CHAPTER VI. 



THE thirteenth century found ecclesiastical authority 

 sovereign in every department of thought. It was an 

 offence against religion, as well as against reason, to reject 

 the truth ; and the truth, it was insisted, was in the dogmas 

 which the Church in its wisdom had arbitrarily defined. 

 The members of a university, who had developed a spirit 

 of investigation, found it sternly repressed, with an ad- 

 monition "to be content with the landmarks of science 

 already fixed by the fathers, to have due fear of the curse 

 pronounced against him who removeth his neighbor's 

 landmark, and not to incur the blame of innovation or pre- 

 sumption." In vain did the Italians, especially, show an 

 intrepid desire to pursue the truth, or reveal prophetic 

 visions of discovery. "Who shall say," asks Ranke, 

 "whither this tendency w^ould have led? But the Church 

 marked out a line which they were not to overstep ; woe 

 to him who ventured to pass it I" 1 



The century had not far advanced, however, when the 

 first faint signs of emancipation of the intellect from theo- 

 logical fetters began to show themselves, although the 

 completion of the enlargement was still many a score of 

 years distant. The work of scholasticism as the "solvent 

 of theology" became manifest, while scholasticism itself 

 commenced to pass into mysticism. As the military and 

 clerical power started upon its decline, so the industrial 

 and scientific forces of the world began once more an up- 

 ward course. 



The works of Aristotle and the Alexandrians had now 



1 Whewell: Hist. Indue. Sciences, ii.; Tennemann: Geschichte der Phil- 

 osophic, viii.; Ranke: History of the Popes, i. 



(148) 



