one aspect of the Italian renaissance of
Hellenism which, in A.D, 1953, was showing an increasing, instead of a
diminishing, potency for fascinating Western souls,1 Those three faeetH
of this particular revenante culture in this particular evocation corre-
spond to three of the elemental and sub-elemental rays into which we
have found the integral radiation of a radioactive culture being tlHFrrtcttul
in the process of diffusion in the dimension, not of Time, but of Hpaee;''
and, with this clue in our hands, we may push our search for instances of
renaissances into the rest of those clivers fields of human activity which
have figured as separately distinguishable strips in our euluire-8peo
trum. On these lines we shall make successive searches for symptoms
of renaissances in the fields of Politics, Law, Science awl Philosophy,
Language and Literature, the Visual Arts, and Religion.•' Moreover,
these inquiries will not be confined to renaissances of various aspects of
Hellenism in the Western Christian Hellenistic World at different Htagea
in this civilization's history, We shall also put into the; witness box, omt
after another, all the other civilizations of the third generation that have
come within our cognizance4—and these arc all that come into quwttum
in our present inquiry, since these alone had been en rapport with their

1 ?ce & £>n-'.'abovc- „ * Sws TJC- v»»' 4<>H" *»«•

3 It will be noticed that Economics tire absent from this list, in contract to *!«• impor-
tance of the part that they have proved to play in cnewintws in the Sptu'rtttmcmian
between contemporaries.

k * A list of tertiary civilizations will be found in the table «f primitive wwU'tirH, eiviUw
ttons, and higher religions in serial order, in VII. vii, Tubk IV facing p, 77-u