son temps, &c., in 1858; Channing, sa vie et ses œuvres, in 1862; John Wesley in 1870; Lord Herbert de Cherbury in 1874; Histoire de la philosophies en Angleterre depuis Bacon jusqu'à Locke in 1875; besides other and minor works. He wrote well, was a forcible speaker and an acute critic; but his adoption of the indeterminate eclecticism of Cousin in philosophy and of the somewhat similarly indeterminate liberalism of Thiers in politics probably limited his powers, though both no doubt accorded with his critical and unenthusiastic turn of mind.
His son Paul de Rémusat (1831–1897) became a distinguished journalist and writer. He was for many years a regular contributor to the Revue des deux mondes. He stood for election in Haute-Garonne in 1869 in opposition to the imperial policy and failed, but was elected to the National Assembly in 1871 and later. In 1890 he entered the Académie des sciences morales et politiques.
REMUSAT, JEAN PIERRE ABEL (1788–1832), French Chinese scholar, was born in Paris on the 5th of September 1788. He was educated for the medical profession, but a Chinese herbal in the collection of the Abbé Tersan attracted his attention, and he taught himself to read it by great perseverance and with imperfect help. At the end of five years’ study he produced in 1811 an Essai sur la langue et la littérature chinoises, and a paper on foreign languages among the Chinese, which procured him the patronage of Silvestre de Sacy. In 1814 a chair of Chinese was founded at the College de France, and Rémusat was placed in it. From this time he gave himself wholly to the languages of the Far East, and published a series of useful works, among which his contributions from Chinese sources to the history of the Tatar nations claim special notice. Rémusat became an editor of the Journal de savants in 1818, and founder and first secretary of the Paris Asiatic Society in 1822; he also held various Government appointments. He died at Paris on the 4th of June 1832. A list of his works is given in Quérard’s France littéraire s.v. Rémusat.
RENAISSANCE, THE.—The “Renaissance” or “Renascence” is a term used to indicate a well-known but indefinite space of time and a certain phase in the development of Europe.[1] On the one hand it denotes the transition from that period of history which we call the middle ages (q.v.) to that which we call modern. On the other hand it implies those changes in the intellectual and moral attitude of the Western nations by which the transition was characterized. If we insist upon the literal and etymological meaning of the word, the Renaissance was a re-birth; and it is needful to inquire of what it was the re-birth. The metaphor of Renaissance may signify the entrance of the European nations upon a fresh stage of vital energy in general, implying a fuller consciousness and a freer exercise of faculties than had belonged to the medieval period. Or it may mean the resuscitation of simply intellectual activities, stimulated by the revival of antique learning and its application to the arts and literatures of modern peoples. Upon our choice between these two interpretations of the word depend important differences in any treatment of the subject. The former has the disadvantage of making it difficult to separate the Renaissance from other historical phases—the Reformation, for example—with which it ought not to be confounded. The latter has the merit of assigning a specific name to a limited series of events and group of facts, which can be distinguished for the purpose of analysis from other events and facts with which they are intimately but not indissolubly connected. In other words, the one definition of Renaissance makes it denote the whole change which came over Europe at the close of the middle ages. The other confines it to what was known by our ancestors as the Revival of Learning. Yet, when we concentrate attention on the recovery of antique culture, we become aware that this was only one phenomenon or symptom of a far wider and more comprehensive alteration in the conditions of the European races. We find it needful to retain both terms, Renaissance and Revival of Learning, and to show the relations between the series of events and facts which they severally imply. The Revival of Learning must be regarded as a function of that vital energy, an organ of that mental evolution, which brought into existence the modern world, with its new conceptions of philosophy and religion, its reawakened arts and sciences, its firmer grasp on the realities of human nature and the world, its manifold inventions and discoveries, its altered
political systems, its expansive and progressive forces. Important as the Revival of Learning undoubtedly was, there are essential factors in the complex called the Renaissance with which it can but remotely be connected. When we analyse the whole group of phenomena which have to be considered, we perceive that some of the most essential have nothing or little to do with the recovery of the classics. These are, briefly speaking, the decay of those great fabrics, church and empire, which ruled the middle ages both as ideas and as realities; the development of nationalities and languages; the enfeeblement of the feudal system throughout Europe; the invention and application of paper, the mariner’s compass, gunpowder, and printing; the exploration of continents beyond the ocean; and the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system of astronomy. Europe in fact had been prepared for a thoroughgoing metamorphosis before that new ideal of human life and culture which the Revival of Learning brought to light had been made manifest. It had recovered from the confusion consequent upon the dissolution of the ancient Roman empire. The Teutonic tribes had been Christianized, civilized and assimilated to the previously Latinized races over whom they exercised the authority of conquerors. Comparative tranquillity and material comfort had succeeded to discord and rough living. Modern nationalities, defined as separate factors in a common system, were ready to co-operate upon the basis of European federation. The ideas of universal monarchy and of indivisible Christendom, incorporated in the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Church, had so far lost their hold that scope was offered for the introduction of new theories both of state and church which would have seemed visionary or impious to the medieval mind. It is therefore obvious that some term, wider than Revival of Learning, descriptive of the change which began to pass over Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, has to be adopted. That of Renaissance, Rinascimento, or Renascence is sufficient for the purpose, though We have to guard against the tyranny of what is after all a metaphor. We must not suffer it to lead us into rhetoric about the deadness and the darkness of the middle ages, or hamper our inquiry with preconceived assumptions that the re-birth in question was in any true sense a return to the irrecoverable pagan past. Nor must we imagine that there was any abrupt break with the middle ages. On the contrary, the Renaissance was rather the last stage of the middle ages, emerging from ecclesiastical and feudal despotism, developing what was original in medieval ideas by the light of classic arts and letters, holding in itself the promise of the modern world. It was therefore a period and a process of transition, fusion, preparation, tentative endeavour. And just at this point the real importance of the Revival of Learning may be indicated. That rediscovery of the classic past restored the confidence in their own faculties to men striving after spiritual freedom; revealed the continuity of history and the identity of human nature in spite of diverse creeds and different customs; held up for emulation masterworks of literature, philosophy and art; provoked inquiry; encouraged criticism; shattered the narrow mental barriers imposed by medieval orthodoxy. Humanism, a word which will often recur in the ensuing paragraphs, denotes a specific bias which the forces liberated in the Renaissance took from contact with the ancient world, the particular form assumed by human self-esteem at that epoch, the ideal of life and civilization evolved by the modern nations. It indicates the endeavour of man to reconstitute himself as a free being, not as the thrall of theological despotism, and the peculiar assistance he derived in this effort from Greek and Roman literature, the litterae humaniores, letters leaning rather to the side of man than of divinity.
- ↑ For a somewhat different view of the parcelling out into such periods, see the article Middle Ages.
