15 



The art of the Middle Ages and the social and 

 political history of the time have fascinated modern 

 Europe; for medieval thought, though its phrases sur- 

 vive in their mouths, few persons have shown any care : 

 yet to these conflicts we owe what we are. No great 

 battles of mankind have been fought in vain; none of 

 its great captains has deserved oblivion. Yet we shrug 

 our shoulders at their uncouth or outlandish names ; 

 we assume that from their chairs there issued naught 

 but rhetoric, casuistries and fallacies, and that their 

 multitudinous disciples were silly moths. 



Each period of human achievement has its phases j 

 of spring, culmination, and decline ; and it is in its 

 decline that the leafless tree comes to judgment. In 

 the unloveliness of decay the Middle Ages are as other 

 ages have been, as our own will be : but in those 

 ages there was more than one outburst of life ; more 

 than once the enthusiasm of the youth of the West 

 went out to explore the ways of the realm of ideas; 

 and, if we believe ourselves at last to have found the 

 only thoroughfare, we owe this knowledge to those who 

 before us travelled the uncharted seas. If we have 

 inherited a great commerce and dominion of science it is 

 because their argosies had been on the ocean, and their 

 camels on the -desert. "Discipulus est prioris poste- 

 rior dies " ; man cannot know all at once ; knowledge 

 must be built up by laborious generations. In all times, 

 as in our own, the advance of knowledge is very largely 

 by elimination and negation; we ascertain what is not 

 true, and we weed it out. To perceive and to respect the 



