68 RENAISSANCES

think that this thing which we call "the Modern World" was the product
of the Renaissance—the inelasticity of our historical concepts, in fact—
helped to conceal the radical nature of the changes that had taken place.'1

If, in the light of Butterfield's and Bury's reasoning, we give judge-
ment in favour of the Spenglerian thesis in the issue between Spongier
and Collingwood, our verdict will be that, before the close of the seven-
teenth century, the Western World did exorcize a ghost of Hellenism
which it had conjured up some two or three hundred years curlier, but
that, before the ghost was laid, this revenant's hold upon a living society's
imagination had become so strong that another two or three hundred
years had to pass before the epigoni of the victors in a seventeenth-
century Kulturkampf could become fully alive to the truth that Queen
Anne was dead.3

The issue between a ghost of Hellenism and the native genius of the
Western Civilization had actually been decided before Queen Anne's
accession to the throne; for a counter-attack that had been opened cau-
tiously by Bodin (mvebat A.D. i53o-<)6),3 and been curried on more
boldly by Bacon (vvuebat A.D. I56i-i626)4 and Descartes (vivebat A.t>.
i596-i65o),s was pressed home to a decisive victory for the living Western
culture's cause, and an irretrievable defeat for the Hellenic ghost's, by
Fontenelle (vivebat A.D. i657-i757)6 in France and William Wotton
(mvebat A.D. i666-i727)7 in England, The two telling shots to which

1 Butterfield, op. cit, p. 173.

2 The writer of this Study would be guilty of odious^ ingratitude to HdUinwm itaelf,
as well as to the Late Medieval Italian Humanists who raised ils tfhoat to huxmt u Modern
Western World, if at this point he forbore to acknowledge and cont'wHN how thankful he
•was that one of 'those surprising overlaps and time-lags which «o often UiMguiMG tho
direction things are taking* (to quote Butterfield, ibid.) hud inhibited the arbitcrd of
educational fashions in his own country from laying sacrilegious humlx on \\w humane
study of Greek and Latin letters for more than two centurion ttftcr thin twe muTOHtinet
curriculum had been implicitly condemned, as a logical consequence of th« clvtVnt that
had overtaken *the Ancients' in their seventeenth-century content with 'the Modern**'.
Whatever might be the verdict, from other points of view, on the VlaHHU'til' t'ducttlioa,
instituted by the fifteenth-century Western Humanists, this w»8 unqut:ntion»bly tho
best education conceivable for a Westerner who wanted to be an historian; for u study of
LitteraeHumanioresvfa.s the one school of education open to a Westerner in the Modern
Age in which he could learn to look at the society into which ho happened to httve been
born with the alien eyes of an outsider whose spiritual home wa» H?llmt» not Uewpcriaj
and, for an historian, no training could be more valuable than, this, »in«e the iim accom-
plishment that is required of an historian is an ability to jump clear of his own fortuitous
Here and Now.

In having been born just in time to ahare in this boon, the writer might count himnelf
fortunate indeed, considering that, by the date of his birth, the Ic&vcn of Ktmtenella't
Digression had already been working in Western minds for no ICON than aoi y«m,
Though pedagogues are notorious for being arch-conaervjitivsm, even they do eventually
respond to influences that have been in the ascendant for a very lonff time in the rent of
the body social, and in England the bastions of a traditional Lute Medieval Italian
system of education in the Greek and Latin Classics at last duly be^an to crumble under
the fire of Fontenelle's seventeenth-century batteries only a few yean ttfter the preaent
writer's fifteen-years-long education in Latin and twelve-year*-long educntitm in Greek
had been safely completed in A.D. 1911. In later life he thanked hiu star* for having per-
mitted him to be so felix opportunitate nat&s,

s See Bury, J. B.: The Idea of Progress (London 19*4, MacrmllarO, p, 43. In the
precise form of a comparison of merits, the controversy opened in Itely in A.O. l6ao,
and in France in A.D, 1635 (see ibid., pp. 80-1).

* See ibid., pp. 53-56.

s See ibid., pp. 67^9. 'He was proud of having forgotten th« Greek which he h«d
learnt as a boy. The inspiration of his work was the idea of breaking iharpiy with th*
Past, and constructing a system which borrows nothing from the dead.'

6 See ibid., pp. 98-126. 7 SM ibid,, pp, 1x9-33,