Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/107

Rh by giving, as John Scotus gave, an equal if not a superior place to reason. Reason was the basis on which he rested, and logic, as the method which controlled the exercise of its powers, became the science of sciences. It was therefore natural that the dialectical reaction should ally itself with the protest of reason against the dogma of transubstantiation. Berengar of Tours, who maintained what may be called the Zwinglian view of the Lord's supper, is therefore so far the beginner of the new movement that the rationalism of the opinions he put forth set the whole catholic world thinking, questioning, disputing. Himself ready enough to recant under pressure, the number of his immediate disciples may not have been large: but the stream of speculation once let loose, could not be restrained at will. It was a time of religious reform, and reform went hand in hand with the promotion of education. Monasteries and their schools were restored or founded in a continually expanding circle. They busied themselves with the rudimentary 'arts' of the Trivium, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic; and the last, because of its universal applicability, remained the most popular study even for those who proceeded to the higher branches of the Quadrivium, or to the faculties of theology or law. The disputations which in the English universities only died out at the end of the eighteenth century, and retained much later a formal existence in the superior faculties, are the shadowy survivors of a system which was in its fresh ardour in the eleventh century. To the enthusiastic dialectician everything would seem to depend upon the turn of a debate; a challenge to a disputation was as serious as a challenge to the combat: logic became the centre round which all speculation revolved, and the question about its metaphysical basis became the absorbing one for all who pretended to share in the commonwealth of scholars.

Nevertheless the suspicion with which theologians regarded the new study was not soon averted. Apart from antecedent principles it was not likely that they