282 THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 



Once more the irony of history displays itself. 

 Thought has become practical, it has become the 

 regulator of individual conduct and social organi 

 zation, but at the expense of its own freedom and 

 power. The defining characteristic of medieval 

 ism in state and in church, in political and spiritual 



I life, is that truth presents itself to the individual 

 only through the medium of organized authority. 

 There was a historical necessity on the external 

 as well as the internal side. We have not the re 

 motest way of imagining what the outcome would 

 finally have been if, at the time when the intellectual 

 structure of the Christian church and the legal 

 structure of the Roman Empire had got themselves 

 thoroughly organized, the barbarians had not made 

 their inroads and seized upon all this accumulated 

 and consolidated wealth as their own legitimate 

 prey. But this was what did happen. As a re 

 sult, truths originally developed by the freest 

 possible criticism and investigation became exter- 



nal, and imposed themselves upon the mass of in 

 dividuals by the mere weight of authoritative 

 law. The external, transcendental, and super 

 natural character of spiritual truth and of social 

 control during the Middle Ages is naught but the 

 mirror, in consciousness, of the relation existing 

 between the eager, greedy, undisciplined horde of 

 barbarians on one side, and the concentrated 

 achievements of ancient civilization on the other. 



