ABSTRACT

The Renaissance appealed to Nicholas of Cusa, who had said both that man was the measure of all things and that God was the ultimate primordial measure. Different, although also typically Renaissance, was the fondness for mysteries and sciosophies, alchemy, magic, cabbalism, theosophy and occultism. The Renaissance is particularly the age which witnessed the birth of modern natural science. The idea of power fascinated the people of the Renaissance, not only in physics but also in the new idea of man and the State as it emerged. Machiavelli is the obvious illustration. His philosophy of man, of law and of the State was a quantitative-mechanistic observation of nature. A light in this darkness was Thomas More, humanist, idealist and saint. In his Utopia he described with irony, caricature and real insight the ideal State as he conceived it. Scholasticism also persisted into Renaissance times.