ctive picture of the inward man and
his spiritual wealth.

The discovery of the beauty of scenery followed as a necessary
corollary of this awakening of individualism, this fathoming of the
depths of human personality. For only to fully-developed man does
Nature fully disclose herself.

This had already been stated by one of the most philosophic minds of
the time, Pico della Mirandola, in his speech on the dignity of man.
God, he tells us, made man at the close of creation to know the laws
of the universe, to love its beauty, to admire its greatness. He
bound him to no fixed place, to no prescribed form of work, and by no
iron necessity; but gave him freedom to will and to move.

'I have set thee,' said the Creator to Adam, 'in the midst of the
world, that thou mayest the more easily behold and see all that is
therein. I created thee a being neither heavenly nor earthly, neither
mortal nor immortal, only that thou mightest be free to shape and to
overcome thyself. Thou mayest sink into a beast, and be born again to
the Divine likeness. The brutes bring with them from their mothers'
body what they will carry with them as long as they live; the higher
spirits are from the beginning, or soon after, what they will be for
ever. To thee alone is given a growth and a development depending on
thine own free will. Thou bearest in thee the germs of a universal
life.'

The best men of the Renaissance realized this ideal of an all-round
development, and it was the glory of Italy in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, that she found a new realm in the inner man at
the very time that her discoveries across the seas were enlarging the
boundaries of the external world, and her science was studying it.
Mixed as the motives of the discoverers must have been, like those of
the crusaders before them, and probably, for the most part,
self-interested, it is easy to imagine the surprise they must have
felt at seeing ignorant people, who, to quote Peter Martyr (de rebus
oceanicis):[1]

Naked, without weights or measures or death-dealing money, live
in a Golden Age without laws, without slanderous judges, without
the scales of the balance. Contented with Nature, they spend
their lives utterly untroubled for the future.... Theirs is a
Golden Age; they do not enclose their farms with trench or wall
or hurdle; their gardens are open. Without laws, without the
scales of the balance, without judges, they gu