26 



world ; that the cosmical scheme of the Timoeus, 

 apparelled in the Latin of Chalcidius, for there 

 were then no Greek texts in the libraries of the 

 West, should for some 500 years have occupied 

 that theoretical activity which Aristotle regarded 

 as the highest good of man 1 . Again, those 

 works of Aristotle which might have made for 

 natural knowledge fell out of men's hands'^, while 

 in them, as Abelard tells us of himself, lay the 

 Categories, the Interpretation, and the Intro- 

 duction of Porphyry to the Categories, all in 

 the Latin of Boetius 3 : treatises which made for 



1 I see in recent reports of Egyptian exploration that at 

 Oxyrhynchus Plato was represented with curious persistence by 

 the Phsedo and the Laches ; and these treatises appear in the 

 early Fay yum papyri. 



2 A few axioms, collected from the physical and meta- 

 physical treatises (perhaps by Cassiodorus from Boetius), were 

 current from an early date. The translations of Boetius must 

 for a time have lain in some neglect ? 



3 Alcuin had but a translated abridgment or summary of 

 the Categories, attributed to Augustine ; and in a MS. of the 

 tenth century we find no more than this. Boetius' full trans- 

 lation of the Categories was not current till the end of 

 this century, when all the logic of Aristotle was in the hands 

 of the doctors. In the earlier Middle Ages, as in the writings 

 of John of Salisbury and of William of Conches, we hear 

 even more of Boetius than of the master himself. Virgil, 

 Seneca and Cicero also were the sources of much of the 

 culture of this period. Alcuin was a grammarian ; he taught 



