The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature and abortive, like those headless trunks and zoophitic members of half-molded humanity which, in the vision of Empedocles, preceded the birth of full-formed man.

The nations were not ready.

Franciscans imprisoning Roger Bacon for venturing to examine what God had meant to keep secret; Dominicans preaching crusades against the cultivated nobles of Toulouse; Popes stamping out the seed of enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal: these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe.

Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were fragmentary and sterile.
Then came a second period.

Dante's poem, a work of conscious art, conceived in a modern spirit and written in a modern tongue, was the first true sign that Italy, the leader of the nations of the West, had shaken off her sleep.