We see often in the world's history a simultaneousness in the regeneration of thought. Here and there a seer works on in ignorance of some obscure brother elsewhere. Rumor and circulating manuscripts bring them into sympathy. They grow by the correlation. It is just this correspondence that confronts us in Columbus and Toscanelli, and it is not quite, but almost, perceptible that this wise Florentine doctor was the first, despite Humboldt's theory, to plant in the mind of Columbus his aspirations for the truths of geography. It is meet that Columbus should not be mentioned without the accompanying name of Toscanelli. It was the Genoese's different fortune that he could attempt as a seaman a practical demonstration of his fellow Italian's views.
Many a twin movement of the world's groping spirit thus seeks the light. Progress naturally pushes on parallel lines. Commerce thrusts her intercourse to remotest regions, while the Church yearns for new souls to convert, and peers longingly into the dim spaces that skirt the world's geography. Navigators improve their methods, and learned men in the arts supply them with exacter instruments. The widespread manifestations of all this new life at last crystallize, and Gama and Columbus appear, the reflex of every development.
Opportuneness of his discoveries.
Thus the discovery of Columbus came in the ripeness of time. No one of the anterior accidents, suggesting a western land, granting that there was some measure of fact in all of them, had come to a world prepared to think on their developments. Vinland was practically forgotten, wherever it may have been. The tales of Fousang had never a listener in Europe. Madoc was as unknown as Elidacthon. While the new Indies were not in their turn to be forgotten, their discoverer was to bury himself in a world of conjecture. The superlatives of Columbus soon spent their influence. The pioneer was lost sight of in the new currents of thought which he had started. Not of least interest among them was the cognizance of new races of men, and new revelations in the animal and physical kingdoms, while the question of their origins pressed very soon on the theological and scientific sense of the age.
Not above his age.
Claims for palliation.
No man craves more than Columbus to be judged with all the palliations demanded of a difference of his own age and ours. No child of any age ever did less to improve his contemporaries, and few ever did more to prepare the way for such improvements. The age created him and the age left him. There is no more conspicuous example in history of a man showing the path and losing it.
It is by no means sure, with all our boast of benevolent progress, that atrocities not much short of those which we ascribe to Columbus and his compeers may not at any time disgrace the coming as they have blackened the past years of the nineteenth century. This fact gives us the right to judge the infirmities of man in any age from the high vantage-ground of the best emotions of all the centuries. In the application of such perennial justice Columbus must inevitably suffer. The degradation of the times ceases to be an excuse when the man to be judged stands on the pinnacle of the ages. The biographer cannot forget, indeed, that Columbus is a portrait set in the surroundings of his times; but it is equally his duty at the same time to judge the paths which he trod by the scale of an eternal nobleness.