. This is not to say that premodern thought is rejected out of hand. It is to say, however, that what is considered significant about premodern thought and the manner that it is used to develop new ideas are bound to reflect conceptions and experience of the universe (i.e., experience of fundamental reality) that would have been (so to say) unthinkable in the premodern period. This is in the background of Baumer's statement that the theme of modernity "is the sense of becoming rather than being" (vii).
The evidence that Baumer uses to develop his thesis and prove the validity of his assumptions is contained in the balance of Modern European Thought. In a treatment of the changing cultural views of God, nature, man, society, and history, he sets the stage for his discussion of modernism--and the connection between the Enlightenment and Romanticism--by looking at their decisive precursor: the Renaissance. He makes the case that it is a commonplace to date the history of modernism from the Renaissance, representing as it undoubtedly did a significant break with the culture that had prevailed for so long in Europe. This is a complex but extremely important argument. Baumer takes the view that there was a profound continuity of thought in Europe that had persisted--very much among the happy few in the literate cloisters of the Church, to be sure--from the Roman Christian era, through the fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the late Middle Ages, and toward the early Renaissance. Enlightenment thought represented both a logical outgrowth and a significant break from Renaissance thought, although the role of reason maintained prominence in both periods. Romanticism, meanwhile, represented another break in intellectual tradition, and perhaps an even more decisive one to the degree some aspects of it pointed away from reason as the principal philosophical element upon which mankind could rely to find its way through history.
Such attac...