Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/140

122 as a key-stone to unite and perfect the structure, in itself incomplete, of human knowledge. Nor would it be just to deny the natural significance of the connexion in which Abailard himself relates this passage in his life. He left his school on Saint Genevieve in order to visit his home in Brittany and to Hake leave of his mother who was about to withdraw into a nunnery. I came back to France, he says, principally that I might cultivate divine learning,—maxime ut de divinitate addiscerem. He found his way clear before him: William of Champeaux was now bishop of Chalons, and Abailard might look with hopefulness to a career of influence in the future undisturbed by the evil eye, as he deemed it, of his enemy; rivals he had long ceased to fear. Nevertheless the impression made upon him by that last interview with his mother—we cannot misread the words, although the inference appears to have escaped the notice of his biographers—had taken so fast a hold of his mind that, even in the auspicious situation of affairs ready prepared, one would say, for him in Paris, he could not bring himself to break a solemn resolve. He passed through the capital and presented himself, this mature philosopher of four and thirty, as a disciple of the illustrious Anselm of Laon.

Abailard has so much faith in himself that he describes every incident in his life as the result of careful planning; he leaves no room for emotion or sudden inspiration: and yet it is these very rapid transitions in his mind that determined the crucial events which give his history so marked an individuality. His self-confidence, if we will, his vanity,—was opposed by an irresolution, an infirmity of purpose, which was no less characteristic an element in him. He surrendered his prospects in obedience to a religious impulse: doubtless he may have foreseen a wider potentiality of sway in the new field to which he betook himself; still for the moment he sank from the dignity of a famous teacher to the level of his own pupils,