Read it through once

But there is another respect in which the aesthetic temper has been, and still is, of supreme importance to a society which is in the act of forming itself. The Renaissance itself, the period of which we have been speaking, was in that sense an æsthetic movement — a movement of recovery and of re-adjustment, which had for its aim the re-establishment of certain sensuous standards, the revaluation of noble objects and noble forms, and the substitution of a new type of human interest for the cold scholastic or the languid medieval temper. It was, in short, an attempt to make life more vivid, more concrete, more rich in imaginative content; and such an attempt must always be in great part æsthetic in its origin and in its means.