71 



advance of the Bestiaries, mostly after Pliny's kind, 

 the chief of which, largely an original work, was 

 that of the well-known Conrad Gesner. 



Some hundred years before the appearance of 

 the Arabian Aristotle, which marked the second 

 scholastic period, we have seen that the shadow of 

 the Faith and the savagery of the peoples had -not 

 quelled such teachers as Roscellinus and Abelard, 

 who fought for rationalism so sturdily as even then 

 to threaten the ascendency of realism and the 

 persuasion of supple and plausible demagogues 

 like Auselm of Laon that "sterile tree" as 

 Abelard called him, and actually to determine 

 the first period of the Middle Ages. Happily 

 the Arabian scholastic philosophy took its root 

 in Alexandria when neo-platonism had veered 

 towards Aristotle 1 , and it was more uniformly 

 peripatetic than the earliest Christian Scholas- 

 ticism. It is one of the notes of the greatness 

 of Aristotle that, even thus garbled and glossed, 

 his power made itself felt by the mouths of the 

 great Franciscans Alexander Hales, Roger Bacon, 

 and William Ockham. The Organon had been 

 expounded in Paris in 1180, and about the same 

 1 See pp. 24 and 28. 



