ABSTRACT
Even contemporaries of Columbus, like the Florentine humanist, Poliziano, recognised that the discovery of the New World was an event of the greatest significance. That the New World culture got its start during a period of grave social and ideological disruption should not, accordingly, surprise us. In the West the beginnings of the new culture date back to the great catastrophe of the fourteenth century, the Black Death: a plague that wiped out between one-third and one-half of the population of Western Europe. Science was the great tool refashioned by the New World mind: the systematisation of inquiry into the forces of nature, and eventually into man himself considered merely as a product of nature. In the seventeenth century, the extension of the system of education to the whole population by means of the common school had been worked out in principle by John Amos Comenius.
