This was not so with Columbus; he hardly seems to belong at all to his age.

At a time when there was never more of worldliness and self-seeking; when Alexander Borgia was Pope; when Louis the Eleventh reigned in France, Henry the Seventh in England, and Ferdinand the Catholic in Arragon and Castille--about the three last men in the world to become crusaders--Columbus was penetrated with the ideas of the twelfth century, and would have been a worthy companion of Saint Louis in that pious king's crusade.
Again, at a time when Aristotle and "the Angelic Doctor" ruled the minds of men with an almost unexampled tyranny: when science was more dogmatic than theology; when it was thought a sufficient and satisfactory explanation to say that bodies falling to the earth descended because it is their nature to descend--Columbus regarded natural phenomena with the spirit of inductive philosophy that would belong to a follower of Lord Bacon.
Perhaps it will be found that a very great man seldom does belong to his period, as other men do to theirs.

Machiavelli [1] says that the way to renovate states is always to go back to first principles, especially to the first principles upon which those states were founded.

The same law, if law it be, may hold good as regards the renovation of any science, art, or mode of human action.

The man who is too closely united in thought and feeling with his own age, is seldom the man inclined to go back to these first principles.
[Footnote 1: Machiavelli was contemporary with Columbus.