But such a study, though it is profitable and interesting, can never lead to the whole truth.

As we saw in the beginning of this book, in the matter of the Renaissance, every age of discovery and re-birth has its double aspect.

It is a revolution in style and language, an age of literary experiment and achievement, but its experiments are dictated by the excitement of a new subject-matter, and that subject-matter is so much in the air, so impalpable and universal that it eludes analysis.

Only you can be sure that it is this weltering contagion of new ideas, and new thought--the "Zeitgeist," the spirit of the age, or whatever you may call it--that is the essential and controlling force.

Literary loans and imports give the forms into which it can be moulded, but without them it would still exist, and they are only the means by which a spirit which is in life itself, and which expresses itself in action, and in concrete human achievement, gets itself into the written word.