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158 tially a period of positive regression. Throughout this whole period scientific studies were pursued to an extent and with an ardor and industry worthy of the highest praise and commanding our admiration, but the attitude of the scholar in relation to his intellectual work was altogether different in the first and in the second half of this period. At the close of the sixteenth century and during the early part of the seventeenth, the scholar devoted himself to researches, because he really desired to solve the riddles which he did not understand, but during the greater part of the seventeenth century the chief aim was simply to become learned, to gather together as much knowledge as possible without any concern about the mutual relation of facts and without regard to the value of learning for the mind and heart. There was no true learning, and thus it was possible that side by side with a most energetic production of new materials there was a great deal of day-dreaming and fruitless occupation with a mass of trifling details, and so it came to pass that the learning of the polyhistor thrived as it never has before or since.

The reformation of the church unquestionably had for a time a beneficial influence on theological learning. The scholasticism which had become petrified into a barren form disappeared. Everybody could now consult the Bible for himself, and an earnest effort to appropriate its contents was manifest. But it soon appeared that the time for a genuine appreciation of truth had not yet come, and that the road now entered upon could not but lead to intellectual slavery. What the great humanists of the Reformation period had stated, namely, that there was danger that the increasing influence of theology would produce a second age of barbarism, was but too true, though the age did not by any means confine itself to theology, but following the impulse given by the humanists, it entered every department of science. Theology, however, intruded itself everywhere, and put its stamp on the whole century. It was not long before it lost that