CHAPTER IX.
CONCLUSION.
forces at work—end of the renaissance—the counter-reformation—rationalism and classicism.
On no period in the history of European literature is it more difficult to generalise with profit than that Introduction. which has been briefly reviewed in the foregoing chapters. Since human thinking began, it has been said, there has been no greater revolution in thought than that which was effected, in men's conception of the world and its laws, in the course of the seventeenth century. To give any complete account of that revolution, and of the eddies which retarded, obscured, or advanced its progress, is beyond the scope of the present work. Indeed, to give a sketch of the intellectual activity, in all its aspects, of even the first sixty years of the century, such as Hallam attempted in his Introduction, would require another volume as large as the present, the subject of which is exclusively literature conceived as an art. Philosophers, theologians, historians, and men of science have been included only
