There existed in the Renaissance an elaborate, detailed, and allembracing system of science and philosophy. It was formed by the reticulation of many metaphysical postulates, and gathered into its meshes not only carefully tested moral and aesthetic principles, but practically all of the phenomena of objective nature which had been observed or attended to. It is to be found completely rounded out, with all objections answered, in the .Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, where it is perfectly theologized. In other places the system, or a congruent system, is given other applications, for it ran through every art and science. There are encyclopædias and numerous works (many alas! not republished) on metaphysics, logic, psychology, rhetoric, natural history, medicine, astrology, physiognomy, politics, practical theology, and other special subjects which carry into detail the completeness of the mediaeval order. These ordinary works used by the ordinary educated man are what we need in order to understand the current thought of the Renaissance.

The mediaeval scientific and philosophic system did not, generally speaking, break down until the seventeenth century. The newer ideas did not modify popular thinking until then, and literature did not concern itself with the new system until the new system had made its way into the schools and the arts. Many men must have ceased actively to believe in the mediaeval system and ceased to devote their talents to the exploitation of the wonders of the world and the universe as revealed in the older system; but it stood as an accepted background. Men thought in terms of it, took it for granted, and felt it as an element in realization. The extent to which writers such as Shakespeare have employed, except in minor details, the features of the mediaeval

system in their thinking, have felt them in their connotations, and exploited them in their moral purposes, has not been determined; but there is significance for students of Shakespeare in the fact that the Renaissance, with reference to its conception of world, order, was mainly mediaeval. One would not forget, however, that there were in the learned world of the Renaissance, side by side with the doctrines of the middle ages, also the teachings of antiquity, now several centuries old in Europe, and inconsistent in many points with mediaevalism.

The middle ages and the Renaissance interested themselves in the moral and aesthetic relations of life, which are natural lines of organization. They were indifferent to science as we understand it. They were, moreover, indefatigable in their classificatory systems, and achieved a perfection which has not been superseded in the ages of natural science. Their ethics and their religion are still in large measure the only ethics and religion we have. Their schemes of moral and, to a less extent, of aesthetic values, still obtain and may be said to have suffered neglect by the moderns, who have not replaced them. It comes about therefore that, not only is renaissance science a more satisfactory instrument than we have realized, but renaissance moral philosophy is a greater, worthier, and profounder thing than our current speculations on such subjects usually are. Shakespeare said great and far-reaching things about life, though not always the things his critics have made him say, and had as his instrument a great ethical system of which we have grown unconscious.

"Examples of Shakespeare's comprehension of renaissance thought are numerous, and they surprise us; for they betray, not casual dramatic and poetic intuitions, but thoroughgoing and interpreta-] tive conformity. If we take into consideration the unshaken validity, one may say, the actual superiority, of renaissance thought in a vast realm in which we still spend most of our intellectual lives, we shall be the less surprised and the more gratified at the spectacle of his conformity. Genius did not project Shakespeare far ahead of his age. It was Bacon who anticipated the thought of future ages, and one cannot say that there was in Shakespeare very much of the loose, if not sceptical, way of looking at the world which characterized Montaigne. Consider, for example, the field of ethics, particularly as it manifests itself in the play of King Lear.

The social and psychological analysis which gave the world the doctrine of the four principal virtues we owe to Socrates. It is explained in the Memorabilia of Xenophon (ch. ix) and in various places in Plato, particularly in the Republic (bk. iv). These virtues are wisdom (or prudence), courage (or fortitude), tem-) perance, and justice. They enter as the chief component into the Nicomachean Ethics and there undergo a highly formal analysis and classification. They enter also strongly into the Politics and into other works of Aristotle, are endorsed in one form or other by Stoics and Epicureans, and finally find place, in the Aristotelian form, in the works of Thomas Aquinas and the Schoolmen. They are the stock in trade of all moral teaching, and are present without exception in the ethics of the Renaissance until the appearance of scepticism in Hobbes and Descartes. The virtues were no longer presented exclusively in the Aristotelian form. Plato's treatment reappears, and there are of course various individual adaptations and expansions according to the particular writer; but when one thought about virtue, one thought about wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice.

Of these virtues the one with which we are now principally concerned is justice. Even in Plato it is the great social virtue, more so perhaps than in Aristotle, who treats it somewhat as if it were a scientific principle of balance. In Plato justice is the chief virtue of the citizen, and its observance becomes that order in the state dwelt upon by Aristotle in the Politics. Among the four virtues it contributes most to civic excellence, more than "agreement of rulers and subjects, the preservation in the soldiers of the opinion which the law ordains about the true nature of danger (fortitude), or wisdom and watchfulness of rulers," since it is found in children and women, slave and freeman, artisan, ruler, and subject. Justice consists in "each of the three classes doing the work of its own class." A man who is trained in the principle of justice will not be guilty of "sacrilege or theft," "treachery either to his friends or his country"; he will "not break faith where there have been oaths or agreements"; "no one will be less likely to commit adultery, or to dishonor his father and mother, or to fail in his religious duties.""

