It was chiefly a polemical movement, a
fight between contentious savants. The writings of the Humanists at
this naively sensuous period were full of the joy of life and love of
pleasure; but scarcely any simple feeling for Nature can be found in
them, and there was neither poet nor poem fit to be compared with
Petrarch and his sonnets.
Natural philosophy, too, was proscribed by scholastic wisdom; the
real Aristotle was only gradually shelled out from under mediaeval
accretions. The natural philosopher, Conrad Summenhart[2] (1450-1501)
was quite unable to disbelieve the foolish legend, that the
appearance of a comet foretold four certain events--heat, wind, war,
and the death of princes. At the same time, not being superstitious,
he held aloof from the crazy science of astrology and all the fraud
connected with it. Indeed, as an observer of Nature, and still more
as a follower and furtherer of the scholastic Aristotelian natural
philosophy, he shewed a leaning towards the theory of development,
for, according to him, the more highly organized structures proceed
from those of lower organization, and these again form the inorganic
under the influence of meteors and stars. The poet laureate Conrad
Celtes (_b_. 1459), a singer of love and composer of four books about
it, was a true poet. His incessant wandering, for he was always
moving from place to place, was due in part to love of Nature and of
novelty, but still more to a desire to spread his own fame.
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