SCOT AT TOLEDO 47 



itself as it were precociously in Bacon and Albertus 

 Magnus, was already awake, and under its influence 

 men had begun to demand more than the mere 

 training of the mind in abstract reasoning. Even 

 the application of dialectics to evolve or support 

 systems of doctrine drawn from Holy Scripture 

 could not content this new curiosity. Men were 

 becoming alive to the larger book of nature which 

 lay open around them, and, confounded at first by 

 the complexity of unnumbered facts in sea and sky, 

 in earth and air, they began to long for help from 

 the great master of philosophy which might guide 

 their first trembling footsteps in so strange and 

 untrodden a realm of knowledge. Nor was the hope 

 of such aid denied them. There was still a tradition 

 concerning the lost works of Aristotle on physics. 

 The Moors, it was found, boasted their possession, 

 and even claimed to have enriched these priceless 

 pages by comments which were still more precious 

 than the original text itself. 



The mere hope that it might be so was enough 

 to beget a new crusade, when western scholars vied 

 with each other in their efforts to recover these lost 

 treasures and restore to the schools of Europe the 

 impulse and guidance so eagerly desired. Such 

 had, in fact, been the aim of Archbishop Kaymon 

 and the successive translators of the Toledan school. 

 The important place they assigned to Avicenna 

 among those whose works they rendered into Latin 

 was due to the fact that this author had come to be 

 regarded in the early part of the twelfth century as 

 the chief exponent of Aristotle, whose spirit he had 

 inherited, and on whose works he had founded his 

 own. 