The subject of the virtue of justice intertwines itself rather perplexingly with the subject of the law of nature and the law of

1 Republic, bk. iv, steph. 427, Jowett's translation.

2

nations, and is in the forefront of the discussion of religious and political freedom in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Hugo Grotius in De Jure Belli et Pacis, following in the wake of Gentilis, gives a sketch of the history of the thought about the law of nature and comes to his famous, slightly erroneous, conclusion that the law of nature is the same as the law of nations. It will be understood that Hobbes strikes out a new line with reference to the natural state of man in the Leviathan, which is quite contrary to the age-old conception of nature derived from Plato and Aristotle, a conception given enormous currency by the famous_dictum of the Politics that by nature man is a political animal The effect of this is to include political institu tions within the scope of natural phenomena. Justice within the ideal state accordingly becomes the highest manifestation of nature. The law of nature in Thomas Aquinas is a positive manifestation in the direction of virtue and, as with Plato and Aristotle, arises unbidden in the human breast.3 It will thus be seen that the virtue of justice is in the large sense the law of nature, since it has the same content and the same utility. The two are constantly connected in men's thoughts popularly and philosophically, and violations of the law of kind, things that were "unnatural," had about them the maximum degree of heinousness, because such

2 Prolegomena, and bk. i, ch. 1. There are various histories of the law of nature. See, particularly, Ritchie, David G., Natural Rights, London, 1895, ch. 2, "On the History of the Idea of 'Nature' in Law and Politics."' Besides Grotius and Gentilis (De Jure Belli, Hannoviae, 1598) one should consult Rachel, Samuel, De Jure Naturae et Gentium Dissertationes, Kiel, 1676, reissued in The Classics of International Law, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916. Discussion of the law of nature is common to many treatises on international law of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Cf. Kaltenborn, Carl von, Die Vorläufer des Hugo Grotius des Jus Naturae et Gentium, 1848. Shakespeare shows knowledge of the association of the law of nature and the law of nations. See Hen. V, II, iv, 80; Troi. and Cres. II, ii, 184. 3 First of all there is in man an inclination to that natural good which he shares along with all substances, in as much as every substance seeks the preservation of its own being, according to its nature. In virtue of this inclination there belongs to natural law the taking of those means whereby the life of man is preserved, and things contrary thereto are kept off. Secondly, there is in man an inclination to things more specially belonging to him, in virtue of the nature he shares with other animals. In this respect those things are said to be of the natural law, which nature has taught to all animals, as the intercourse of the sexes, the education of offspring and the like. In a third way there is in man an inclination to good, according to the rational nature which is proper to him; as man has a natural inclination to know the truth about God, and to live in society. In this respect there belong to natural law such natural inclinations as to avoid ignorance, to shun offending other men, and the like.-—Summa, la 2ae, qu. 94, art. 2; Rickaby's Aquinas Ethicus, I, 282.-Quoted from Ritchie, loc. cit., pp. 39-40.

offenses struck at the foundations of all social and political life.* Over against this conception of nature as an inward necessity tending to perfection of things, is the other conception of nature as an unorganized crescive tendency which, wher untamed by law, produces chaos. It is thus the function of the law of nature and the virtue of justice to establish and maintain civilization and its institutions. The clearest contemporary statement of this I have found is in Wilson's Art of Rhetoric. I give it in modern spelling:

The wisdom of princes and the fear of God's threat, which was uttered by his words, forced men by a law both to allow things confirmed by nature and to bear with old custom, or else they should not only suffer in body temporal punishment, but also lose their souls forever. Nature is a right that fantasy hath not framed, but God hath grafted and given man power thereunto, whereof these are derived:

Religion and acknowledging of God.

Natural love of our children and others.
Thankfulness unto all men.

Stoutness both to withstand and to revenge.
Reverence to superiors.

Assured and constant truth in things. (Reprint, G. H. Mair, Oxford, 1909, p. 32).

In the Nicomachean Ethics (vi, 7-13) Aristotle places wisdom or prudence among the intellectual virtues, but in so doing he recognizes the moral function of wisdom. Justice, temperance, courage, and the other qualities of moral character come with the birth of the individual, but they must be formed by training in accordance with right reason. Without this training the natural virtues in children, brutes, and the untrained are plainly hurtful. He takes the Socratic position that the presence of the single virtue of prudence implies the presence of all the moral virtues. Aquinas also states that prudence is both an intellectual and a moral virtue (Summa, Qu LVIII, art. v r), and that discretion, which is derived from prudence, is to be distinguished from fortitude, justice, and temperance in that it belongs to reason; whereas the other three involve only a certain participation in reason by way of the application thereof to passions or acts (Qu LXI, art. v r).

It will therefore be seen why Lear's folly is made fundamental/

to his tragedy. It is Regan (I, i, 291-310) who remarks that Lear

4 Hooker in the Treatise of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (bk. I) derives all law from the eternal law (iii, 1). From this come the law of natural agents (iii, 2), the law of angels (iv, 1, 2, 3), and the law of man (v, 1, 2). From the law of man, which is a law of progress towards perfection, come natural laws (viii, 6-11), human laws (x, 8-14 et passim), and supernatural laws (xi-xv passim).