The great zeal of the Jesuits, and others, in the renewal of Catholic faith inspired a new outpouring of art. In painting, Mannerist spatial complexity and artificiality of concepts replaced Renaissance order and decorum. Michelangelo's Last Judgment mural demonstrates the new interest in extreme states of emotion depicted through the contortions of the human body. Mannerist intensity was exemplified by El Greco's striking distortions of form, experiments in space and the use of dissonant color. A painting such as El Greco's The Agony in the Garden shows his complete re-working of the idea of pictorial space. Caravaggio and his follower Artemisia Gentileschi painted dark canvases with heroic biblical figures displayed in sharply focused light, like people lit on a stage.

Theatricality also marked the work of Gianlorenzo Bernini, whose dramatic, intense fountains and multimedia works

Writers began looking at the world with new eyes. Francis Bacon, in his Novum Organum (New Method), promoted the idea of using inductive reasoning in place of the old authority of Aristotle and the Church. Bacon believed in drawing conclusions from observation and his empirical method was defended as the means by which humanity could use its capabilities to the fullest. In France René Descartes revived interest in the ancient Greek idea of trying to discover "how one knows what one knows" (47). Descartes employed deductive reasoning, in which one moved from established general principles to establish particular truths. Descartes' method relied on the premise that one must not accept as true anything one did not clearly know to be true. The mind was only able to function if it eliminated all the biases and received ideas of the past and Descartes proceeded from the most basic thing he knew -- that he existed as a thinking individual ("Cogito ergo sum" or "I think, therefore I am"). One result of his method was the evolution of the idea of human beings as entities in which a dualism existed between soul and body, mind and matter.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant took philosophy in a new direction and sought to determine how "the mind comprehends experience" (133). Kant saw the mind as the instrument that organized experience into a coherent pattern and this lead to idealism; the idea that "reality consists of the mind and its forms of perception and understanding" (133). The human individual w