16 



limits of the knowable we must have sought to trans- 

 gress them. We can build our bridge over the chasm of 

 ignorance with stored material in which the thirteenth 

 century was poor indeed, we can fix our bearings where 

 then was no foundation ; yet man may be well engaged 

 when he knows not the ends of his work; and the 

 schoolmen in digging for treasure cultivated the field of 

 knowledge, even for Galileo and Harvey, for Newton and 

 Darwin. Their many_mirs. came not of indolence, for 

 they were passionate ; not of hatred of light, for they 

 were eager for the light ; not of fickleness, for they 

 wrought with unparalleled devotion; nor indeed of 

 ignorance of particular things, for they knew many 

 things : they erred because they did not know, and 

 they could not know, 'the conditions of the problems 

 which, as they emerged from the cauldron of war and 

 from the wreck of letters and science, they were 

 nevertheless bound to attack, if civil societies worthy of 

 the name were to be constructed. How slow in gestation 

 is the mother of truth we may see by comparing the 

 schoolmen of the second medieval period with those of 

 the first ; in the enlargement of their view, the better 

 furniture of their minds, and the deeper meaning of 

 their distinctions : and when we compare with these 

 later schoolmen the naturalists of the seventeenth 

 century, we find not new acquirements only but also a 

 new direction of the pursuit of truth. 



It seems hardly comprehensible that great and stable 

 societies have been built up on transcendental schemes 

 of thought, upon conceptions poised as it were in the air. 



