accumulated capital of ideas provided for them by the genius of the seventeenth century. The men of this epoch inherited a ferment of ideas attendant upon the historical revolt of the sixteenth century, and they bequeathed formed systems of thought touching every aspect of human life. It is the one century which consistently, and throughout the whole range of human activities, provided intellectual genius adequate for the greatness of its occasions. The crowded stage of this hundred years is indicated by the coincidences which mark its literary annals. At its dawn Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and Cervantes’ Don Quixote were published in the same year (1605), as though the epoch would introduce itself with a forward and a backward glance. The first quarto edition of Hamlet appeared in the preceding year, and a slightly variant edition in the same year. Finally Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day, April 23, 1616. In the spring of this same year Harvey is believed to have first expounded his theory of the circulation of the blood in a course of lectures before the College of Physicians in London. Newton was born in the year that Galileo died (1642), exactly one hundred years after the publication of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus. One year earlier Descartes published his Meditationes and two years later his Principia Philosophiae. There simply was not time for the century to space out nicely its notable events concerning men of genius.
I cannot now enter upon a chronicle of the various stages of intellectual advance included within this epoch. It is too large a topic for one lecture, and would obscure the ideas which it is my purpose to
