174 A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



disposed to look upon the Crusades as an age of discovery com- 

 parable with that of the new world by Columbus and his follow- 

 ers, but a discovery of the East instead of the West. 



The period of the Crusades extends over about two centuries, 

 viz : from 1090 to 1290, and thus immediately precedes the 

 Renaissance, of which it was apparently one of the most im- 

 portant factors. 



TRIVIUM: QUADRIVIUM. SCHOLASTICISM. Meantime, follow- 

 ing the mandate of Charlemagne establishing schools in connection 

 with all the abbeys and monasteries of his vast domain of central 

 Europe, a characteristic technical and essentially verbal scholarship 

 gradually arose which, although chiefly ecclesiastical in substance, 

 and so narrow in its range as almost completely to neglect natural 

 science, was often thorough and sometimes profound. This 

 learning in its later development is known as "Scholasticism," of 

 which the foundation and essence was the famous curriculum of 

 "the seven liberal arts," founded upon the educational doctrines 

 of Plato, but adapted to the fashion of the Middle Ages. These 

 consisted of a quadriwum geometry, astronomy, music and arith- 

 metic and a trivium grammar, logic, and rhetoric, (p. 148.) 



In the introduction to the Logic of Aristotle which was in the 

 hands of every student even in the Dark Ages, the Isagoge of Por- 

 phyry, the question was explicitly raised in a very distinct and 

 emphatic manner. The words in which this writer states, without 

 resolving, the problem of the Scholastic Philosophy, have played per- 

 haps a more momentous part in the history of thought, than any 

 other passage of equal length in all literature outside the canonical 

 Scriptures. They are worth quoting at length : 



' Next, concerning genera and species, the question indeed whether 

 they have a substantial existence, or whether they consist in bare 

 intellectual concepts only, or whether, if they have a substantial ex- 

 istence, they are corporeal or incorporeal, and whether they are sep- 

 arable from the sensible properties of the things (or particulars of 

 sense), or are only in those properties and subsisting about them, I 

 shall forbear to determine. For a question of this kind is a very deep 

 one and one that requires a longer investigation/ Rashdall. 



